Your Vote Counts

THE proper response to this

is:

A) Is it elitist to create a Slate for sane people?

B) They already have that. It's called "porn". 

C) Don't you mean "Is it reverse sexism to ask if it's sexist to..."?

D) Other

What Did We Learn From Politico Today?

MONEY, shit, and The Word. And thank God that at least they don't kill trees for this crap.

Who?

Who?

"Say nothing, and say it boldly. Sorta." 

Expectations for consensus? Or gunplay?

Those plurals tell you exactly how much research went into this.

Who?

Finally some serious news. 

Friday Monon Knee Warmers

Ben Harper and The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Take My Hand
Fountains of Wayne, Please Don't Rock Me Tonight
Leon Russell, Dixie Lullaby
Bruce Hornsby and Ricky Skaggs, Come On Out
Richard X. Heyman, Hand Prints
Rufus Wainwright, Across the Universe
Brenton Wood, Gimme Little Sign
Sam Phillips, Raised On Promises
ZZ Top, Stages
Ryan Adams, Chin Up, Cheer Up

Friday Monon Knee Warmers

Nazz Open My Eyes
Ray Charles You Don't Know Me
James Brown Get Up Offa That Thing
Webb Wilder Human Cannonball
Family Spanish Tide
Julie Miller All My Tears
Jane's Addiction Just Because
Iggy Pop Knocking 'Em Down In The City
Spoon Anything You Want
Frank Zappa The Gumbo Variations

Friday Monon Knee Warmers

Ian Dury Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3

Iggy Pop Five Foot One

Richard Thompson Two-Faced Lover

Mink DeVille Mixed Up Shook Up Girl

Richard X. Heyman Falling Away

Tom Waits Downtown Train

Southern Culture on the Skids Fried Chicken and Gasoline

Eddie Floyd Knock on Wood

Gruppo Sportivo Girls Never Know

Joe Jackson (Do the) Instant Mash

Friday Monon Knee Warmers

Adrian Belew One of Those Days
Eno No One Receiving
Carlene Carter I'm So Cool
The Dave Clark Five Try Too Hard
David Byrne His Wife Refused
Bryan Ferry Let's Stick Together
Dave Edmunds I Hear You Knocking
The Nazz Open My Eyes
Kathleen Edwards 12 Bellevue
Mott the Hoople One of the Boys

Friday Monon Knee Warmers *

Boz Scaggs Some Change
Deaf School Thunder and Lightning
Frank Black Hang On To Your Ego
Randy Newman It's Money That I Love
The Strangeloves I Want Candy
The Vibrators Stiff Little Fingers
Pere Ubu Flames Over Nebraska
Love My Little Red Book
Kings of Leon Pistol of Fire
The Loud Family Aerodeliria

_________

* Just songs from my iPod Shuffle (4th Generation) that happened along like an old (or really old) friend to give me a little encouragement on the trail.

A Small Malignancy

I DON'T generally single out local teleprompter readers by name, because a) it seems unduly harsh, and b) it's like choosing the whitest alto in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Now and then, though, one volunteers.

We've actually met Karen Hensel before, back in '07, when she threw an ice-cream and softball party for Fred Dumbo Thompson's 45-minute Presidential campaign. Channel 8 has decided to style her an Investigative Reporter, which is Happy Talk Newspeak for "someone who covers stories we might get complaints about". This has the added benefit--or, perhaps, the only benefit--that they're free to sensationalize to their hearts' content, making for damn good teasers.

Which is what caught my eye last night--I'm not made of stone, Your Honor!--and led me to assume the Big Panhandling Exposé being teased involved 2009's Anti-Panhandling ordinance, not to be confused with 1999's Anti-Panhandling ordinance. The 2009 law, reluctantly rewritten, for Constitutional reasons, to include everyone, not just the unsightly and odiferous, had gone unenforced while the police sought "clarification"; said clarity almost certainly will illuminate all of Downtown just before Super Bowl 2012. (It's, well, amazing how periodic tax-appropriation-funded Big Events spur draconian efforts to keep the skinned and scorned out of sight for a while. That 1999 law preceded the 2000 Final Four; the practice dates to 1986, when then-Prosecutor for Life Stephen Goldsmythe--you're welcome, New York City--used the upcoming Pan-American Games to try to run all the massage parlors and adult bookstores out of business. This did not noticeably improve public morals, or anything else besides Goldsmythe's campaign treasury, but it did make you drive all the way to Clermont for a handjob.)

The major violators of the Ordinance, at least as far as I can tell by touring the Midwest's Largest Continuous Strip Mall as infrequently as I can, are fast-food joints and fly-by-night storefront scammers who send minimum-wage-earning and shame-free young people to the street to dance in stupid costumes, thus, apparently, convincing passers-by that this is just the spot to fulfill their gastronomic longings or turn their unused jewelry into cash. Or just a great location to take their eyes off the road while driving, assuming they hadn't already. This, of course, presents a major dilemma, as the sort of person who finds panhandlers an unspeakable nuisance is almost guaranteed to be the sort of person who finds any behavior, no matter how loud, annoying, ceaseless, disquieting, or insulting, to be sacred protected speech provided it's in the pursuit of Profit. With the possible exception of handjobs.

But the 8 Investigation neatly sidestepped any tricky ethical considerations by simply focusing on panhandlers themselves, and following them around with hidden cameras.

And, as disturbing as that might sound, what grabbed me by the sigmoid colon was Hensel's apparently unself-conscious announcement in the intro that she'd noticed these people while driving in to work each morning and begun to wonder if they really were Homeless and in Need of Food, or whether they truly did beseech God to bless donors. Maybe they weren't even monotheists at all! There's nothing like a reporter's nose for a story, even if said nose has been surgically reconstructed three or four times.

Oh, you can throw in the proud declaration that the following is the result of a Six Month Investigation, if you like, but that was more of a garnish than a turd sandwich.

Okay, okay; these people are scofflaws at best. News flash. I'm not quite sure who was supposed to have believed otherwise, or how their behavior is distinguished from the Makers of Airborne™, Emeril Lagasse™ Signature Cookware, or the Daniels administration. But, sheesh, a six-month investigation triggered by something which disturbed your view out the SUV windshield one morning? It's the local business paper, not the considerably better-funded local network affiliates, which exposed Tim Durham and his connection to sleazy Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi (a man you people gave nightly face-time to so he could flack his political career); we have to wait for them, or local bloggers, to fill us in on Brizzi's contributors and business partners getting questionable deals in murder and drug cases. You stovepiped the Ur-Teabagging Property Tax Protests without ever identifying the Governor, and the state Republican party (the primary beneficiaries of all that "grassroots" anger) as the people who'd fucked the system up in the first place. You missed the Capital Improvement Board losing $45 million tax dollars per year, but you didn't miss the free buffet at the new Football Barn. The Goldsmythe-era New Main Library Palace nearly had to collapse into a heap of substandard concrete and insufficient support before you stopped touting it as an architectural marvel, and you never did show much interest in just who wasted millions of tax dollars by not hiring a general contractor. The Simons demand an extra $15 million/year lest they find some other city which wants the Crappiest Product in the NBA; Indiana Barrister suggests the "renegotiation clause" in the Pacers' lease agreement doesn't actually exist; you people seem too busy calculating how much Simon Malls spend on advertising to get around to looking in to it.

Hey, by all means: scammers don't deserve a free pass just because they're small. My point is that we deserve news reporting which also looks up, at least once in a while.

Worst News Of The Past Two Days Of The Decade

I TRIED, really, to come up with some End of the Naughts schtick. Okay, not really, but as a thought experiment, which centered not on "come up with an idea for an End of the Naughts column", like about actual events that normal people have long forgotten and couldn't care less about, but on "under what conditions, Riley, could you imagine working in the sort of place that did such things without that knowledge ticking away in your brain for the final fortnight of some arbitrary period, ticking, ticking, knowing that whoever had been given the task considered it a fun assignment, and the ticking just kept getting louder," and I think you know the rest. The answer is "none".

Who th' fuck cares? and is it even worth asking if there's a Decade in anyone's memory they'd less care to relive (in the hyperreal sense, not the sci-fi sense; in some recent decades people who were the loudest supporters of US military action were actually invited to join in, so we know that answer)? The Nineties may not have been that great, but compared to what followed they're like the mundane stroll you took with your beloved, on some nondescript day, that neither of you paid much attention to at the time, and no one said or did anything memorable, and the next day she got run over by a bus driven by Laura Bush.

Th' fuck are we supposed to remember about a Decade that began with Gary Condit and Terrorist Attacks and ended with Tiger Woods and demands for More Terrorist Attack nostalgia? And in which The Same Goddam Thing filled the space between those bookends? How do you talk about history, even fatuously, when everything that happens is now either discounted immediately or slowly backed away from in hopes nobody will ask questions? It's the Decade in which we pretty much decided officially to quit trying to solve problems, due to Problems' pesky habit of making us look at problems, and just see if the fishin' wasn't a little better once we floated downstream a tad.

The Naughts! When the goddam country turned against a war without doing a fucking thing about it, or by electing Democrats, which amounts to the same thing. It's the Decade where cries of "Pearl Harbor II!" were immediately followed by cries of "How dare you investigate Pearl Harbor II?" When previously unrevealed asterisks were discovered in the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, where Secondary Financial Market manipulators were Too Big To Fail, and your phone company Too Big To Bother With The Law. When "Classical Liberal" was redefined as "Ravening Right-wing war monger" and "Progressive" as "Would-be Democratic demi-functionary so intent on garnering votes for the Centrist he favors he'll accuse Hillary Clinton of Crypto-Racism By Proxy" ("Conservative", having been devalued two decades earlier, was found to be unassailable. Which is a good thing, as it's nice to know there are still absolutes, even if they're all Absolute Nadirs).

Look: there's an uncountable number of events surrounding the Bush Jr. administration which, related singly, prove without a doubt that no one should want to relive the ten years we're just now undeservedly escaping. Vandalgate. The Crawford Ranch. The Bush Twins, who couldn't keep their privileged petty criminality out of the papers for six months. Nicknames. Journalists paid to shill the Bush line. Complaints about other country's journalists, who didn't. Actors, and later male prostitutes, hired to impersonate journalists. The little matter of our large stockpiles of chemical agents we'd renounced in the 70s; the littler matter of our losing interest in a series of terror attacks involving the same once the idea that the supply came from anywhere else became untenable everywhere except in the New York Times. 9/11 casualty figures knowingly inflated. Ahmad Chalabi. Freedom fries. Mission accomplished. A Few Dead Enders. Don Rumsfeld, the Press' Favorite Straight-shooter. The Jessica Lynch Story. The Lynndie England Story. Purple Fingers. Purple Band-aids. The close-harmony duet of the President's and Vice-President's testimony before the 9/11 Commission. L. Paul Bremer. Schoolrooms painted and soccer balls inflated. John Ashcroft turning out to be the high point of the Bush Justice Department. The Fourth Branch of Government shooting a guy in the face. That guy apologizing for getting in the way. Ari Fleischer. Karen Hughes. David Frum. Scooter Libby. Karl Rove. Medals of Freedom. Fries of Freedom. Lights on in Jackson Square. Unfettered supra-capitalist rapine spoiled by a couple bad apples. I made that list up without even trying, let alone peeking at the record. The only thing I'd want to revisit would be the cold, dead, ashes if we'd'a had enough sense to burn the motherfucker down while there was still time.

And it's all still being narrated to you by the same careerist hair-product endorsers who couldn't find an Inkling, or buy a Vowel, when it all went South the first time around, or who hid under the desk lest MSNBC stamp Finito on his employee folder, and reemerged to slap George W. Bush around after the All Clear had sounded, to resounding "Progressive" applause; by some fat fucking crypto-homicidal Brit who came into my country and called me a Fifth Columnist, after which he belatedly noticed that the Nazi prison guards he was palling around with didn't care much for his kind, either, and suddenly turned into a rational non-partisan. It could be measured out in Slate-brand coffee spoons, in the annual How I Got Iraq So Wrong Despite There Being Ample Evidence the Whole Goddam Thing Was a Sham Being Run by Coked-Up Gangsters Revisited issue. Frank Rich, MoDo, Peggy Noonan, and David Brooks still have Three-Card Monte stands, but at least two of them went to see An Inconvenient Truth as a substitute for a public apology and ritual suicide.

The Naughts are nothing but a measure of our collective failure to even address, let alone work on, the transparent con-game at the center of our downward political spiral, a time when we told the professional liars and justifiers of international atrocity they could quit trying so hard, 'cos we really preferred being hoodwinked to the difficult business of thinking things out, and did they know if anyone was looking for interns? A Time of War is no time to question the President's judgment on military matters, but it's okay to try de-balling him over his birth certificate. It'd be one thing if we were really caught in a traffic jam of political discourse. But we ain't. The culprit isn't lack of clarity, it's the lack of courage to confront an entrenched ruling class that no longer cares about truth or falsehood, and won't so long as it can get away with it. The goddam run-up to our little Iraq fiasco was a friggin' caricature of a 50s Red Scare classroom film, but there was no Edward R. Murrow to (eventually) call it out. We proved, in successive disasters, any of which (maybe excepting Katrina) was not just predictable, but assured, that the Reagan House of Cards would not stand. 'Course, we could'a saved ourselves some trouble by noticing it had blown down in a minor breeze in 1987, but, you know. You don't write a bad review of the hottest new restaurant in town, else people will be convinced you don't know what you're talking about; just try to remember to act surprised when the salmonella outbreak hits the news.

Just fucking spare us all, for once, huh? I don't give a fuck that there were no iPods as of January 1, 2000. It's bad enough that that sorta thing gets reported as though no previous Decade had seen any comparable technological gee-whiz moment it lionized as proof of its own superiority by proxy; it's just that much worse when it sounds like the only thing you can find to celebrate. Last night the forced nostalgia was interrupted briefly so some hairdo could report--with suitably feigned gravitas--that Iran's police chief had promised "No mercy" for protesters, and--yeah, it's just me, but--I couldn't help remembering how the Decade halted for a month, just about in the middle, so we could celebrate the Great American Hero and Single-Handed Smiter of Godless Communism, a man who made his political bones as the No Mercy To Protesters Governor of some Western state.

Just fucking spare us all, for once, huh? Yeah, I know it's too late. And many happy returns. Try the Freedom Fries.

Kids Today

I AM, officially, fascinated by "Ross" "Douthat's" "new" "blog" in the "Newspaper" "of Record", at least until the new Kitchenaid™ Pro 5 Plus stand mixer (imperial gray), with ice cream and sausage-making accessories (guaranteed delivery between November 25-27!) arrives. For a socialist I sure am made giddy by the prospect of my new toys. On the other hand, this is a fine, American-made product with a motor an' gears an' steel an' stuff, and it doesn't kill people, at least not intentionally. So I think it's at least a wash.

Douthat is not nearly so much fun as a mixer, not of cookies, young Singles, nor cement, nor does he do anything remotely as useful. His lethality is open to interpretation, I suppose, and I do feel safe in assuming he consumes more electricity.

He is, though, suddenly rated to turn out tens of dozens, if uncomestible, words per day, or roughly his weekly output as of two weeks previous. I find this curious. Was he holding out for more money? Is there something about blogging, noun or verb, that revs the man up? Or like he can't perform for adults, or with the bathroom door open? Listen, it's not like there's a question of quality here; his "blogging" is, well, blogging: link Megan, link Matt, link Ramesh; or link some other piece he's read on some topic of wingnut importance, an act which is supposed to show he's done his homework, or peered deeply into the pressing issue of Trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City, or Why Liberals Should Actually Be on the Other Side of an Issue, or Something Else That's Wrong With Pro-Choice Ratiocination, or something, generally followed by a few dozen words of his own which demonstrate that he's done no thinking at all, or none beyond the well-worn wagon ruts of Thoughtful Conservative Careerist Lane. Is this supposed to be fooling someone? Am those someones spose t'be the readers of the New York Times? It reads like a goddam junior-varsity debate practice, complete with fucking Clique.

I wound up there yesterday in order to fact-check what I'd said about him, and I find Khalid Sheik Mohammed ("KSM", of course), Part Umpteen, and Why Liberals Really Ought To Reconsider What Ross Douthat ("DS") Says They Think About The Trial, which turns out to be that according to Someone Else ("SE"), what Holder ("AGEH") is doing is just what Bush ("GWB") did, so naturally Liberals should oppose it. So in other words ("OW"), right off the top, right from the grand outline, the argument runs like this: if someone Ross can find to link to says trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in US courts is in line with whatever Bush administration action he found to compare it to, then the people who are not working themselves into a foaming fit at the very thought of a Terraist being brought onto actual US soil should switch their position. Or, more accurately, the opposition Douthat assigns to them for purposes of his "argument".

Now, just for starters, Harvard should rescind his diploma for that, and in a better world, the Times would have been so embarrassed by the thing it would have gone back to being a news source. But we're not finished! We're not even finished starting! Because the story the Linkmaster leeched onto, this Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith piece from last Friday's WaPo, is actually making the reverse argument: critics of the "Holder-Obama" approach ignore the fact that the Bush administration did precisely the same thing. So now--this goddam vertigo is gonna kill me someday--if someone, somewhere, replies to critics (who really exist) that their objections are hypocritical, at least, in that they (in their actual existence) made no complaint when their side took comparable action, the theoretical opponents of the actual complainants are obliged to reconsider their own (fiat) positions.

Wait! Don't call yet--if you pay separate Shipping & Handling we'll double it! Douthat proceeds to try to finesse Comey and Goldsmith's examples ("all save Lindh were arrested by domestic law enforcement rather than the military or the C.I.A., and only Lindh and Padilla were ever actually held as 'enemy combatants' "),

[I'm sorry. There are only two contrary examples! Jesus wept.]

before giving up one sentence later, ["Padilla probably should have been tried as a civilian, since he was a U.S. citizen apprehended by the F.B.I. on American soil — but he only ended up in civilian court because the White House wanted to avoid a Supreme Court ruling on the legitimacy of classifying him as an enemy combatant (and holding him without trial for several years)."] So now Imaginary Liberals should reconsider a position they might possibly have, assuming their position is determined in toto by opposition to whatever the wingnuts are screaming about on FOX at this moment, because if you equivocate about somebody's claims of comparable Bush administration actions without actually paying attention to what 1) they said, or 2) you're saying, you can prove that Bush actually had other motives for what he did. Meaning, if we can just sit long enough for the swirling to abate so we can go back to the start again, that Liberals should reconsider their support for "Obama-Holder", because Bush did exactly the same thing, except that wasn't what he was doing. So Q.E.D., K.S.M! It's just shock. Try to work through it!

And this will be refined, if that's not too big a giggle, by the next 'graph:

Instead, they look like examples of a White House essentially making things up as it goes along, moving detainees back and forth across the criminal defendant/enemy combatant divide for reasons of expedience, rather than principle. And now the Obama administration is … doing exactly the same thing.

Look, I was gonna pass on that altogether, but I was afraid someone would figure I'd done a Bill Holden and call 911. Douthat has begun with a sort of playground Rubber/Glue comparison, and in the space of two paragraphs--paragraphs dashed off, compared to his usual careful constructions--he's made the thing about ten times stupider. Liberals yadda yadda reconsider splork splash because one can manufacture a categorical abstraction which encompasses both Bush and Obama administration actions. And, forgive me, this is not Ross Douthat drunk blogging, squeezed by deadline, or hitting Send prematurely; this is Ross Douthat's fucking MO. He writes for the Times! He went to Harvard! He graduated from high school! and presumably on time! And now he's paid, presumably on time! to argue that the Obama administration's decision--after six years of Bush administration actions which could only be portrayed as legal shenanigans if the term included an almost cosmic sense of shame, disgust, and betrayal of principle--to try the 9/11 mastermind in a court of law, rather than dither around until he became someone else's problem, should be equally repellant to the Left, on the grounds that both men play golf.

They Saved Douthat's Brain Stem

MY Friday night exercise bike viewing was Kill Your Idols, Scott Crary's documentary on the three-point-seven-five minutes of fame Fame granted New York's No Wave scene in the vaunted 70s and 80s, and its tragico-farcical revival in miniature in the Naughts. The thing really gets going in the second half, when middle age descends upon yesterday's iconoclasts and they notice the Kids Today have little concern for the kind of effort a good lawn requires, godamit.

(Full disclosure: at the time I was, by some accounts, the godfather of the No No Wave movement, whose members stayed in the Midwest, declined to pick up instruments we couldn't play, eschewed record contracts altogether, aggressively enjoyed blues-based Rock, and didn't name the bands we didn't form "Fungus" or "Teenage Hitler and the Child Prostitutes" or "Something That Might've Shocked Grandma Fifteen Years Ago". Some of us had actually heard of Edgar Varèse and Iannis Xennakis, or Don Van Vliet, for that matter. Some of the more hard-core among us got jobs. Also, I've never seen what the 70s or 80s had to be so vaunted about.)

I kid, because I love. And it's not like I don't agree with 'em about the cheery middle-class mercenaries who'd rather be famous than posses an actual human soul, or the more cosmic seriousness about the coziness with fame and self-promotion, the placid acceptance of those circumstances, and the self-congratulations for the "maturity" of that viewpoint. (Much of this appears to have been filmed around the heyday of Strokes Hype, and too much of the rest is spent listening, like, to, like, y'know, Karen, y'know, O. like, who may as well, y'know, be the intended target of this from Jim Thilwell:

It seems to me that a lot of the people who are looking back at how things were in 1982…are seeing what the secretaries for investment bankers looked like when they went out on Friday night in 1982.

Which can be writ large to take in, well, the Sixties, say, or the legions of campaign experts who assured us that Obama needed to run to the right to get elected, lest he turn into the George "Che" McGovern of their unlettered imaginings.

Help, I've lost my segue! The next day I was grocery shopping when I was assaulted by some obnoxious ringtone, followed by one side of a personal conversation which took place at roughly the same decibel level, interrupted by the woman ramming her cart into my person, not simply accidentally but evidently from some deep metaphysical assurance that the rest of the cosmos, if real, halts whenever that demonic brass section she carries around with her goes off. She looked up at me for about a half-second, less apologetic than to make sure I'd noticed she was on the phone and was therefore exempt from all other considerations. The conversation never stopped; this had the unexpected result of actually giving pause to my homicidal fantasizing, since the woman was obviously mentally unbalanced. Or was that just my (outdated) perception of someone willing to broadcast the Tawdry Carnival Prize details of her personal life without consideration for audience or tort law? I felt partly to blame; I mean, I didn't actually have to pick up that loaf of bread right that minute, just because I was in the bread aisle, if it was inconvenient for her.

You'd know better than I: is there a cellphone out there which doesn't double as mp3 player, address book, inch-square cinema, or hotplate, but which can shoot a jet of mild caustic solution fifteen to twenty feet? Because I'd love to just hose somebody down under the circumstances, and when they looked at me I'd give 'em a shrug that says, "Sorry, but that's my ringtone. Oh, gotta take this."

And the two fused in my mind while I was driving back home: it's really more to me than just the utter lack of consideration for anyone else on the planet with these things, and it's even more than the depressingly invariable evidence, where none was needed in the first place, that that small portion of the race which is not completely absorbed by events which can only be described as Beneath the Fucking Trivial is, in fact, busy shopping when it is supposed to be working, and thus requires this digital tether to an automatic dispensation dispenser. No; it's that people are so goddam willing to hand over chunks of cash to some Phone Company.

I know. I'm old. I have to admit that it was my one Idealistic, mescaline-fueled adolescent conviction that this sort of thing would be impossible to sell people by the 21st century. Not telecommunications, nor commerce in general, but the Hard Sell, the Useless Tube, the Cult of the Gimcrack. You need a phone. It does not follow that you need the ability to tell Chaz, or Dylan, or Annessa what you're doing On Demand. It's a hard bitter lesson that so many people are so desperately afraid of What's Out There that they'll do anything to cling to the Familiar, the Reassuring, and the Sleek and Convenient.

Which, dammit, I was sure I left that segue here somewhere, brought me to Saturday night and the belated, if that's the right word for something you'd just as soon have never come face to face with, discovery that last week someone at the Times, having possibly realized just how little Ross Douthat was doing for a paycheck, gave him a blog, or "blog".

Now, I dunno about you, but to me a newspaper's "blog" section is like some indie singer with Marlo Thomas' That Girl wardrobe. Whom do you think you're fooling, again? I don't understand how there can be people who reach some level of authority over such things and yet continue the search for the next New Coke™. Fer chrissakes, it's like you're Merchant Ivory and you decide to pepper The Tragic Muse or something with YouTube videos. Y'know, so the kids'll dig.

The man's your columnist. This is damning enough, and maybe you could concentrate on having him produce something original, or thought-provoking, or, I dunno, halfway fucking competent at the grueling pace of once a week. If you've gotta do the Blog bit--and, apparently, you do--Ross Douthat is the last person who should be turned loose to jot. He should not show his work; think Legislation and Blood Pudding, not Math test. In four days the man links to Rod Dreher, Megan McArdle, Ezra Klein, Ramesh Ponnuru, the Atlantic a couple more times, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, and someone else's thoughts on health care, Stupak, and video games. Plus an attempt to do to Chuck Schumer what The Daily Show actually accomplished with Rudy Giuliani, namely, catch him talking out of both sides of his mouth. This Douthat does by conflating Schumer's comments about a hypothetical bin Laden trial eight years ago with what he says today about the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Remember, kids, 9/11 was the Death of Ever Wising Up about anything.

This is the flaky detritus of a prematurely ossified intellect. I don't need to know what Ross Douthat is reading; he needs to figure out how to make something of it for once.

Don't Go There.

Farhad Manjoo "in Search of Microsoft Geniuses". February 17

LANCE, on the idea that the government doesn't create jobs:

This is how Right Wing agitprop minister and pseudo-historian Amity Shlaes is able to argue that the New Deal didn't reduced unemployment. She counts government workers as unemployed ---until 1942; government workers who wear uniforms and carry rifles belong to a special category of government workers who somehow don't count as government workers.

Follow the link to David Sirota for more on how Shlaes--or, as I like to refer to her, Joe the Plumber for Republicans Who Know Which One's The Dessert Spoon--turns economic information from the 1930s into delicious fudge. Or what looks like fudge.

This sort of thing was on my mind when I flipped the dial to Slate this morning--it (the idea) had, in the meantime, shacked up like Meganjane McArdlegalt (safe link; it's Roy) with that "Historians Rate the Presidents" bit that, I suspect, was designed mostly to gauge whether there's any juice left in the American people whatsoever, in preparation for tapping it. Judging by what I'd read the thing didn't work; even the commenters didn't give a shit, or buy the "George W. Bush wasn't as bad as the pneumococcus that killed William Henry Harrison" routine, but one of 'em did explain--in those earnest tones adopted by internet idiots who imagine that anonymity=invisibility--how FDR was a great President for winning WWII, but he'd recently learned that the New Deal actually made the Great Depression worse.

This sort of thing is on my mind a lot lately: Is American ready for self-government? I don't think blinding idiocy is anywhere near the impediment that Professional Stunt-Lying, Unequal Access to Anything Composed of Molecules, or Self-Centeredness Raised to the Level of Ineffably Transcendent Self-Hoodwinkery are, at present, but god knows we've got the former in spades for good measure. Which reminds me to note Kia's capsule McArdle description, from Roy's joint:

I fear that Megan is not the only person who thinks that the point of human existence and the end of all ambition, the reason for all the shopping, and what gets a girl out of bed in the morning, is the attainment of such a state of airtight self-complacency.

I freely admit that I understand, too well, how the Reagan-era conversion from zomboid consumerism to Capitalist Fetishism took place; what I haven't quite figured out is how it lasted so long, or how, as so frequently with fetishism, or amputation, for that matter, the thing became a sort of hyper-sexualized object which stopped being either Object or Sex, but stayed deeply disturbing. You click over to Slate, whatever the hell it is, and the euphoria over Super Bowl commercials has neatly dovetailed into Grammy, Oscar, and Joaquin mania, and the Girls Gone XX are in a tizzy over Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren. (Here's a hint: it's Greta Van Susteren, who, in any more reasonable era, would be recognized, hands-down, as the most inexplicable person on television.)

This is, as you know, the same Slate, online model of the New Media, which seven years ago couldn't find anyone on staff who didn't think invading Iraq sounded like a Damn Fine Idea; now it can't find anyone with the slightest interest in the crushing problems that little adventure helped create. Still, I can't quite decide whether Slate is entirely to blame for this, or whether it is acting as a Special Reverse Double-Conter-Intuitive Contraindicator of the country at large: waving tiny American flags while we gorge ourselves for twenty-five years, then glancing around occasionally to see if the waste-removal crews have arrived yet.

My mood was not leavened by this:

There are two parts of the Apple retail strategy that Microsoft would be wise to replicate: the hiring process and the Genius Bars. Every Apple Store employee I've ever met has at least acted as if she loved to work there. The staff never tries to pressure you into buying stuff you don't need, and, unlike the blue-shirted guys at Best Buy, rarely lapses into tech jargon. The store especially excels when something goes wrong with something you've bought. When your iPhone keeps crashing or your MacBook won't connect to the Web, just go online to make an appointment at the Genius Bar (if you don't make an appointment, you might have to wait in a long line).

Okay. I've detailed my own Visit With A Genius at the Snootville Mall elsewhere. Suffice it to say, for now, that the store appeared to be staffed by the hipster extras from a soap opera coffee shop, that they all appeared to be enjoying the hell out of working there, except this appeared to be related to the fact that for 98% of them "work" involved leaning on something talking to someone while not wearing a company golf shirt, and 99% of them appeared to be otherwise hard-core unemployable. Not that I disapprove, au contraire; I think it's a savvy marketing scheme. It's just that I extrapolate from my own teen- and young-adult-dom and the number of times "get a haircut/shave/better attitude" was mentioned to me during interviews for some part-time job. I'm guessing more than one of my locals has heard "some way to cover that neck tattoo" from more than one HR guy.

Yes, my Genius didn't burden me with a lot of techno-mumble jumble. In fact, he pretty much spoke to me as if he figured I'd wandered in by mistake after hitting my head on something just outside. This, despite the fact that a) I was there because my new reconditioned iMac died, not because I couldn't sync my iPod; and b) I have Macs in the basement older than him, and I'd lived through fourteen years of imminent Apple bankruptcy, so fuck your cult. He did diagnose the problem correctly, and quickly, though getting it back required a barrage of phone calls on my part.

But my point is this: why in the world would you root for Microsoft to duplicate The Apple Store Experience? Why in the world would you root for Microsoft at all? Sheesh, it's like wishing Bank of America would come up with a trendy new eyeshade design, and make us all feel good about banking again. Not that I'm trying to give them story ideas.

Please Stand By

I'M not sure what exactly happened to the page layout here.  I was just trying out a floating width scheme, or whatever you call it, and then the browser crashed, and the file with what I imagined to be the old saved template--which I had been led to believe I hadn't changed yet anyway--turned out to be some sort of Blade Runner fanboy scheme, and when I went to get rid of that it turned out that the most recent New and Improved Blogger wouldn't return me to the old, original template--minus my carefully considered color combinations--unless I signed on to the New and Improved Blogger, which process wipes out the rest of what formatting had survived to that point.  So now I'm just glad the thing is not in Hindi.  I guess I'll find the time to fix it sometime soon; I was previously engaged in trying to find out where all my winter clothing has gone since last winter, which you might figure could wait, but then I realize that if I stop it might be six weeks before I start up again, and you don't.  Meanwhile, I don't complain about every little inconvenience with Blogger--it's fuckin' free, dude--but for the life of me I can't understand why every time they execute another suite of Improvements, which always turn out to be somewhat short of Earth shaking, usually more like earth piling, one is forced to sign on, figure out where they've hidden the HTML this time, and change it all back again.  I know, I know:  I was educated in a previous century.  Back then, all the telephones were black, didn't buzz incessantly while you were trying to carry on a conversation, and your fellow citizens couldn't carry them into bookstores where the half of the conversation they subjected total strangers to, at volumes approaching those formerly reserved for calling lost animals, raised the question of what a complete illiterate was doing in a bookstore, anyway.

The Electric Gatekeeper of Hell

WARNING: the visually impaired should not watch this video. The rest of you can already see it's Meredith Viera.

AT one point last week the bereaved homeowner, forcibly separated from modern communications, considered getting all his news from the television networks, which still showed up in his living room unbidden, free of charge, like previously rejected suitors now possessed of some pathetic new hope, but secret, daring only to express condolences but thinking maybe! Maybe now he'll come back! But I'd only thought of it as some species of that experiment where one eats fast food every day for a month or watches the complete cinematic oeuvre of Former Saturday Night Live cast members and then blogs about it if he survives. But Katie's little puppy eyes looked so sad and hurt and trusting that first night that I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I got so far, though, as to actually try to watch the morning shows, and these were ten of the most unpleasant minutes of my life, ever.  I know it couldn't be that my expectations were too high. It must be that in the interval since I last watched one (when Hughes Rudd, R.I.P., still hosted the CBS Morning News) the very concept of "News" had been forgotten, and then was reconstructed by network archaeologists, largely through guesswork aided by the discovery of Joan Lunden's long-lost audition tape. On Thursday morning I sat down with coffee, buttered toast, and two aspirin, and discovered--this is right off the bat, mind you!--that at that moment the viewer could select  a) Miley Cyrus, b) George Michael, or c) Batman. I glanced at the clock, which read 8:15!  Even the wintergreen-flavored lo-cal hard news substitute they peddle had been dispensed with for the day. I'd begun with zero expectations and they had already proven impossibly high.

Who needs--or can take--this sort of thing before breakfast digests? Who among those prefers it come annotated by a clamor of carefully coiffed "talent" all nattering at once? Why are a bunch of middle-aged white people enthusing over the latest singing sensation beloved of girls from 11 to 11-and three-quarters as though this were a recently discovered demographic, or one which Nielsen recently reported had suddenly taken to watching morning "news" programs as a replacement for hot torrents of text messaging urea?

I resolved to tune in earlier next time, just to make sure there was no mistake. And it turned out to be worst than I'd even imagined.

Meredith Viera.

First, I'll own up to a visceral, possibly chemical dislike for the woman, and I suspect that part of it is that the way some people have gaydar I have I have an analogous ability to spot schoolyard tattletales and congenital suck-ups years, even decades later. Second, though we were born less than ten days apart she has been exuding that cloying eau de middling-town society page for twenty years, and as someone once said about Harry Connick, Jr., it's one thing to act as though Bob Dylan isn't important to you, and quite another to act like you've never heard of him. And there was the infamous 60 Minutes stint where she tried to portray herself as some sort of breast-feeding Feminist icon, even though real women, working and otherwise, who were struggling with real problems and real workplace oppression without high-six-figure salaries to cushion the blows never got the time of day in her stories.

And, finally, call me old fashioned, call me just plain old, but once you've decided that hosting game shows and hawking everything from patent medicines to washday miracles to panty shields is your line I think you should be done with reporting The News, and The News should be done with you. Once you have demonstrated that the things that come out of your mouth are for sale you're disqualified! Is this too esoteric a concept for the modern age, or just too potentially honest?


Now, maybe that's just me, but then, go ahead and judge for yourselves. Friday they gave Viera the 100th Anniversary of the FBI story. And fittingly, since she has all the qualities Hoover admired in a journalist.

Watch along with me, won't you, as we begin with a faux-noir tale of the Bureau's early fame, matched by faux-history (though this too is fitting). Dillinger! Bonny and Clyde! Scarface! Machine Gun Kelly, who gave 'em the G-Men moniker! Except, of course, that fans of the cinema may recall that Bonnie & Clyde were gunned down by state lawmen from Texas and Louisiana, although more casual viewers would be forgiven for mistaking the Sneaky Ambuscade Without Warning as Hoover's Boys' M.O. Capone was tracked down by T-Men, and it was John Edgar's wordcrafters that put their slogan in Kelly's mouth. Right on one count, though; the public execution of Big Dick John was all Purvis, pissing his drama-queen boss off no end, of course.

Then it's time to update our hagiographyin', as Viera interviews Robert Mueller. Skip ahead to around 2:30; believe me, you won't miss anything.

Let's talk about highlights for the F.B.I. The Unabomber?

Right. The stirring success story of a government agency which looked for the man for eighteen years, and managed to find him, somehow, shortly after his brother turned him in. And this in spite of the fact that a sizable percentage of the UNABOM task force didn't believe Ted Kaczynski was their man even after they'd arrested him. Perhaps because they'd been reading that miraculous profile that predicted he'd be a married, meticulous, blue collar worker with a high-school education.  Let's talk about highlights!

But it's not all fluff; Viera proves she can ask the tough questions:

But the FBI has had its embarrassments. The raid in Waco, Texas. The wife and son of White Separatist Randy Weaver were killed in a standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Again, I'd lost track of her until Friday. Does she do all her research at Little Green Footballs?

And don't get me wrong. The Bureau has a lot to answer for about Waco. It has one shot to answer for, two if you believe the conspiracy theorists, at Ruby Ridge.  Okay. But is it possible that Viera is so tone-deaf she didn't realize how that sounds, or is that just her real journalistic credentials on display? She and I were born ten days apart. If you ask me about FBI "embarrassments" I'd probably start with Martin Luther King, spying on US citizens for partisan political purposes, infiltrating anti-war groups and inciting violence, Wounded Knee, and doing Reagan's dirty work for him. I might have gone back to the trial-less executions of Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, or tuning Ma Barker into a criminal mastermind after they gunned her down, or the internal domestic surveillance they were doing even before the world's most successful malignant cross-dressing little fascist took over (Jane Addams, public enemy, anyone?) I might mention Hoover's warehouses of creepy, sex-obsessed licensed snoppery, his utter contempt for the law, his blackmail-fueled five decades of petty-tyranny, his racism, his cosy relationship with the Mafia the Bureau insisted didn't exist. I might've mentioned Fred Hampton, who, unlike Koresh or the Weavers, didn't get a warning, let alone hours or days to surrender. If you told me you wanted to restrict it to something within the memory of the Today Show viewership--like they remember the 90s?--I might've asked Viera if she'd ever heard of Judy Bari, or why Robert Hanssen and Wen Ho Lee didn't qualify as "embarrassments".  Waco and Ruby Ridge, whatever else they were, were legitimate law enforcement exercises gone bad (and then politicized).  Maybe we should start the list with the extra-legal killings and the overtly political acts.

Or maybe it's just me.

re: Inspire® 2-slice model 6328

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC
General Delivery
Indianapolis, IN
May 12, 2008


Mr. John Oster, deceased,
Founder
The Oster Manufacturing Company
acquired by Sunbeam Products,
which was bought out by
Allegheny International, Inc., before
the division was cited, along with
its accounting firm which, not surprisingly, was
Arthur Andersen, LLC, now owned by
four limited liability corporations called
Omega Management I through IV,
for accounting fraud and
filed for bankruptcy, only to reemerge
one year later as the privately owned
American Household, Inc. (AHI)
which was purchased by
Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH), the former
Alltrista Corporation, which began as the
spin-off of its canning business by the Ball Corporation
Rye, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Oster:

I like toast. In this, as I'm sure you're aware, or would be if you were still alive, I am far from alone; it's a staple of breakfast tables in much of the civilized world. Toward this end I, again like millions of others, employ a toaster, or device which toasts bread automatically on both sides at once. I enjoy its convenience, and, if I may indulge in the personal for a moment, the aroma of toasting bread and the satisfying pop of the finished product, which frequently startles, but in a good way. I like mine with butter (or, more accurately, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil spread the color of cabbage butterflies); for an occasional treat I'll add some apricot preserves.

I don't know when I first became a fan of toast. As an infant I was fed digestive biscuits, which might serve as a sort of gateway to toast enjoyment; I suppose your marketing department could answer that. I do remember that the toaster was a prominent feature of my family's breakfast table, which, let us clearly understand each other here, was also the lunch and dinner table--we were not one of your fancy breakfast-nook-owning families--but Mother would put the toaster back in the cabinet after the morning meal.

Now, here's the peculiar thing about that, the late Mr. Oster: we must have had that same toaster for at least a decade. If you could remember things at this stage, I'm sure you'd remember that such objects take on a sort of totemic power for young children, being, at the same time, a kind of magical amulet and a provider of warmth and comfort. I can, in fact, close my eyes and still smell the warm brown bakelite of the handles and knobs, with their clearly marked numerical progression, and recall how the Art Deco-ish bulge of its chrome body offered literally hours of enjoyment once I discovered it would distort faces most comically, like a household funhouse mirror. And the redorange glow of its elements was mesmerizing, presaging a lifelong fascination with various forms of flammability, something I would eventually turn into a career of sorts. So I remember it clearly, and it was the only toaster I would know until the late 70s ushered in the craze for throwing perfectly good equipment in a landfill, during which time it made toast.

You may have seen where I'm going with this, Mr. Oster; I'm not quite clear how perceptive people in your situation are. Last fall I replaced my previous toaster, which, at a mere five years of age, had lost a portion of its electrical function. (Here I might explain that in the American economy of the 21st century it is both cheaper and faster to replace the entire apparatus than to contrive with ten cents' worth of wire to repair it.) So I cranked up the flivver, bounced my way to my local retailler, and bought a sleek and shiny replacement. As you may have guessed, or not, an Oster.

Now, sir, like you, I imagine, I find myself living a portion of my life in a century for which I was not prepared, though I imagine the dazzling rate of increasing complexity seemed to you like progress. I get home with this product and spend ten minutes reading the instructions. For toast. I mean, sir, I don't generally swear around the deceased, in case they're not partial to it, but what th' fuck? The thing has a setting for bagels, which is fine in a politically-correct sort of way, but there's also a WARM and a FROZEN button which I can't for the life of me figure why anyone would need. And the dial is a marvel of illegibility. There's no marking on the knob itself, which apparently would have demoralized the design staff no end. Instead it has a small ridge between two beveled sections which serves as a marker supposing one has sensitive enough fingers (and, I might point out, small enough to still read the numbers underneath while fondling it). The scale runs from 1 through 7, with dots in between offering what frankly must be termed the illusion of decimal increments of control. In the actual event numbers 1-4, and their fractional handmaidens, do nothing beyond getting the bread slightly warm, which, while it may be some user's cup of tea, does not actually qualify as "toast", and would seem to raise the question about what that WARM switch is doing there.

All of this in fact, sir, I would have learned to live with without too much bother as, in fact, I had until recently, when the thing began to develop a mind of its own, which, although I haven't checked yet, probably signals the warranty has expired. This may have begun when my Poor Wife, who is a notoriously fickle, sensitive, and, well, no need beating around the bush, half-insane eater, as is the rest of her family (at least she doesn't vomit nearly as much as her baby brother, who can be set off by someone trimming the broccoli too long) decided to have some toast one morning instead of whatever godawful coffeeshop provender she usually indulges (a sensitive eater who readily consumes feedlot-quality comestibles prepared by people who were in prison as recently as last week!). She, you might have been able to guess, favors toast in which the color of the bread remains unchanged, and in pursuit of this started fiddling with the dial which, of course, I didn't discover until the next morning, when my own toast popped up so quickly I thought I'd failed to completely engage the switch. And, of course, since what markings there are are in Hipster Design Braille it took another exercise in warming bread to figure out the problem. As I say, I haven't checked the warranty; perhaps "changing the dial once set" voids it.

So this weekend I planned on fixing club sandwiches for lunch. This means, for two of us, six total slices of toast which I generally toast lightly in consideration of my wife's preferences and avoidance of keeping them all straight during assembly. Six total slices of toast, one unchanged setting, yielding four different visual results, including one piece which looked on one side as though it had gotten a suntan through a picket fence. You may compare, sir, that old chrome model of my youth, which, rescued by some landfill archaeologist, is probably available on eBay as we speak, listed as "works great!"

I write to you, Mr. Oster, not because I cannot contact the company online, or because I imagine that you still have some pull there, but because it is your name on the thing ("Oster: The Quality Goes In Before The Name Of Some Guy Who Died Thirty Years Before His Company Ever Made A Toaster Goes On") and I feel this makes us partners in grievance. And I was wondering if it's true that the dead can shoot laser beams out of their eyes, or cause people to stab themselves with their own letter openers, or raise maps of painful boils, anything the people responsible for this thing deserve? A simple haunting, if that's the one interaction you're permitted, would be satisfactory. I remain, sir, yours in spirit.

Sincerely,


James B. S. Riley

JBSR: dc

Fuck Steve Jobs

I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.

Steve Jobs

Just imagine. The whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass.

Herman Mankiewicz

"Hey, man, where you goin'?"

"I'm goin' to class."

"Man, you always goin' to class."

from Overheard in the Hallways, Vol. II

OF course some of us think--and have said so on several occasions--that the only thing wrong with our system of public education is that overpaid, over-praised, egomaniacal gizmo marketers (Jobs), software pirates (Gates), or old-school brigands (Welch) think a coterie of ass-kissers proves their personal bungholes taste like apple danish.

Th' fuck? When was the last time Steve Jobs was in a public school, or talked to a teacher or a student (or, more to the point, a principal)? Where would he go at Apple to find someone with a GED? I have no idea what makes anyone imagine the CEO of a technology firm has the standing to critique secondary education, but I now know what the counter-argument is.

What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, "I can't win."

Steve Jobs

"Really smart", of course, as embodied by...Steve Jobs.

And this is a(nother) guy who famously dropped out of college in his freshman year, who became a multi-millionaire genius by capturing 8% of the exploding personal computer market with someone else's invention, and who would be back home tinkering with the next NEXT if the Apple board hadn't re-elected him Prom King and the iPod hadn't proved the preferred miniature premature-hearing-loss provider of the early 21st century. In the interim Jobs bought himself a company that produces brightly-colored computer-animated baby sitters and product-licensing machines; today he's overseen the vast network of corporate agreements which allows you to watch Jackass: The Movie on your telephone, provided you aren't presently screaming into while walking down the cereal aisle. Some of us might suggest that this, rather than the inability of high-school seniors to perform any better than the general public in a Find Afghanistan On The Map exercise, is the real demonstration of the failure of public education.  Maybe education is not exactly in your best interests, Steve.  

I mean, I know a guy who became an electrician's apprentice right out of high school who may now have more money than Jobs. It's probably close. He might also have a collection of half-remembered, third-hand anecdotes about Our Failing Schools, but if so he doesn't promote them in public. (Then again, the number of full-time speech-writing toadies he employs is surprisingly small.)

Okay, enough of the ad hominems (they're justified because that's the full extent of Jobs' argument); let's deal with this warmed-over Gospel According to John Stossel once more:

• Bad teachers can't be fired. Unlike Jobs I don't have a Wi-Fi lossless psychic connection to every union contract in the cosmos, but I know one pretty well, and in Indianapolis Public Schools a new teacher can pretty much be fired at will for the first two years, although, sadly, not simply at the whim of a godlike Principal,  but through an evaluation process. After that it gets a little tougher (and why shouldn't it?), mostly in that teacher evaluations are less frequent, plus (and one hesitates to explain the obvious to our 21st century seers) the teacher now has a track record. How many good evaluations should a bad evaluation negate? Four? Fourteen?

(This puts me in mind of the decade my Poor Wife spent outside the gigantic Union Featherbed that is public education, working for a couple of studios. The first was in transition from the leadership of the guy who founded it to that of his two daughters, who managed to combine various untreated psychopathies with the absolute assurance that their good sense in inheriting a business was sufficient proof of their Mensa-level business judgment. My wife became the shop steward, in part through her quiet expertise, but also through actually putting up with these nitwits, something she'd later regret.

(And so she was given the occasional glimpse into the inner sanctum, and what passed for thought in the rarefied air. One of them confided to her that "they knew a business owner" whose invariable practice was to fire every one of his employees after two years, without exception, because by that time they had learned to cut corners and developed bad attitudes (gee, there's a shock, huh?).  This seemed to them a Very Good Idea.  

(Of course it was my wife, not they, who knew how difficult it was to find people with the requisite artistic ability and low income expectation, and just how long it took to get them to master the technical requirements of the job. And she knew how totally nuts those two were, so it didn't really surprise her when she later learned that the paragon of smart business practice in question operated a dry cleaners.)

The main thing seniority grants a teacher at IPS is first call on job openings, all other things being equal (and why shouldn't it?).

We might mention in passing that the no-union solution has been in operation for years now, in the form of charter schools, whose predicted miracle results have, as with the Iraq war, tended to repeated devaluation as the actual vote tallies rolled in.

• Let principals be CEOs. One is tempted to ask, rather more pointedly this time, when the last time Jobs met a public school principal was. I know it may be difficult to believe from the moral aerie that is Silicon Valley, but there occasionally exist petty, venial, self-aggrandizing educators with administrative licenses who occasionally promote personal whim, small-time grudges, or outright cronyism over the needs of the system. Shocking, I know. But I could name names. And places and dates.

• Our failing schools. Look, one, I don't believe it's possible to be a success even in such a marginally intellectual activity as mass marketing and think like this.   How many failures has Apple chalked up?  Where would it be without that tiny musical device?

Steve, you're welcome to drop by my castle and interview my neighbors. They think our suburban school district is one of the best in the state. A ten-minute drive'll take us to Hamilton county, where they spend like sailors on a spree and like to imagine they get a hell of a lot in return. It's like that all over the country--except in impoverished inner-city districts--people think their own schools are just fine; it's Those Others that collect demagogy and spray paint. 

And we know, we've known for over forty years, or since we first bothered to look, that the major predictor of academic success is socio-economic status. Fighting poverty, providing sound nutrition and adequate health care, and giving people below the poverty line a fair shake and the hope of decent employment would do a hell of a lot more for public education than those cadres of virtual software engineers who just can't wait to teach junior-high math, but are prevented from doing so by greedy union bosses.

Funny how that sort of thing never enters into Buck Rogers' Geek Utopia.

My Xmas Shopping Is Complete--And Before Black Friday!

Hillary Clinton Nutcrackers for everybody!

Hair By The (Digital) Bagful

GRATIFICATION last week--it's not something to be taken for granted at my age--came in the form of a sudden local uproar over the now-expunged-from-my-screen local cable provider Comcast (and its regional partners in crime). The Big Ten (Motto: "Only 91.7% As Corrupt As The Big 12") has begun its own sports network, via FOX, and it won't be carried any local cable system, or not soon, anyway. The news that negotiations were at an impasse and that, as a result, some Purdue and Indiana games would not be seen locally (except by subscribers of Direct-TV and astute, handsome, Comcast-hating beta testers of the upstart AT&T U-Verse) resulted in a lot of fist-shaking at all concerned. That is not the really gratifying part. The failure to reach a deal has to do with the Big Ten's insistence that its network be part of the basic cable package, while Comcast (whose Big Fish status makes it the de facto negotiator) wants to put it on a That'll Cost Ya sports tier. Both sides fired away after word was made public, natch, and the bemused outside observer was left to marvel, once again, at the sort of shit some people are willing to be spoon-fed. A Comcast mouthpiece actually said that Big Ten basketball was a niche market in Central Indiana. Or so I read; it's probably not surprising that no one could keep a straight face while reading that on camera.

The Big Ten, meanwhile, pointed out that most of what Comcast did, in fact, offer on basic cable was shit, except they said it in a more academic-sounding way. Perennial ratings-grabbers The Golf Channel and Versus (a version of Spike for people who consider Spike "too cerebral") are embarnacled on the basic schedule possibly because they are owned by Comcast. The Big Ten probably backed this up with statistics or something; if they can fit eleven schools into The Big Ten you know they've got that math thing down cold.

Which is not to let our nation's colleges, including the ten members, or roughly 91%, of the Big Ten schools which are state-supported, off the hook for behaving like money-grubbing agents whose clients share in roughly 0% of the take. Their mouthpiece tried to argue that increased athletic revenues would eliminate the need for increasing tuitions to fund lesser sports, which either means that Logic has become less rigorous in the thirty years since I matriculated, or they figure the rest of us don't know anything about it.

Anyway, word is that the Big Ten wants $1.10 per subscriber, and Comcast--which charges $60 a month for basic "service"--says its customers Just Won't Stand for a rate increase. Again, presumably, this was said this off-camera. I was reminded of the recent loss of Leona Helmsley, whose great contribution to American culture--having The Help perform her Community Service--has gone sadly unmemorialized. There's a lot of talk these days about when America lost Her Greatness. I would point to that morning in 1985 when the much-limned Little People, having seen and heard Leona on the previous night's 60 Minutes, did not march into work and kill their bosses simply on the off-chance they were like her. This was the crucial evidence needed that the Reaganscam had worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I believe it was at this point that Dick Cheney said to himself, "Fuck! Let's try war profiteering!"

Which brings me back to my own 190, soon-to-be 191, channel line-up. My Poor Wife got me watching The National Geographic channel when she caught its fine Katrina recap recently, and I taped a couple shows I saw promo'd: a four-hour tick-tock on 9/11 which traces back to the Soviet-Afghan war, and a one-hour Road to War: Iraq, which traces back to My Pet Goat. And I'm still working my way through the former, but I ran through the latter last night. And what was interesting is that despite the fact that it's almost entirely Republicanized (the sole "Liberal" commenter is Bob Graham), not one of its former insiders could make the case anymore, or even be bothered to try, and these are people whose public perceptions will forever be linked to Our Mideast Adventure. Half the fuckin' WHIG group is there (Card, Frum, Matalin, Calio) plus Dick Armitage, and the well just pumps dust and nobody seems inclined to work the handle very hard anyhow. Card does seem to do his best to make Bush seem Presidential in a vague sort of way, but, assuming that is his best, one might be justified in thinking the suggestion that the next administration try hiring people with a spark of intelligence would insult only Armitage. Frum actually finds it necessary to say, over the My Pet Goat footage, that Bush "didn't have a good poker face," which suggests that Frum doesn't play the game much. Granted "total zombie incomprehension" is not your standard approach to the problem, but it's technically quite serviceable.