Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?

The following letter appeared on the web site of the Gratiot (MI) County Herald on May 12, 2011 (Thanks to the Low Brass Correspondent for pointing it out to me):

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,
Nathan Bootz
Superintendent
Ithaca Public School

This is as well as I have seen the argument for education done, though I hesitated to post it, because I know some asshole is going to miss the point and say it’s a plea to make prisons harsher.
I will be happy to engage in that argument.

Adventures in Headline Writing

From the Associated Press:

Acrobat, mom, reenact fatal Puerto Rico wire walk.

I’m assuming it was originally fatal for someone else.

Oops

Sure was embarrassing to have the President talk over “God Save the Queen” at the state dinner the other night. While it’s easy to say it’s an honest mistake, there are a lot of people in this country who’d consider declaring war if someone stepped on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sensitivity to other nations’ customs and patriotic symbols should one of the easier parts of his job. True, it wasn’t his fault the orchestra started playing when he was still talking, but he’s supposed to know—as anyone else would be expected to—that when the national anthem starts, that’s your cue to shut the fuck up. (Then again, when has any politician observed a cue to STFU?)

Embarrassing and (inadvertently) disrespectful, but at least he didn’t throw up on her, as did George H.W. Bush with the Prime Minister of Japan. Thinking of Forty-One barfing on the guy puts me in mind of what would have happened had the most recent Bush president had committed the same gaffe as Obama.

“Hey,” he’d say, “it wasn’t my fault the band started playing ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ right in the middle of my toast.”

A Good night at Castle Schadenfreude

I watched the Pirates lose 4-2 to the Natinals tonight, but it wasn’t a total waste of time. Washington Capitals coach Bruce “Porky Pig” Boudreau was observed in the crowd behind home plate. I wondered what he was doing there, then realized he has time on his hands, now that the Caps have been swept four games to none by Tampa, eliminating them from the Stanley Cup playoffs in the second round.

At first I could find no connection between the Porkster and the Nats, but a after a little thought it was obvious:neither team has ever won a Stanley Cup.

Porky was not observed after the seventh inning, but that was not unexpected. It’s spring, and he thinks it only natural to pack it in while teams are still playing.

(Editor’s Note: “Natinals” is not a typo. A couple of years ago the team actually took the field for a game with two players wearing uniforms with the team name spelled that way. Washington DC, the Sports Capital of the Apocalypse.)

Can Someone Explain This to Me?

Suppose a man—let’s call him a Republican so as not to defame anyone—has spent much of his life doing his level best to see to it that people who need help don’t get it. Wants to cut the WIC program and Head Start, argues tirelessly against Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance of any kind. Anyone willing to work doesn’t need unemployment benefits for more then thirteen weeks.

Now he gets laid off. He’s a hard worker, he’ll be back in harness again soon, which is good, because those COBRA payments are killers when you’re not working. Good thing the family can do without insurance for a few weeks while he finds a new job.

Then he finds out that pain in his kid’s gut is a tumor, and I look at this prick and I smile.

I wish the kid no ill will. It’s not his fault his father is a selfish, insensitive douche bag. This hypothetical tumor isn’t fatal. Hell, I don’t want it to be painful.

Just expensive.

I like the idea of Dad laying awake a few nights wondering how he’s going to pay for this. Can he pay the kid’s bills and still afford a house for him to live in? At what point will they cut him off, making what should be a scary inconvenience into a life-threatening drama?

To most people, this makes me a bastard, far worse than the fictional father described above. He’s willing to deny children a healthy diet, decent medical care to entire families, and a safety net over uncertain times to literally millions of people. All I want is for him to walk a mile in their shoes and have a few of the countless sleepless nights he’d inflict on others.

Yet I’d bet most people would say that makes me the lesser person of the two of us, and I just don’t see it.

Say Hey!

Willie Mays is eighty years old.

Holy shit.

A Win for the Good Guys

I meant to write this last week before the Osama bin Laden news overwhelmed the Internet, but I have a life, too, so it slipped. (Editor’s Note: No bin Laden comments will be forthcoming, either about his death, what comes next, or the celebrations that erupted when the news broke. These have already been overdone by people who weren’t right about 9/11/01 or any analysis or predictions since. He’s dead, it’s a victory, move on. It’s not like Sunday was VE or VJ Day; not much is going to change.)

Sometimes it seems there’s no good news. Allegedly responsible representatives are threatening a default by the federal government. (Most of these are people who would throw you out of your house for missing even a single mortgage payment. Et tu, assholes?) The economy refuses to pick up and there are rumblings that we may have to get used to a new definition of “full employment” that has twice as many people off work as the old.

In the midst of all this misery, comes a beacon of light from, of all places, Mississippi, where the Anti-Christian Spawn of Hell Westboro Baptist Church was finally foiled in an attempt to ruin a military funeral. Beating the snot out of one of their number while everyone in the vicinity saw nothing was nice; the local government’s response in blocking their vehicles into their motel parking lot was priceless. We must be careful not to encourage too much of government’s behavior, as its potential for abuse is too great. Here it was just right.

As for the unwitnessed beat down, you want to push the law and the Constitution to the breaking point, you invite others to do the same. I only hope I would have the courage to flatten some tires if offered the same opportunity. There are things that go so far beyond decency that decency in return is nothing more than enabling behavior. Maybe the next step should be harassing their church services, especially funerals. See how well that shoe fits.

Perseverance in the 21st Century

Slate’s Jurisprudence page is the only part of the online magazine I keep on my site aggregator, and that’s so I can read dahlia Lithwick’s columns. Only NPR’s Nina Totenberg can breath life into descriptions of legal arguments as well as Ms. Lithwick, who consistently treads the fine line between objectivity and showing her political inclinations. (The Beloved Spouse has called her my intellectual mistress, and we refer to her by her first name around the house.) I stand second to no man in my admiration of her gifts and insight. (Her husband excluded, hopefully.)

She sure blew it today, though.

The question is not whether the Defense of Marriage Act deserves adequate and enthusiastic representation in court. of course it does, no matter how reprehensible I may find it. Flawed as it is, ardent advocacy is the best hope we have for our judicial system, be it for individuals, corporations, or laws like DOMA. (It would be nice if judges refrained from some of the advocacy, having supposedly left that behind when they ascended to the bench, but that’s a different post.)
The issue here is who’s at fault for King & Spalding’s refusal to provide that advocacy after agreeing to do so, after scathing attacks by a gay rights group. Ms. Lithwick blames the gay rights folks for going too far and placing King & Spalding in a position where keeping on with the DOMA case would cost them clients and money.

The gay rights group may have gone too far; that’s a different argument, too. The villains here are still King & Spalding, who folded under pressure. It’s not hard to see what kind of advocacy anyone could expect from them. They’ll support you so long as your fees bring in more money than they lose on those who disagree. Then you’re on your own. Quite the idealistic image for law students to aspire to.

I don’t suppose you’ll see many pictures of Thurgood Marshall or Morris Dees in those offices. You know, lawyers who’d take on a client and stand up for him, whether the firm agreed with his position or not.

I doubt the ACLU will be hiring these guys for anything in the near future. Kudos to Paul Clement for resigning.

My Fantasy

No, it doesn’t involve Elle MacPherson.

My middle-aged adult male fantasy is to win the lottery.

Not for the money.

Well, yeah, for the money, but because the money would allow me to act on this fantasy. (It still doesn’t involve Elle MacPherson.)

I want to win enough money so I can write a check for a million dollars. (Picture Dr. Evil saying it. “One millllion dollars.”) Make it out to the Democratic National Committee. Get DNC Chairman Tim Kaine on the phone. (Damn right he’ll take that call.) I’ll ask for a meeting with him, Bob Menendez (Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman), and Chris Van Hollen (House Campaign Committee Chairman). They can name the time and place. They’re busy men, and I’ll be retired by then. (You think I’d work with a million dollars to throw around? Really?)

So the four of us are in the room and I take out the check. Show it to them. Certified check, the bank vouches for it. Lay it on the table between us and tell them they can leave with it, spend it how they want, on one condition:

Tell me why the fuck they deserve it. How they’re Democrats, not Republican Lite. And who they plan on running for president. If I don’t like the answers, the I’ll tear the check up and give the money to the likeliest primary challenger to Barack Obama, aka The Mole.

See Glenn Greenwald’s piece in Salon for detailed reasons.

Okay, Elle can come if she wants.

But They Probably Know Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location

Fox News has a hard-earned reputation for faulty research and negligible fact checking. Now it appears their virtually invisible standards have moved into the sports department.

During Saturday’s Yankees-Tigers game, Tim McCarver—who needs no help from researchers to say something stupid—noted that Derek Jeter was close to becoming only the seventh player to get 3,000 hits for the same team. That didn’t sound right to me, so I did one Google search (3,000 hits same team) and took the first hit that came up.

Here’s the actual list:

Paul Waner,  Honus Wagner, Roberto Clemente, Stan Musial, Carl Yastrzemski, Cal Ripken, Jr., George Brett, Robin Yount, Tony Gwynn, Al Kaline.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s ten.

(Note three Pirates on the list. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when Pittsburgh did baseball right.)

America in Microcosm

The economic and political problems confronting this country are well summed up in this tale of two friends.

The State of the Nation

Thanks to the Beloved Spouse for providing this link on income distribution, taxes, and trends in America. The comment section is available for any Tea partiers and "cut taxes but not any spending that will make a difference" conservatives.

I'm not counting on much of a response from those quarters.

Energy Policy

Daylight Saving Time started over the weekend for most of the United States. For years it began the first weekend of April and ended at the end of October. Then the half-asses in Washington decided we needed an energy conservation policy, so they extended it a couple of weeks on either end, like that makes the sun shine longer each day. All it really accomplished is setting my wake-up time back into what looks like the middle of the night. It also sums up Congress’s efforts to create a sustainable energy policy, just in case you thought they were too busy bickering to get any serious business done.

They Made Me Do It

I have a policy of not contributing to out-of-state political campaigns. I have a state to be politically active in, and I don’t much like others coming in from outside and telling us how to run things. If things are going to be screwed up in Maryland, they should be our screw-ups.

I’m going to make an exception for Wisconsin. Don’t misunderstand me. The ultimate blame for what’s going on there rests with the voters. They elected these bastards; a large part of me says they can live with them.

The problem is, Wisconsin’s Republicans are the tip of the spear. They get away with this here, their peers will be emboldened in Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, and probably Pennsylvania. Down this road lies the status of a second-rate nation, one that can’t—or won’t—care for those who can’t take care of themselves and is incapable of educating its population to do more than what they’re told.

Imagine a Japan-esque disaster in this country with Mike brown in charge of FEMA. We have continued to elect politicians who campaign on the platform that government is the problem, then make every effort to ensure government will be the problem once they’re in power. We then express astonishment and dismay when they do what anyone who looked closely at their record should have known they’d do.

The Republican response to “tax and spend” Democrats is to dismantle government, except for the pieces that directly benefit them. A line has to be drawn somewhere to show liberals aren’t, in the words of Peter Moskos, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” Wisconsin is as good a place as any to start.

The check goes in the mail today to help to recall the Republican senators and governor. Enough is enough.

Circling the Drain

I have reached the age where thinking about the end game of life is more than an abstract concept. My health is fine, and I fully expect to be around at least another twenty-five years, but what were casual thoughts in my thirties are now concrete obstacles that must either be dealt with or maneuvered around. I’m hoping to get to retirement before the current political climate makes the working economy unendurable, with the idea that Social Security and Medicare will remain relatively intact for a while longer, as the ability of Republicans and the Tea Party to play groups against each other there is minimal. No  one wants old people living under bridges, scrounging meals from Dumpsters. I hope.

What is most discouraging is that I see no way not to leave my daughter and grandchildren a worse country than I inherited. I have no delusions, there; the country I inherited had plenty of issues. I was born before meaningful civil rights legislation, during the Cold War (though, thankfully, no wars of the shooting variety), not too long after Joe McCarthy’s self-serving inquisition. It was also a time when working people could join the middle class and not have to live from paycheck to paycheck and could reasonably expect their children to go to college and improve themselves, attitudes that only increased in the Sixties.

What will I leave? A country where “every man for himself” has more significant meaning than any time since the Oklahoma land rush. No fiscal responsibility in government or the population that elects it. Fiscal responsibility? Hell, there’s no fiscal sanity. Political “leaders’ tell us we have to cut the deficit by trimming only programs that make up about 12% of the government; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are off-limits. Tax increases, even for those who have most benefitted by the frenzy of tax reduction in upper income strata, is unmentionable in civil discourse.

So cuts to “discretionary” spending it must be. You know what constitutes “discretionary” spending? Food safety inspections. Occupational safety. Prescription drug testing. Highways and infrastructure. Education. People in Pennsylvania can light their tap water with a match due to gases released from a coal-mining technique known as fracking, and the governor is working to make the regulations less stringent.

The salient purposes of government are to protect the population, to provide what individuals cannot provide for themselves, and to level the playing field at least enough to prevent the advantaged running roughshod over those with less power. Not here. Not anymore. Now it’s to pad the lives of those who can best afford to take advantage of the system. Corporations have more rights than people.

I hope my time doesn’t come for a while yet. There are things I want to do, and people I want to spend time with. But when it does come, I’m not going to miss this shit one bit. I’ll just feel badly I wasn’t able to think of anything productive to do about it.

Still Pretending He’s the Cavalry

From today’s Wonkbook summary, by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein:

With the stopgap funding bill safely through Congress and the federal government given a two-week reprieve, the White House has decided to get in the game more directly: They've invited congressional leaders to sit down with Vice President Joe Biden, Chief of Staff William Daley, and budget director Jack Lew to hammer out a deal.

You could imagine a great beer commercial coming out of this: The wonks and legislators are deadlocked until someone brings in an ice-cold case of Miller Lite. Suddenly, it's all backslapping and "of course revenue should be on the table" and "you're right that government needs to spend less" and "sorry about that whole Planned Parenthood thing." And I haven't even mentioned the disco ball.

But can you imagine a great budget deal coming out of this? This is the same play the White House ran to resolve the tax debate: they waited till the last minute, when inaction was about to force unwelcome consequences, and then they gathered the players in a room with Tim Geithner and Jack Lew and had Joe Biden act as shuttle envoy to Mitch McConnell. Despite the skepticism of people like, well, me, it worked. Maybe it'll work again. But the downside here, much like the downside there, is that the White House has taken ownership over the process, and they will get much of the credit or much of th blame for whether it works and what it produces.

This is the same thing President Comfortable Shoes has done since Day One: wait until a situation hits crisis mode, then come in late, thus taking credit for what results. Health insurance reform, financial overhaul, taxes, and now this.

It’s not leadership’ it’s opportunism. Granted, he doesn’t have a lot of political capital to spend right now, having pissed much of it away doing what was described in the previous paragraph. Still, he thinks this is the way to go, consequences to the 99.9% of people who just want to get along with their lives be damned.

March 1

March 1 is a special day at The Home Office. Because of March 1, the grass is greener and the sky is bluer. I am more often happy, and, when I'm not, the unhappiness is not as deep, nor does it last as long.

Thanks to March 1, I find humor in ordinary things. I am more patient, and less likely to assume malicious intent when things don't go my way. My health is better. Honest to God. I am a better friend and a better son and generally a better person to be around.

The Beloved Spouse and The Sole Heir both drew their first breaths on March 1.

Happy birthday, ladies.

Today’s Lesson

The current politico-economic situation of the United States is clearly and accurately described in the following story, provided by the Show Tunes Correspondent.

A CEO, a union worker, and a Tea Party member are sitting around a table  with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO takes 11 cookies, then turns to the Tea Party member and says,"Watch out for that union guy. He wants to take some of your cookie."

Paul Krugman can’t do it any better than that.

The Crux of the Problem

This colorful little graphic shows what is the core of most of the trouble in the United States today.

The gist of what it means is simple. The top 20% of Americans control over 80% of the wealth. Most Americans don’t know this. They think—as the second graph shows—the top 20% controls almost 60% of the wealth, and they’re not real happy about that, as the third graph shows they think the top 20% should control about 30%. I’m not even going to discuss what the bottom 20% get. This is depressing enough. (For a set of graphs that explores this in more detail, see the article in Mother Jones.)

The rich have always controlled a disproportionate amount of the economy. That’s what makes them rich. There was a time when they had the smarts—or class—to keep it to themselves. Flaunting it in everyone else’s faces was considered to be poor form. We’ve all heard stories of families who had money during The Depression keeping their shades drawn much of the time so those less fortunate wouldn’t see the disparity. That could be hubris or sensitivity, depending on the family, but it’s not happening now.

People making $400,000 are distraught because they don’t make $600,000. They see their income figures and think they should be rich—and they are—then look at the guy across the way who makes a couple of million and feel deprived. Few look in the other direction and feel grateful for what they have.

And it’s still not enough. Tax cuts are proposed for the rich, though their rates have plummeted since the Eisenhower years. (See Mother Jones.) Union busting activity is worse than it’s ever been. True, there are armed confrontations, but now the government is actively against the unions. Witness Scott Walker’s power grab in Wisconsin, where he doesn’t just want to be the governor who busted the unions, he wants to be king. How else can you describe a governor who has promoted a bill that will allow him to sell off state property without soliciting bids, to whomever an official appointed by him deems worthy?

Public sector workers are being demonized to out of work private sector workers, when the people who are really hosing them make more in a year than any of them will make in their lives. The true enemy of an employed worker is not an employed government worker; it’s any unemployed worker, who is now competition for the job he needs.

This is bad, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon. Both parties share in the blame. Republicans for their ruthlessness, and Democrats for their fecklessness in ceding the battlefield. The real problem now is that, even if the pendulum swings back, it will take years to undo the damage that was done in a couple of elections, and there don’t appear to be enough people on the horizon willing to do much more than talk about it.

Unions

A lot of people would have you believe the current financial crises many states find themselves in are the fault of unions. Wisconsin and New Jersey have been the most aggressive in taking action, but anecdotal evidence abounds of men in the street blaming unions for everything from deficits to health care reform.


They forget that states operated under the same union contracts three to five years ago as they do now, and were rolling in money. It’s the financial crisis that put the states’ budgets in jeopardy; the unions are in the process of being scapegoated into picking up much of the tab.


Make no mistake: unions have brought much of this on themselves. They too often devote their energies protecting the least deserving. It can be virtually impossible to fire some people, as union contracts can make every employee’s faults the employer’s responsibility: drugs, alcohol, or sometimes just plain laziness. (It can also be pointed out here that employers signed none of these contracts at gunpoint.)
Unions also have traditionally taken too much of an adversarial position. When common sense argued for creating partnerships with management so that risks and rewards could be more equitably shared, too many unions chose to suck every dime out of a contract. Times changed, and now they find themselves in situations where management careers and fortunes can be made by firing workers, and it’s too late to strike the kinds of deals that could have prevented it.


In the midst of all this bashing, let’s not forget why we have unions in the first place. Do a little research into what working conditions were like a hundred years ago. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened exactly one hundred years ago on March 25. One hundred forty-seven garment workers died in a few minutes because the company locked the doors to the sweatshop and they couldn’t get out.


I’m 55 years old and remember a lot of men my grandfather’s age—including my paternal grandfather—who were missing fingers, many of them from industrial accidents. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. We’re all shocked at the safety violations that were ignored in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine last April, but I’ll bet miners before the time of the Molly Maguires would have thought they’d won the lottery to work in such conditions. Skyscrapers and bridges used to have “expected casualties” built into the plans and budgets. No more. We expect no one will die building something today.


Unions helped to make that so, along with stopping many arbitrary firing practices that could deny a worker the pensions he’d earned just before he was able to collect it.


Of course, most pensions are gone; we have 401 ( k ) plans and companies can’t understand why employees show so little loyalty. Break the unions now, and the chances for unskilled and semi-skilled labor to retain company-provided health insurance drop to nothing. In times of high unemployment and a potentially interchangeable work force, why provide any more benefits than necessary beyond the lowest wage you can get away with?

Unions are easy targets, but they’re straw men. No surer way exists to cripple the melding of the middle and working classes that made this country the force it became in the middle part of the 20th Century than to break them. Let’s not forget, the American Exceptionalism conservatives so loudly proclaim was not ordained by God. It was the by-product of hard work and the coming together of historic forces. We undue them at at our own risk.