I've Known Some Great Whores. You're Not A Great Whore.

OH yeah. New Fucking Media.

Same old fucking campaign.

John Hagee's a whackjob. (Full disclosure: as a semi-curious observer of that milieu, in my opinion he's also the most dynamic preacher on television, by roughly the same margin as Secretariat's in the Belmont. But then I'm not particularly swayed by stage presence.) 

This does not make Bill Donohue a source.

John Hagee's got a teevee program, a web site, God knows how many books, and enough video on YouTube to make Ann Althouse an expert on his theology without learning his first name. So maybe people could quote him instead of quoting Donohue not quoting him. Glenn Greenwald found some, and borrowed some others, but when it came time to defend the anti-Catholic Bigot charge he went straight to Donohue. In fact, none of the Papist-bashing appeared before Mr. Anal-Sex Loving Jews Run Hollywood opened his self-righteous yap. By the end of the piece Greenwald is marveling at the strange bedfellows he finds himself playing pup tent with. As well he should.

Meanwhile, Jane Hamsher, Josh Marshall, any number of Kosacks, and other major theologians take to employing the two-word quote technique: John Hagee, the man who called the Catholic church (alternately, Catholics) the "great whore". (As always, we're indebted to Bob Somerby for quantifying this. Run, do not walk, from the Two-Word Quote!)

Okay, back up a minute. The TWQ should be avoided, except in cases where the underlying speech is clearly understood by all; but failure to capitalize "Great Whore" as Marshall does, is dishonest and illiterate. Hagee may be a lot of things, but "unfamiliar with the Revelation to John" isn't one of them, and whatever he's doing with that junior-high graphic it isn't praising Catholicism's price-to-oral talent ratio.  At least not saliently.  

Look, did you like this sort of thing when Donohue (and a bully of Bishops) slimed John Kerry? No? Then don't quote 'em now just because the shoe's on the Fisherman's other foot. In the last national election portions of the Catholic hierarchy attempted to use Holy Communion as a cudgel for steering the Flock into the Bush fold, based on narrowly selected issues (abortion, gay marriage, just in case you've forgotten) which ignored the fact that Kerry was under no religious compunction to insert that or any other Catholic teaching into US law. This, to me, was insulting to all Americans, not that they all saw it that way. What, exactly, is Bill Donohue's personal affront that some Texan legalized beggar doesn't like Catholics compared to that?

So, please...use Hagee's own words (not Donohue's parse) to hang him; use McCain's to hang him, too. And hang Timmy Russert the highest of all. But there's no call to help Wild Bill spread his toxins cross country. Hagee's apocalyptic hatefulness isn't a tin can to be tied to the Republican party's tail. It is the Republican party. Or what's left of it.

Le Mot Juste

“I was never on his show,” Gore Vidal, with whom Mr. Buckley had a famous feud, said on Thursday. “I don’t like fascism much.”

And While We're At It, Let's Give Principals The Right To Fire Bad Students.

FURTHER proof, where none is needed, that whoever writes Steve Jobs' speeches has never met an actual public school principal:

Franklin school: Student has right sit during pledge

By Amy Bartner

February 27, 2008
 
Franklin school officials had a quick reply Tuesday for a student who sued over his right not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance: You’re right.
Administrators in the Johnson County school district said they already had started to resolve the complaint from the 17-year-old, who said he was wrongly given detention after refusing to stand in class for the pledge.
“Our attorney addressed it and basically indicated that the student was correct and the school administration had erred,” said Franklin School Superintendent William Patterson.

Our Story: In 2005 the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ (Motto: Louisiana Is "Reforming", It's Time To Move Up!), out of a spasm of patriotic fervor/concern over dwindling military enlistments/fear that Kansas was becoming an innovator in Making High School Students Do Stupid Shit, enshrines as a legal right every Hoosier students' daily opportunity to say the Plejullejence and observe a moment of silence which may or may not include, without institutional interference,  an invocation to the Higher Power or Powers of his or her choice to smite that smirk off Jaime Reynolds' face Once and For All, amen.   The Legislature also provides the funding to put a fire-retardant flag in every classroom, lest students start twirling like Dervishes looking for the thing and accidentally adopt a new religion. This was the last time the Legislature actually anticipated a problem before it created it, and also the last time it funded an educational initiative.

Cut to: Franklin (IN) Community High School ("Home of the Grizzly Cubs"), 2008, and a week very much like the last one, where a student known to the legal system only as "J.L." refuses to stand for this and is reprimanded by Teacher. (According to the lawsuit, when pressed for his legal justification in ordering the student to stand, Teacher replied "because I said so." It's left unclear whether he realized he was quoting Charles Evans Hughes, though for education's sake we hope so.)  When the same aberrant behavior resurfaces the following week, and spreads like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus to another lad, Teacher sends both to the school office.

(By the way, this reminds me of my own response when, in my junior year, facing an ever-increasing average length of student hair, my own high school ["Home of the Americanism Club"] instituted a weekly Plejullejence. It took place Fridays, third period, when my best friend and I had a study hall in the cafeteria. We took to grabbing one of the small tables along the wall, the one, not coincidentally, right under Old Glory. Then at the appointed PA system cackle we'd stand up, hands on hearts, and face the other 250 kids in the place while craning our necks like we were looking for the thing. Did that for a full year. I guess kids today favor the more direct approach.)

Here Our Story begins to be enclouded in murk, a situation familiar to regular readers of the Indianapolis Racist Star as well as anyone who's ever listened to the public pronouncements of a school district spokesman who has discovered a prominent, if metaphorical, portion of his anatomy caught in the proverbial wringer. "J.L.'s" lawsuit says an (unnamed) assistant principal ordered him to serve an hour of after-school detention. Principal Craig McCaffrey says the school had not planned to take any action, but was unable to notify the two students before the suit was filed.  (Couldn't find them, presumably.)

Principal McCaffrey also claimed that the students were not punished for refusing to stand for the pledge, but were merely asked to conduct their own legal research to prove they should be allowed to remain seated.

(The lawsuit, by the way, puts it, to use the legal term, slightly fucking differently; it claims that "J.L." presented the Unnamed Assistant principal evidence of his right to remained seated under Indiana Code 20-30-5-.05 and -4.5, and was informed by Mr. Anonymous that the school was "expanding the Indiana Code".)

McCaffrey told the Racist Star “We were in the process of solving the problem. There wasn’t enough time between Friday and Monday. Part of what the ACLU does is protect people’s civil liberties, but I think that’s my job as an educator.”

Really?  When are you starting your job?  

So, "protecting civil liberties" is part of your job, but a passing familiarity with the laws affecting student behavior, a reasonable grasp of the Constitution of the United States, not operating a public trust without resort to cheap intimidation, and getting your fucking story straight before talking to the newspaper, aren't?

Or finding time to Google Indiana state law, for that matter?

It's 20-fucking-08, bub. This sort of thing has been news at least since the "flag salute" cases of the 1940s, and the underlying Constitutional principles have been a hot-button issue in public education since the school prayer decisions of 1962 and 1963, or in other words, longer than you've been using oxygen and long enough that you might be expected to have a passing familiarity with it even if that weren't your job. Not to mention the fact that that goddam 2005 law was all over the local media at the time, as was its intention. It seems to me that students shouldn't be allowed to graduate from your institution without understanding the principles involved, or maybe even be promoted to it, let alone run the place. The World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ was savvy enough to understand it, and it's pretty clear at least half of them couldn't meet your graduation requirements.

So let's just face facts here, and then let's toss what's left in the circular file. First, you've got an enrollment of around 1400, situated in what in my day was an hour's athletic bus ride across amber fields of corn and soybeans but is now nearly edging Indianapolis' suburban sprawl. (Back in the day your cross-country course included a one-man footbridge over a dry creekbed, where, in 1969, I told my first and only Chappaquiddick joke, then blew past the guy in front of me when he started laughing. Always the fierce competitor.) The population, both town and school, is 97% white. Which, give or take a couple points, is the siren's call of all that development headed your way.

We feel justified in assuming, based on size, homogeneity, and recent scientific discoveries on the effects of inbreeding, that it was not very long after the initial incident--reported in the suit as occurring on the Friday of two weeks ago--before the whole place knew about it, meaning you should have, too. The next episode is the Tuesday after that, or immediately following the three-day Presidents' Day weekend. It's beyond our measure of charity to assume you hadn't heard about it once it escalated. Then, according to the suit and depending on which story one believes (yours is not exactly sparking confidence at this point) the student quotes relevant Indiana law, either in self-defense or as an "assignment", and is either rebuffed or ignored. We know this because the ACLU filed suit the following Friday, which despite popular fable, Country and Western song lore, and history lessons originating from talk radio, they don't do without first making a good-faith effort to resolve things. You ignored them, or blew them off, or maybe you explained Because I Said So, or Vice-Principal Anonymous told 'em you were expanding the Code. And no doubt more than once.

So let's shitcan (hey, it's Free Speech; treat it as a Learning Experience) this "no time between Friday and Monday to straighten things out" routine. The suit was filed on Friday, and by then you'd had a minimum of three days to read the straightforward English of the law and respond as a good citizen should have, although a really good citizen might have understood the laws he's responsible for overseeing in the first place.   And now that taxpayers have to pay to respond to a lawsuit that could have been avoided had you a) known the law; b) bothered to look up the law; or c) not operated like a small-town bully, you claim time constraints?  

Anything to add, Mr. McCaffrey?

McCaffrey said the students — along with administrators — learned something from the situation.

“Any type of process that can be a learning process is good,” he said. “I’m proud of the kids, and I think they did a good job.”

Now on to making that mulatto kid prove he's entitled to eat lunch with the white folks.  His research was due yesterday.

It's Like Rabbit Starvation, Except From A Thirty-Year Diet Of Nothing But Bullshit

David Brooks, "The Real McCain." February 26

Hushed Radio Narrator Voice: When last seen, David Brooks, political columnist for the New York Times. had just discovered that anonymous sources may have ulterior motives. As we begin today's episode, Brooks has tracked the wily political consultant into his lair:

You wouldn’t know it to look at them, but political consultants are as faddish as anyone else. And the current vogueish advice among the backroom set is: Go after your opponent’s strengths. So in the first volley of what feels like the general election campaign, Barack Obama has attacked John McCain for being too close to lobbyists. His assault is part of this week’s Democratic chorus: McCain isn’t really the anti-special interest reformer he pretends to be. He’s more tainted than his reputation suggests.

Thus David Brooks, Republican countertenor! Now that the Wall of Shame is down, anyone's free to search for a single week when Brooks didn't tout GOP talking points at least once, often with no visible link to any actual news stories. I found a couple, but only when he was on vacation.

And by the way, "first volley of the general election?" McCain started in on Obama on campaign finance two weeks ago, and last week called him "the most liberal US Senator". Those are volleys, even if they didn't hit anything, although when I read the second my wife mistook my spastic laughter for a choking fit and tried to Heimlich me. People in public life really ought to be more careful.

Well, anything is worth trying, I suppose, but there is the little problem of his record. McCain has fought one battle after another against lobbyists and special interests. And while I don’t have space to describe all his tussles, or even the lesser ones like his fight with the agricultural lobby against sugar subsidies, I thought that, amidst all these charges, it might be worth noting some of the McCain highlights from the past dozen years.

Or, put another way, I've got a copy of the standard litany of right-wing complaints about John McCain, which for the most part could only be leveled by extremists hiding behind a crackpot "defense" of "free speech" and unfettered robber baronage, which it now occurs to me can be 1) offered as a argument in McCain's favor and 2) used to fill up a column:

• In 1996, McCain was one of five senators, and the only Republican, to vote against the Telecommunications Act.

• In 1998, McCain championed anti-smoking legislation that faced furious opposition from the tobacco lobby.

• In 2000, McCain ran for president and reiterated his longstanding opposition to ethanol subsidies. Though it crippled his chances in Iowa...

• In 2002, McCain capped his long push for campaign finance reform by passing the McCain-Feingold Act.

• In 2003, the Senate nearly passed the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act.

• In 2004, McCain launched a frontal assault on the leasing contract the Pentagon had signed with Boeing for aerial refueling tankers.

• In 2005, McCain led the Congressional investigation into the behavior of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

• Over the past few years, McCain has stepped up his longstanding assault on earmarks.

Okay, look, I'm from Indiana. My senior Senator has been touted for the Nobel Fucking Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to stem our global nuclear threat. Meanwhile he's voted for every war, police action, Third-World government destabilization, bullying military "exercise", and every last weapon system that's come down the pike, not to mention voting to send nuclear technology to the world's largest nuke-armed non-signator of the NPT.

So, forgive me for not performing naked somersaults just because John McCain has sometimes voted--or gotten his name on front on, no great trick when you're the only Republican to support something--in a way a hell of a lot of Americans consider merely reasonable. And forgive me if I imagine one can afford to stake out some unpopular positions in the World's Most Sluggishly Deliberative Body with relative impunity (Dave, try being a lefty default Democrat watching the Democratic Senate majority for the past two years!), especially when one has been running for President since 1996.

And (praeteritio alert!) I'm not even gonna mention that Young Senator McCain got caught with his hand in the lobbyist cookie jar before he'd unpacked his toothbrush, and has been campaigning for sugar-free sainthood ever since, or that his campaign staff is chockablock with insider Washingtonians, or that he's made his own campaign finance decisions this time around based purely on expediency.

This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.

For pity's sake. No one's accusing McCain of failure to reach perfection. They're accusing him of failing to live up to the standards he proposes for others, and they're pointing out that lobbyists themselves don't seem to find McCain quite the pariah the standard-issue Republican chatterers claim to. It's not possible anyone could miss that distinction.

And here’s the larger point: We’re going to have two extraordinary nominees for president this year. This could be one of the great general election campaigns in American history. The only thing that could ruin it is if the candidates become demagogues and hurl accusations at each other that are an insult to reality and common sense.
Maybe Obama can start this campaign over.

Please. You people sat still for the sliming of John McCain in 2000, for an unfiltered Press pathology disguised as coverage of the Gore campaign, the ham-fisted disenfranchisement of Florida voters (and quite probably others), for multiple criminal enterprises run out of the House Majority Leader's office, for the outing of a covert CIA agent at the direction of the Vice President, the sliming of John Kerry in 2004, and Jack Murtha shortly thereafter, not to mention the jaw-dislocating move, in a span of three years, from "The President is not above the Law" to "The President Is the Law." This is Marquis of Queensbury stuff, and with feather pillows for gloves. Stop pretending otherwise.

Kevin Drum, Éminence Grise of American Politics

I like to think that I have standards, however lax or sui generis. I do retain some of my early Christian training, especially the parts about the Hypocrites, the Pharisees, and the Assholes; I'd never short-change you in a financial transaction; I would never physically assault anyone older, bigger, or in sight of objective witnesses. If I write at length about faulty toaster design or television programs where eating live insects is more attractive than the performers themselves, well, I hope it's because there's some larger lesson for the kids out there, one I would have benefitted from in my youth, like "writing a blog is for imbeciles."

There are two things about this, as there are about a lot of things. One, I learned and accepted at a very early age, say, twelve, that crap was going to come out of my mouth which frequently would be instantaneously misunderstood--sometimes to the point of having someone nearby try to shove it back in, and not always helpfully--even, maybe especially, when I thought the sentiments were too outrageous for anyone to believe they reflected my own. Here again, it would have been nice if some trusted adult had explained to this tender sapling that scrapping with bullies, xenophobes, hilljacks, self-appointed defenders of the Republic, and Boilermakers was as nothing compared to the sort of deep gonadal pain a sex partner, or even a potential one, could inflict. Two, even I get confused about where the line between intended minor giggle and revelation of my inner crochets lies. I defer to my Poor Wife when it becomes an issue, even though I know she thinks I spend too much time hitting fungoes in the Outer Space league and just wishes I'd shut up long enough so she could hear the weather report.

I haven't asked her to settle the Obama thing for me, in part because it's less real than hyperreal, and in part because she's a white suburban girl with feminist sensibilities, a dues-paying union teacher who began life as a fair-share-paying non-union member before she saw the light (compare her poor excuse for a husband, a trades unionist since the early Thirties), and, while informed politically as much as anyone who has to try to concentrate on the news while someone in the room rants about That Idiot Mayor or The Goddam Scree Slope that is the Democratic Leadership in Congress, she manages to be reasonable about it.   I'm on my own.

It's more hyperreal than real. I live in Indiana. I've voted in every election since 1972. I've never had a vote count. I think this may color my perception of Blogtropia having turned the '08 Democratic primary into a sort of myspace war. Short weeks ago I thought my daily reading habits had been hewed to the point where I might run into "While I agree with Matt that ..." no more frequently than I run into a Pink Moon;  there are places I go, places I've frequented, where it's now found in every second post, and sometimes in every second paragraph. This may or may not explain why, on successive nights, I dreamed of being a scuba diver who gets his flipper trapped under a cement block which is chained to a corpse. And not a pink-skinned naked female corpse with floating hair, either. Not that I regularly dream of those.

The weekend murkiness contained--again!--a learned discussion on whether Experience was really an electoral millstone, or whether Hillary was just lying about it. Matt?

If you win a primary on an "experience" argument, then you'd damn well better be more experienced than your general election opponent. McCain would make an experience argument against either opponent, so it's much better to be the opponent with a record of statements aimed at rebutting such arguments (I don't think the American people judge your qualification based on duration of service in a broken Washington system...) than to be the opponent who's been making the argument that voters need to stick with the more seasoned Washington hand.

Mr. Drum explains:

Seen through this lens, the problem with Obama isn't that he's less experienced than Hillary, but that he's inexperienced, full stop. And again, like it or not, John McCain will certainly use that as an argument in the general election campaign in a way he couldn't against Hillary. Sure, he's got 25 years to her 15, but that doesn't matter. Beyond a certain point voters aren't interested in who's got more experience, and 15 years is well beyond that point. If McCain tried to paint Hillary as inexperienced, it would be a waste of breath. Nobody would buy it.

FIRST, let us note here that in terms of national elections alone we experience close to five hundred biennially. So that by age 25 someone paying attention has at least had the opportunity to listen in on over 1800 of 'em, not counting any state or local races. In how many of those does someone tout Experience? This requires analysis? Please. It's like a Winston smoker proving that Chesterfields don't really satisfy.

Drum is right: Senator Obama is a crapshoot, and it'd sure be a more attractive game if we could get a close look at those dice. (This should not be taken as an invitation to link to hilzoy for the umpteenth time.)

Here's another thing. If you've got to jump on board the Out With Old Washington, To Hell With Boomer Partisanship bandwagon, kindly keep your feet inside, and refrain from donning bell bottoms and handmade sandals and flashing the peace sign when it's convienient:

There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?...

Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.
Mr. Obama was 6 at the time, and like many of his admirers, he has only read about the violence that traumatized the nation. But those recollections and images are often invoked by older voters, who watch his candidacy with fascination, as well as an uneasy air of apprehension, as Democrats inch closer to selecting their nominee.

Okay, okay, that's a Times "news" story, and I trust we all share a concern over the safety of all candidates, and even a sizable portion of our fellow citizenry, but it'd be nice to find a hint somewhere that we recognize the distinction between the twin martyrs of a black year forty years gone and unlettered and cost-free projections about a guy who's done nothing so far to merit the comparison beyond a presumed susceptibility to gunshot wounds.

Garry Wills noted (in his fine study of another charismatic politician) that one only has power until it is used. It'd be gratifying to find more concern about that and less about spinning every last Clinton utterance. But, like I say, I'm a Hoosier, so it's easy to pretend to withhold support when that support will never even mean the 1 in 121 million it does for others. Then again, I'm a natural-born agnostic. Meaning, in the absence of convincing evidence I should favor one centrist Democrat over another, I'll be a lot more comfortable two years down the road apologizing for not supporting the man than apologizing for having believed in him.

Fuck David Shuster

YOU gotta be kiddin' me:

"Does it bother me that I was thrown under the bus to pay for the sins of the father? No," he says in an exclusive interview. "As somebody who's covered politics for a while, I understand all the forces that were in play."

A two-week suspension (during which you seem, if anything, to have forgotten that you're the one who apologized) is not being "thrown under the bus". Had you been fired (as you should have been) and become a pariah (only in my dreams, evidently) you would still have not been "thrown under the bus", but simply forced to pay the price for your own actions, bad faith, and failure to uphold simple professional standards (the ones in my dreams, evidently). The "forces at play" are those that determined, one, that MSNBC felt free to slag Senator Clinton, and her family, personally, viciously, without regard for fairness or veracity, and using the lowest forms of playground epithet, and after being called on this in the matter of Chris Matthews either allowed, instructed, or permitted you to continue. (And like you don't know the rules, huh?)

So your non-apology apology is now, officially, a non-apology, and your suspension is now an act of official hypocrisy and economic self-defense. Meaning, I take it, that we're not supposed to believe either you or MSNBC think there's anything really wrong with calling the Clintons felonious panders and their daughter a whore.

Way ahead of you on that one, David.

Say it again: Shuster's self-proclaimed issue was that Chelsea Clinton wouldn't speak to him, David Shuster. It's stupidity beyond belief. This is the United Fucking States of Hi I'm Elvis Costello for Lexis, Hi I'm Will Farrell And My Latest Remake Of Every Movie I've Ever Made While Wearing Humorously Anachronistic Clothing Is Brought To You By Sugar Frosted Shit In A Tube, Eat Some NOW. For fuck's sake. Even assuming Chelsea Clinton is on the hustings because someone's holding a trust fund over her head (though, unlike the Bush Twins, Ms Clinton gives every appearance of being able to survive without one), no one could possibly give a shit about this sort of thing and remain sane.  Here's Shuster refusing to apologize by email to the Clinton campaign, and even refusing to acknowledge that what he said, not his "point", was what was objectionable. It's interesting to note that he manages to express himself for paragraphs at a time without referring to hos or snarfs or the xeriscape of Radical Feminist lady parts.  

And these are the people parsing the "racism" in every Clinton utterance.  

Hey, and while we're at it, a big Doghouse Riley digital steamer to the A-list "lefty" bloggers who, having complained for eight years about what the dreaded Em Ess Em had done to this country, announced that D-Shoe was just guilty of being too honest in his choice of expression.

Say What You Will About Our New Mayor, He Was Right About The Strawberries.

INDIANAPOLIS Racist Star political apologist columnist Matt Tully, a man who appears to be having second thoughts about publicly fellating a rodeo clown, reports that Accidental Mayor Lt. Col. Gomer F. Ballard told a local businessman he'd like to create a Chinatown on the city's southside, and hopes to corner the market on North American cricket.  No, I did not start drinking early.

That's Quite A Standing Order You've Got, Straight Shooter! The Gentlewoman Yields! Insert That Rider! More Motions! More Motions!

IT  was 5:30; I was lying in bed reading while my Poor Wife watched MSNBC, having already heard the local weather six times in the previous thirty minutes, and the BREAKING NEWS video of the blazing US embassy caught the corner of my eye. I propped myself up on an elbow to watch. At the end of it the hairdo read a statement from John McCain moderately deploring the violence and urging all people of goodwill to start acting like NATO runs the world before HE HAS TO TURN THIS CAR AROUND, You Hear Me? 'Cause he will.

Typically, I'm wondering what th' hell John McCain is doing in the story, but then the hairdo says something to the effect that McCain must welcome the opportunity to talk about something other that the day's other Big Breaking News. There is no way I could make this stuff up.

"What's that about?" asks the PW.

"I have no idea," I said.

And I didn't, and they returned to their coverage of the Big Breaking News Allegedly Involving an Unnamed McCain Appendage, a story from the front page of the Times, and I told her I must not have read the Times. So when I roused myself enough to go downstairs I checked in on it, and found to my surprise that I had read the Times, or skimmed it, and the Hot McCain on Lobbyist Action was there under the headline:

For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk

Which, I think you'll agree, falls somewhere short of Selling the Sizzle. Just like Evel Knievel fell somewhat short of jumping that canyon. The first time around I'd figured it was some sort of campaign eyeglass-stem-chewer designed to balance coverage of a Democratic race which still includes candidates people want to vote for. So I read the article, belatedly, and the first thing that comes to mind is that they should have translated the dirty parts into Latin.  

(For those of you under seventy-five, they used to do that in learned journals so that only educated people could read them for the dirty parts.)  

My father will admit to you that he never changed a diaper in his life.  He's no macho posturer; it's merely a testament to what gender roles were a mere half-century ago.  Plus when you see him tell it you notice he has some difficulty to this day in not vomiting at the mere thought. The modern Timesman finds himself with the same visceral reaction, apparently, but forced to take a couple of good lungfuls regardless:

Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened...
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship....
By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic...
Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic.

So, they were just humping like seasoned-up rodents in a squalid alley, I guess. It's sad to see that romance is dead even among the older generation.

Self-confidence on ethics! How many hours were spent in the stifling environs of the word smithy to forge that gate topper? We remind ourselves that someone wrote that headline, went home, and did not stick his head in the oven.

We remind you: these are the people who are supposed to be covering the torture scandal enhanced interrogation techniques story.

In Fairness, In Those Days You Only Had One Thing To Fear.

ON one of the occasions over the past two weeks when I could watch television I happened upon the last half of Bill Moyers' interview with Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. From Laura Miller's Salon review:

To top it all off, when [Jacoby] was invited back to her alma mater, Michigan State University, to receive an honorary award, she struck up a conversation with an honors student in the College of Communications Arts, only to find that the young woman had never even heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats.

Overview of the College of Communications Arts & Sciences, from the MSU site:

The departments of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing, Communication, Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media and the School of Journalism offer programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Students work with their advisors to establish an individual program of study designed to prepare the students to meet their desired career goals.

So, out of those five (it's five; turns out they have a little problem with punctuation at the CCAS) how many would dictate a student be familiar with the Fireside Chats? As many as two? Are people who have "heard of" the Fireside Chats more knowledgeable than those who haven't? How many of them could do more than identify FDR as their source? (I've heard a couple--and read a couple more along the way--mostly because I went to a high school with its own radio station, and so I heard The Hindenburg Disaster and The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff and The Inner Sanctum and The Results of Fibber McGee Opening That Closet, but by the time I got to college and took the introductory Radio & Television course I found it was two weeks of history and four months of Business, and FDR turned up as the guy who signed the Communications Act of 1934 and was mean to bankers.) The final Fireside Chat took place more than forty years before that young woman was born. It's like asking me to discourse on the Elkins Act.

I have a lot of sympathy with this sort of thing in the general: we're an anti-intellectual society. So what else is new? It's not really demonstrated by the number of people who can't find Syria on a map, or who'd rather socialize by text message than have a decent discussion about the merits of laissez-faire capitalism.   It's more likely demonstrated by our anti-intellectualism.  

Why do studies show our young people are so appallingly ignorant of world geography? Because you can't get older people to take the test.

Hell, Jacoby has visited college campuses? I've read through comments at the Indianapolis Racist Star, where you cannot for the life of you figure out how these people manage to decide which face of the keyboard is supposed to point up. People who try and fail to locate the Middle East on a map are still demonstrating a capacity for abstract thought many Americans will never master, or even glimpse, and most of them have an internet connection. I bow to no one in this arena, Susan. And I will defend at whatever cost the idea that we might as well give the fuck up and just enjoy the ride.

But then I saw her with Bill Moyers, and I liked her despite the book, and her point about the Fireside Chats, that modern Presidents have no talent for, nor make any effort towards, educating the public was perfectly illustrated by the example of (Bill) Clinton Healthcare, which was simply dumped on the public as a 900-page fait accompli, and so was easy pickin's for the insurance industry.

And the bright boys of Left Blogtopia want to talk about...superdelegates, and brokered conventions, and racist attacks. How did we get here again, exactly? 2008 finds you running against the most catastrophically awful administration in our history,  and its toadying surrogates, all members of a party which has proven itself crookeder 'n deregulated car dealer with scoliosis. And your bright boys are arguing about campaign staffs. There's an issue that'll galvanize the electorate.

Look. Ronald Reagan sought his party's nomination for sixteen years. He had buggyloads of Bircher money behind him, and he managed to defeat titans such as George H.W. Bush and Harold Stassen for the Republican nomination, then defeated a sitting President so unpopular Stassen would have had a chance against him. If you want to marvel at someone using the power of communication, try Ross Perot, who did precisely that educational, or "educational" thing, and who managed to convince 18% of the voting populace to support him despite being a funny-looking crank. To me that's a helluva bigger accomplishment than Reagan sweeping the board against an out-of-favor party he'd pinned ten years of bad economy on, while riding the crest of Nixon's Southern Strategy.

Last week brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson--an Obama supporter--wrote about the experience of going to familiar Democratic haunts and confronting unfriendly sentiments; I would suggest that what's more disturbing than cranky comments is going where one expects intelligent commentary and finding horserace touts thicker'n Irish bacon. It would make sense if Democrats were choosing between a liberal and a centrist, but they aren't. Can't say I understand why people who as recently as a year ago were insisting the Bush administration was about to invade Iran would now rather beat each other over the head. Maybe somebody needs to explain it to me.

Shoe Pinches Other Foot; Film At Eleven.

DID I ever tell you the one about the garlic bread?

I was a junior in college. I'd given up my downtown apartment that summer to come home and work, and I wound up living way out by the mall, on the opposite side of town from my old school-year job. I had no car. I needed a job. I took one at a franchise "Italian" "restaurant" chain. There probably should be two sets of quotes around each. The only thing about the place that wasn't cheesy was the cheese. Plastic grapevines ran around the top of the booths, for that touch of Old World elegance.

I quickly found myself running the pizza ovens, which was, like, the single skill position in the place and the only one where you had to Give A Shit, since it meant repeatedly plunging your arms into a 550º oven. The oven guy had to coordinate the activities of all the other line workers--pizza makers, sandwich makers, the guy who dropped the pre-measured, pre-overcooked loads of spaghetti, or "spaghetti", back into boiling water for a minute. The place was generally busy, because a) it was a chain restaurant and b) this is Indiana.

It was run by an early-thirties couple who had two screaming brats and who had fallen for the franchisee pitch somewhere. They'd had the place about a year. They had no idea what they were doing, except Being Their Own Boss, and no desire to get their hands dirty or spend any more time than necessary in the place. Which meant that most nights they occupied a booth in the corner while their brats ran screaming though the kitchen, and every so often Dad would turn up to complain about something. They loved me, because I worked hard and was too naive to realize that anyone who worked hard in that situation should demand his hourly wage be tripled.

As such things go, this one went. With that first year under their belt, and probably the chain breathing down their neck for increased profits, they soon decided they weren't quite making enough money, despite the solid business. The boss turned grouchy. He'd jump onto the line for ten minutes "to show people how to move faster", apparently without considering that these were college students, and thus reasonably aware that anyone could work fast for ten minutes, provided he could go sit down again and never clean up after himself.  Also around this time somebody on the day shift got fired for coming to work high. What the hell did you imagine any of us was working there for?

And so, in the flick of a switch it went from being a not-real-pleasant job to an unpleasant place to work, but, hey, it was a paycheck.

Then they bought a Dymo Label Maker.

What I think may have happened is that he'd written notes and stuck them up around the place, and some college wise guy defaced them or tore them down or something. So he availed himself of the high-tech solution, like any good American who wants to avoid making the effort to personally solve a problem. Overnight those little motherfuckin' tape labels are everywhere, and they're telling you to do stupid shit you do automatically, every day, like SET OVENS TO 550, or CHANGE PANS AT NIGHT. It hadn't been codified, but even back then ALL CAPS was perceived as boorishness, even with no real typeface alternatives.  

This being a restaurant, the major weapon to hand was Extremely Hot Metal or Liquids, and within a week most of those labels looked like a battalion of plastic Army men that had unexpectedly encountered an enemy with magnifying glass technology.

I wasn't a ringleader. Honest. I think I melted one particularly obnoxious label. Of course getting a direct refutation of the Non-Communicative Control Method just made the boss madder. So he called in the big guns from Corporate, and called a Mandatory Meeting. Now, to me the definition of "Mandatory Meeting" is one that I don't want to miss. So I skipped it. Firing would cost them more than it cost me.

And I turned up for my shift a couple days later, still employed, and the boss puts an avuncular arm around me like I'm his co-conspirator, because everyone else has now gone from thinking he's an asshole to actively hating his guts and plotting his demise.   And he starts to fill me in on all the Exciting New Changes around the place. The prep line sports a series of sawed-off red translucent picnic glasses of various sizes with two Dymo labels each: the weight in ounces of shredded cheese each one holds, and the size pizza that volume of cheese is designed for. There's a similar set for meat (Board of Health on Line 2!).  There's a DYMO label for each size pizza with the number of pepperoni that are to go on it. He's showing me these things like they're a combination of the latest economic breakthrough and the most attractive perks of a lodge he's trying to get me to join.

"Now, one thing we talked about was this problem with the garlic bread," he says after the tour is done.

And, see, to that point I'd never heard there was a problem with the garlic bread. It was mini-sub loaves sliced and slathered with butter and garlic powder and popped in the pizza oven, and it went out with every "spaghetti" order. 

"You know how you've been getting it too done?" he asks. No, I didn't. "Well, what you need to do is put your finger in the middle of each loaf. When it's hot in the middle it's done."

Okay, first of all, you and your corporate overlords are fucking nuts, even though I knew that before.   I haven't been getting garlic bread "too done." I've never heard a single complaint about garlic bread. And if I'd heard a hundred it's not gonna get me to stick my finger in everyone's food. It's a fact that you people want to bake it 100º too high because that's what the pizza ovens are set for, and you don't want to spring for aluminum foil to wrap it in, so you have to push it to make sure it gets warm in the center.  It winds up brown,  but it's never "too done".

Of course I didn't say this out loud. I just stood there like I was interested as he set up an empirical test. Garlic bread was brought out and placed in the oven.

My recollection is that it was pulled out three times for the finger test, since he had no sense  of timing.  The second time it was done, and warm in the center, but not sufficient for the new digital penetration standard. The third and final time it was...black. The color of your toast when it's started to smoke before you take it out. Except shiny from the butter.

"There. See, it's hot all the way through, and it's a lot lighter than you've been getting it."

I looked down at that smoking briquette for a moment, and then I looked him square in the eye. I'm a twenty-year-old corn-fed Midwestern boy, and despite nine hours of psychology credits  I had no idea anyone would ever lie to someone like that. I took off my apron, draped it over the sheet pan he was holding, marched back to the time clock, punched out, and went through the back door while he yelled, "Hey, where you going?" at my back.

I think something broke in my head that evening.

Black is White! It isn't that I'd never run into that before; I'd just never seen someone consciously risking soul-death for the sake of some trivial advantage up close and personal. I've seen it twice since--both times cops; it's why they wear shades whenever possible--but the power to shock was gone.

MY intermittent DSL service over the past couple weeks (Solved! And This Time We Mean It!) distracted me from blogging about Marine Lt. Col. Gomer "The Accidental Mayor" Ballard's embarrassing performance before the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ last week, in which a guy who basically, if anonymously, ran for mayor on a platform of jumping in front of the Giant Teabag Property Tax Revolt and his Secret Plan To Cut Taxes and the Budget admitted, in broken English, that he had no plan other than asking the State to cover any shortfalls, and explained, approximately thirty times, that this was due to his being new on the job. The irony of this was not lost on the Tax-Revolt Pimps on local news; you could tell because they carefully avoiding covering his testimony beyond his prepared statement.

But the real square-in-the-eyes moment came from the Indianapolis Racist Star, first when political apologist columnist Matt Tully reviewed the performance last Wednesday under the headline "Mayor Steady Under Grilling On Tax Relief".  By Sunday Tully had apparently dug himself out of the pile of rotten vegetables, to where he could offer Charles Foster Kane Defeated! Fraud At Polls! this:

Ballard's average-guy persona, and even his sometimes-stammering method of public speaking, is in many ways refreshing in this era of smooth-talking politicians. It goes well with Ballard's back-to-the-basics pledge to focus on everyday issues such as crime and potholes.

Yup. Been a long time since we've seen a stammering politician who can't articulate a single thought in public.   A real treat.

And suddenly state legislators "seem to be going too far", because they're moving to enact the 1% cap the governor was rounding praised for offering up six months ago.

That was just the sideshow, though, as the three-column front page graphic read: Prepare For CUTS. With scissors graphic. Marion County is spending more than it takes in! This was known in the previous administration! Somehow the bastards managed to keep it secret from the Racist Star, which would have been sure to splash a three-color warning on the front page last summer right alongside all the dramatic snaps of protestors. Suddenly, property taxes "pay for things like schools and police and fire protection". And suddenly we need those things.

Suddenly road salt costs money. Suddenly our fleet of DOT trucks is aging and needs replacement.

This year the legislature is overreacting to an election-year issue. Last year a Revolt of the Peasants of Meridian-Kessler kicked the tax-raisin' bums to the curb.

So how do you take your steak, Mr. Tully? Burned to a crisp Rare, or burned to a crisp Medium?

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.

Friday Hedgehog Blogging