Donald Trump, Next U. S. Secretary of Education?

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TODAY, I AM GOING TO EXPLAIN how Big Business and billionaires can end the "education crisis" facing America.

Unfortunately, most people who see that phrase, "end the 'education crisis' facing America," will lose interest before finishing the sentence and switch to YouTube to hunt up clips of Jolene Van Vugt setting the land speed record on a motorized toilet.

While you're checking out Vugt's stunning accomplishment you might also watch Secretary of Education Arne Duncan drone on about the achievement gap in U. S. education. But you're not actually crazy. Duncan has a measly 184 views. No. Do what most  people do. Check out the video of Charlie Schmidt's piano-playing cat, which has 24,189,976.

Of course, if you're interested in what's happening in the public schools, there's one place you can still go for "fair and balanced" coverage. That's right, you can watch Fox News. And if you do your head is already brimful of ideas:

1. You know teachers' unions are shot through with greed and corruption and that their reason for existence is to protect tenured child molesters.

2. You are convinced that unions make campaign donations to politicians who worship the Devil.

3. You realize that if Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin loses his recall election, June 5, then union thugs are coming to your home next and they are going to eat your baby.

4. On a positive note, you can see that the only way we can save our schools, our children, our piano-playing cats, and our inalienable right to ride motorized toilets, is to break teachers' unions and turn the public schools over to for-profit corporations.

5. You believe government isn't a solution. Government is a problem. In fact, government is like herpes.

6. And last, but not least, billionaires are your heroes, because you admire their altruism; and you understand that business efficiencies brought into U. S. public education can only mean lower taxes and soaring profits.

6a. No, wait, we meant:  soaring test scores.

6b. In fact, you hope that when Mitt Romney sits in the Oval Office he will select Donald Trump as his U. S. Secretary of Education!

Of course, since you probably don't follow education news closely, you might not know that Rupert Murdoch, the Australian billionaire and owner and guiding spirit of Fox News, paid $360 million in November, 2010 to buy a company called Wireless Generation and get in on the education technology business. And you've probably never given much thought to what might happen when people like Trump and Murdoch see dollar signs dancing in front of them....no, no...we mean happy American children.

So let's look at a few examples to see how the Golden Age of For-Profit Public Education might play out:

SCHOOL BUS SERVICE:  Low-budget bus companies take over and slash costs (hugh savings for taxpayers! huge profits for low-budget bus companies!) by dispensing with time-consuming safety inspections, ignoring rules limiting hours employees can drive, and skipping background checks for drivers. Okay, kids! Meet Ophadell Williams, your new driver! Sure, Ophadell was once jailed for manslaughter. Sure, his driving privileges have been suspended on multiple occasions. Mr. Williams works cheap and this is business. So fasten your seat belts, because your bus is going to be careening off the road when Ophadell falls asleep at the wheel!

GYM CLASS REQUIREMENT:  Parents might worry that their children are getting flabby. But the for-profit gym teacher has a solution. He asks mom and dad to watch a short educational film about the benefits to their child of wearing Skecher toning sneakers. The film features Dr. Steven Gauteau, chiropractor, touting a six-week clinical trial he conducted, which showed that if a child would wear these toning sneakers he or she would lose weight, see an increase in muscle strength, and have slimmer legs and better buttocks! But the doctor will not bother to mention that his wife is an executive who works for...Skechers. No problem. The shoe companies will rake in the dough, earning $1.1 billion in 2010 sales of toning sneakers, and the $40 million Skechers will pay in fines later, for making unsubstantiated health-benefit claims, will be a small cost to pay for doing business. And your son or daughter will still have those cool sneakers!

GOOD SCHOOL NUTRITION: Meddling bureaucrats with the Department of Agriculture will try to impose new rules and require more fresh fruits and vegetables on the school lunch menu. But student interests come first when Big Business controls education. Del Monte Foods will save all those chubby fourth graders, putting lobbyists to work in Washington, D. C., to ensure that pizza remains classed as a vegetable. (After all, a slice of pizza is covered in tomato sauce!) Tea Party types will be shown on Fox News, passing out bumper stickers that read, "You'll have to pry my cold dead hands off my pepperoni pizza."

FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS: We have seen the future of for-profit education! At the college level, it's ITT Tech and Phoenix University! These for-profit colleges make money hand over fist, which we all know is the founding principle of U. S. public education. Since 2008, such institutions have actively recruited students, including returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, who have guaranteed G. I. Bill tuition benefits, even though many of the students they recruit are totally unprepared for college-level study. No problem for Big Business saviors:  Students at for-profit colleges have used G. I. Bill benefits and relied on more than $125 billion in federal grants and loans to pay almost all their tuition expenses (because government is always a problem) and many have flunked out or graduated with worthless degrees (because business is always a solution). Wait? What? And then those students have defaulted on 15% of all loans.

START YOUR OWN CHARTER SCHOOL:  Profits are waiting at the elementary and secondary levels, as well. Just found a charter school! Collect payments from state government. Then cook the books and pad your own bank account. It's the Carl W. Shye Jr. method! Shye, treasurer for four Ohio charter schools, has been charged with embezzling $523,000 from school operations! Or go bankrupt, as did Lorain Art Academy, another Ohio charter. Yep. Make the state take back it's students, but say you no longer have the money already paid to your institution to educate those students. Feel the power of Big Business to save U. S. education! Operate with the same dedication to children as Michigan-based National Heritage Academies. Lease an old Catholic school in Brooklyn for $264,000 yearly. Then charge a New York State-supported charter school $2.76 million to use the same building.

STANDARDIZED TESTING: The states pay testing companies hundreds of billions to design, market and grade standardized tests. Classroom teachers will tell you the tests aren't working. But if that were true Big Business couldn't keep selling more testing, and, you know, helping America's children. So, all you billionaires, rely on your allies in right-wing political circles, and your proxies at Fox News, to keep portraying teachers as lazy union members! Sure, the test-preparation company, Princeton Review, now faces a federal suit, accused of submitting millions of dollars in false claims, for providing tutoring services to underprivileged school children in New York City! Sure, sure, one former supervisor is accused of forging student signatures, falsifying sign-in sheets and providing false certifications, including one billing which showed that 74 students attended a class held on New Year's Day in 2008, when...well...no class was actually held. That's  okay. Free markets always work the way God intended.

FINALLY, SCHOOL NURSING: Children with severe emotional problems are way more expensive to educate. Yet they insist on coming to school! Time to apply good business principles and sedate them. Presto! No more behavior issues! And tidy profits for drug companies! So what if hundreds of thousands of young children, two-thirds of them twelve or younger, are treated with Risperdel. Who cares if 1,200 kids suffered serious health problems after using the drug? If thirty-one died, including a 9-year-old who suffered a stroke a few days after beginning treatment? You're bringing business efficiency to the school house!

Meanwhile, doctors are increasingly prescribing Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify and Geodon to treat children. But government agencies are whining. (As always, government is the problem!) Studies show that use of these drugs has increased fivefold in twenty years. Well, that's great! Drug companies help kids and simultaneously make billions in profits! In fact, according to an article in the New York Times, “The growing use of the medicines has been driven partly by the sudden popularity of pediatric bipolar disorder.”

Well, okay. Thank god for the work of Dr. Joseph Biederman, a child psychiatrist at Harvard, and leading advocate of that diagnosis. If you can’t trust an expert like Biederman to tell you when your child needs powerful medication, who can you trust? What? You say an investigation by Congress reveals that the doctor failed to report to Harvard that he earned $1.4 million in outside income from... the drug manufacturers?

You say Biederman and the drug companies were not entirely forth-coming in testimony before Congress? That as early as 2002, one internal report noted that more study of medicines prescribed for children was necessary?  That without more data, government watchdogs might rightly question the use of these powerful medications, “especially those like neuroleptics, which expose children to potentially serious adverse events?”

You say “adverse events” is Big Business-speak for “death?”

Don't worry. When it comes to America's public schools, Mr. Murdoch and all the other billionaires just want to help.

P. S.: I CAN ALWAYS ADD EXAMPLES to show how business efficiencies, business morals, and business motivations can save us.

HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS: Your favorite high school realizes good athletic teams mean good publicity. The football coach starts recruiting, paying players from other schools under the table. The star linebacker gets hurt and his status for the big game is doubtful. Follow the National Hockey League, where Derek Boogard, who played for several teams, received more than 100 perscriptions for pain-killers from team doctors, even though he had a history of addiction. (Boogard died of an accidental overdose at age 28.)

GAMBLING DOLLARS GO TO SCHOOLS: We all know altruistic casino owners like to pay taxes to support schools. It's called doing your civic duty! So, let's say you want to move into a new state, say New York, and say you want the governor's support for a constitutional amendment to to legalize casino gambling because you love helping the children, and let's say you donate $2 million to the governor's campaign organization. You won't care about that money because you'll be raking in huge profits...no, I mean, you'll be helping raise test scores.

Who Knew? Rupert Murdoch is a Flaming Liberal

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LT. COLONEL WESLEY BROWN, the first black graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (Class of 1949) died last month and even many Fox News affiliates took note of his story.

A handful of black students had enrolled at the academy before, but all quit in the face of intense race-based hatred and hazing. Brown, a member of the entering class of 1945, barely made it. Most white cadets refused to sit next to him in the cafeteria or classroom. He was barred from joining the choir and admitted to a biographer years later that not a day went by during his stay at Annapolis that he didn't think about quitting. But with the World War II just ended, attitudes about discrimination were finally changing. It was hard to argue that Hitler was a monster if a brand of racism virtually indistinguishable from Nazi ideology was going to continue to thrive in this country. Luckily, a few cadets (including Jimmy Carter) encouraged Brown to "hang in there" and he did and went on to make a career of the Navy.

More about Brown in a moment; but for now it's interesting to consider his story in light of recent polls that show 40% of Americans identify themselves as "conservatives," outnumbering liberals 2-1. Here in Cincinnati, my hometown, it can feel like it's closer to 10-1.

Many of my friends tell me they're "conservative." I tell them I'm "liberal." What's odd is that they sometimes tell me I'm not.

I say I am, and say I can prove it. They still say I'm not and walk away feeling, it seems, a little too smug in their beliefs. They don't believe in global warming nor in evolution. They don't gasp when Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann put themselves forward as serious contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. They don't notice that Sarah Palin is an intellectual lightweight or that Glenn Beck can sound nutty. They believe in the Bible, though, and they really, really believe in the Founding Fathers and don't seem to think there has been a good political idea hatched out of anyone's head since 1787.

The Brown story makes you wonder if Americans still understand what labels like "liberal" and "conservative" mean. A "conservative" has always been someone who wants to keep society as it is. A liberal has always been a person who wants to see society change and improve. Both views have their strengths. Yet, for two decades, the loudest voices on the far-right, people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and the crew at Fox News, have done everything they could to turn the word "liberal" into a pejorative.

IT MIGHT HELP ALL GOOD AMERICANS THEN, liberal and conservative alike, to consider a few examples and explain how liberals really think, and we'll circle back to Brown before we're finished.

Recently, the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law compiled a database of individuals wrongly convicted of serious crimes and later exonerated, since 1989, in this country. Records indicate that more than 2,000 men and women have been unjustly convicted of very serious crimes, including murder and rape, and many have been freed only as a result of improvements in the use of DNA evidence, which has often conclusively established their innocence.

The database, however, looked at only 873 individuals (not surprisingly, half of them black), for whom the best records existed. Collectively, they spent 10,000 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

One hundred and one innocent Americans were facing death sentences.

If you're a liberal you think this is a travesty. You believe the courts must do a better job of insuring that innocent people are not sent to prison. You might even oppose the death penalty, though not all liberals do.

Last September, when Rick Perry defended the 234 executions carried out in Texas during his time as governor, and said he wasn't worried about mistakes, because his state had such a fine justice system, you had a sinking feeling. You knew, for instance, that the State of Illinois admitted it condemned at least 13 innocent men to death in years following the decision by the United States Supreme Court to reinstitute the penalty in 1977.

Go back farther if you like. Do you believe a defendant on trial for murder should have legal counsel if he cannot afford it? You're a liberal if you do, because the Founding Fathers never thought to address that issue and the U. S. Supreme Court had to determine that the answer was "yes" in a series of decisions in the 1930s and 40s.

What about a defendant on trial for armed robbery? Should that individual have a lawyer if he can't afford one? Or should he defend himself, try to stay out of jail for five or six years, relying only on his own native wit? He might be innocent, after all. If you say "he deserves a lawyer," click your ruby slippers together and repeat three times, "There's no place so perfect for conservatives as the past" and be transported back to 1963. Up until then defendants on trial in felony cases had no lawyers unless they could pay for them.

If you think that's wrong, and you claim you're conservative, it's time to come out of the closet. You, madam, or you, sir, are a flaming liberal!

What about the whole matter of Brown and the idea that all Americans deserve equal treatment? Should Wesley Brown have been allowed to enroll at the U. S. Naval Academy in the first place? Should Herman Cain be allowed to run for higher office? Should Colin Powell be a general? Should black and white soldiers, fighting today in Afghanistan, serve in integrated military units? They couldn't until President Harry Truman took a liberal stance and ordered U. S. armed forces to eliminate the color line in 1948. At the time, Strom Thurmond, U. S. senator from South Carolina, and a red, white and blue conservative till the day he died in 2003, called the new policy "un-American."

He was opposed to race-mixing and warned: "There's not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters." Strom Thurmond. Served 48 years in the Senate. Ran as the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948 on an anti-integration platform. Switched to the Republican Party sixteen years later because Barry Goldwater, the conservative candidate for president, had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A conservative, good and true, that fellow, Thurmond! Keep the blacks out of the swimming pools, the schools (including Annapolis), and, for sure, voting booths. Not necessarily your bedroom though. In 2003, after seventy-eight years of secrets and silence, it was revealed that Senator Strom Thurmond had fathered a child by his family's black teenage maid in 1925. Down South, they call that miscegenation.


And, of course, Thurmond was against it.

You'd think our political opponents on the right might see the irony now and then and be a little more humble. "Conservatism," after all, has often meant standing squarely in the path of human advancement. In 1521 it meant you believed it was acceptable to burn church critics at the stake. In 1611, when the King James Bible was published, you supported King James when he claimed to rule the people by divine right. In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, you called it justice to hang men and women for witchcraft--and no lawyers required to defend the accused. In 1775 you considered George Washington and all those who would later become the Founding Fathers, traitors. In 1861 you were on the side of the slave owners. In 1920 you predicted disaster if women voted and said it would lead to increases in the divorce rate.

In 1967, like Senator Thurmond, you opposed interracial marriage. So you knew it was a dark day in American history when a few "activist" judges on the U. S. Supreme Court stepped in that summer and voted 9-0 in favor of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia, ruling that if two people loved each other they could marry. (Police officers had invaded the Loving's home at night, had apprehended the criminals in their own bed, with a wedding certificate from another state affixed to the bedroom wall). For decades the laws of the State of Virginia had held that a racially mixed marriage was a felony (again: no lawyer needed at the trial if you couldn't pay for one yourself), and conservatives heartily approved, just as they imagined the Founding Fathers must have intended. So: you're a true conservative if you believe the government should be able to tell people who they can and cannot marry. And you're a liberal if you believe marriage between races is acceptable.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the most conservative TV network on the face of the planet? Why that curmudgeon is a liberal! Divorced twice. Old white fellow. Married to a woman of Chinese extraction.

CONSERVATIVES USED TO CALL that miscegenation.

Governor Scott Walker and Big Business Buddies to Save U. S. Education

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Teachers' unions are killing the U. S. economy.

GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER LIVES to fight another day. He has survived the recall election. Now he can go about the job of saving Wisconsin. He has handed greedy public sector unions a stinging defeat, then another, defeating them against all odds and rescuing the taxpayers of his state. Governor Walker is like David with his sling (and wearing a Cheesehead hat), slaying Goliath.

He has brought down the mighty teachers' union.

Okay: true. The governor did have tens of millions of dollars worth of stones, thanks to campaign contributions from Big Business types like David and Charles Koch.

That doesn't change the basic story. Just watch Fox News. Walker is a modern-day hero! He is like Governor Chris Christie. Only thinner. The forces of evil, those dirty union members behind the recall, have been defeated and Wisconsinites can sleep again at night, knowing the kindergarten teacher and the high school physics instructor can't ever rip them off again. Teachers have no more bargaining rights. Taxes will be going down! Count on it. Millionaires are saved! Pay and benefits for middle class Americans will also go down. But, say, did we mention taxes go down? Test scores will go up. Really. Bank on it! Wisconsin's economy will soon be booming. No more teachers' unions standing in the way. And with luck, and a Romney win in November, we introduce this approach on a national scale.

Remember 2008, when the teachers crashed the economy and got that big bailout package from the Bush adminstration? Well, okay, maybe that was somebody else; but the point is the same. Never again will unions bring down the U. S. economy.

A NEW ERA IS DAWNING, from sea to shining sea, as voters come to realize (after watching about $45 million worth of pro-Walker advertisements) that only a marriage of Big Business and conservative politicians can save the nation. The door to a fantastic future is opening. Unions are dying.

Now we privatize U. S. education.

We turn schools over to billionaires and millionaires who know how to make a profit. We put the Big Business types in charge, those who can bring business efficiencies to schools. Teachers will have to shape up or ship out and our children can only gain. Okay, maybe we outsource a few secretarial positions to call centers in India. And alright, maybe we hire a few illegal immigrants to perform the janitorial services. Hey! That's what free enterprise is all about.

Saving taxpayers money.

With Big Business methods you can also look forward to Big Business morality. And when has Big Business ever not been about helping kids? Okay, sure, there was that whole 19th century when business leaders fought against enactment of laws to ban child labor. And, well, okay, sure, business leaders today want to help your son our daughter save money for college by freezing the minimum wage and cutting funds for low-cost student loans. Quit quibbling. We are saving America here and if a few middle class Americans get run over in the process, that's the price of success, and the cost of lower taxes for the Koch brothers. We are putting our faith in Joe the Average Billionaire because, let's face facts, who cares more about about helping every child in America, and helping every American worker--unless that child or that worker needs health care--than the people who (did I already mention this) know how to make a profit?

Privatizing U. S. education is going to be great. It will be like:

Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling...no, no, poor choice. Um. Schools will show rising standardized test results, year after year, like when Bernie Madoff...uh...no, no, that's not right. The school nurse will save taxpayer money by turning away students who come to her office with pre-existing conditions...
Still not quite right. Okay, try this: Your school superintendent will have the business acumen of Jamie Dimon, CEO of J. P. Morgan. He will let your district business manager put up buildings, athletic fields and school buses as collateral for risky loans. No. Scratch that. You don't want to lose $2 billion do you?

Oh yeah, have we mentioned greedy teachers lately?

Well, now that you've smashed the unions, you can tell those middle class teachers to take a hike if they want a raise on their $50,000 salaries. You can pay your superintendent who is really the key to all the success of your district, $133.7 million dollars for one year.

That's what Home Depot does. That's how much Bob Nardelli earns running the company; and while you're at it your district can start buying everything it can in China. This means parents of students might lose jobs; but it doesn't matter because the savings you make buying foreign goods will allow you to pay Bob Nardelli and he's the key to everything. When a newspaper reporter asks if Mr. Nardelli deserves it, a spokesman for your district can reply, "Mr. Nardelli works harder than other people."

"Really?" the reporter may respond. "Harder than 2,674 teachers, earning $50,000 a piece... combined?"

Your spokesman must be ready to respond, and try not to laugh: "Yes. Mr. Nardelli puts in a lot of late nights and weekends."

Still not convinced that Big Business, with the help of conservative politicians, can save the children? Maybe a real example might help. Real businessmen, real heroes, running real schools. How about
K-12, Inc. an online school operation, which owns the Ohio Virtual Academy? The company spends $6,108 per pupil vs. $10,660 at traditional brick and mortar schools (partly because K-12 pays teachers half what the regular public schools do). This means...um...huge savings for taxpayers! Have we mentioned huge savings for taxpayers lately? Talk about efficiency. Ohio Virtual Academy has one building and 7,277 pupils and a student-teacher ratio of 55.5-1 vs. a statewide average of 16.1-1. Assigning each teacher three-and-a-half times as many students and paying them less allows K-12, Inc. to make tidy profits, and...give taxpayers a fantastic deal. What? The dropout rate is 14.9% yearly, compared to a statewide average of 4.3%, according to the website Local School Directory.com?

Don't sweat it. Governor Walker can explain how it will all work. Or Governor Christie, unless his mouth is stuffed with donuts. Or Governor John Kasich here in Ohio. K-12, Inc. is in the education business because the company wants to help children. They would probably run their school for free if they could help children. But, no, Big Business leaders at K-12 can't help it if they are so talented that they make a ton of money running the Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania. True: One-third of students at Agora fail to graduate on time. Also true: hundreds withdraw every year, within months of enrollment. True, again: some Agora high school teachers are responsible for overseeing 250 students.

What the heck. Big Business heroes are crushing the evil unions. Big Business heroes are going to save U. S. education.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has bought into the education business--because who cares more about our children than an Australian billionaire, paying $360 million for an education company called Wireless Generation, a technology operation with close ties to the New York City Schools. And who used to run the New York City Schools?  Joel I. Klein, a gentleman who never taught a day in his life.

Now Klein works for Murdoch, heading up his education operations. How much does he earn for his expertise? A cool $4.5 million per year. After all, if you want to help the kids, you need to have the best legal advice, and Klein's real value has always been in the field of corporate law, another bastion of altruism if there ever was one. Sadly, Klein has been unable to focus on improving U. S. education lately.

He's been devoting most of his efforts to cleaning up Murdoch's long list of legal difficulties in Great Britain, including widespread phone-hacking, bribery of politicians and police, perjury, and all kinds of other sleazy antics. Maybe Klein will suggest to Murdoch that they name their first on-line charter school Milly Dowler Virtual Academy, in honor of the 13-year-old girl English girl who was abducted on her way home after classes one day, and who then had her cell phone account hacked by Murdoch's reporters while she was still missing, so that News Corporation could try to get scoop rival papers.

I mean, if you can't trust lawyers like Klein and businessmen like Murdoch to save America's kids, who can you trust?

Stunned GOP Leaders Discover Latinos Don't Like Them!

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SUDDENLY, MITT ROMNEY and other GOP leaders find themselves in a pickle. Or in Spanish, you say they're in "el encurtido."

In the Bible, which these same GOP folks love to quote, it's known as reaping what you sow.

Mitt will think of something on immigration:
as soon as he figures out what will help
him get elected.

With President Obama's recent decision to halt deportations of young Hispanics, 30 years old or younger, those who came here before age 16 and have lived here at least five years, those who have no criminal records and remain in school or serve in the U. S. military, who were two years old, or five, or eleven when they came to the United States with parents, the GOP is scrambling to lay out some kind of coherent position to appeal to Latino voters.

Well, what is the Republican Party position? The Party of the Fence? You know:  halt the waves of dark-skinned people with a wall. Maybe electrify it for good measure? Thank you, Herman Cain.

And when Cain backed away from that position during the recent Republican primaries, hinting that he was joking, there was crazy Michelle Bachmann, insisting, no, this was no time for levity, or compassion, for that matter.

We needed to complete that border fence. Maybe add a little razor wire, a few guard towers, a machine gun or two.


Now:  Imagine you're an undecided Latino voter. You think to yourself, "Mitt Romney doesn't seem so bad." So you go to YouTube and type in something like "Tea Party and securing the borders" and start looking at scary videos, demonizing people like you, warning that you and your wife and aunts and uncles are intent on driving white people out of this country, and then read such intellectual comments as this from dakota 7609:  "Filthy nasty Illegal shit smelling spics..Make anyone want to Vomit just from looking at them."

Well, still...that wasn't Mitt Romney speaking.

So you swallow another dose of right-wing rat poison  and go to the video of a broadcast by Michael Savage, titled "Is Obama Trying to Start a Race War?" You look at the first still image, portraying all Mexicans as criminals, and think you know who might be ready for a little race war and think it isn't Mr. Obama. You listen to Savage rant about "Hispanic rabble," and how they plan to riot in the streets and marvel at what passes for conservative philosphy, when CHHSE1986 adds a comment on illiterate Hispanics, calling them "illegal vermin."

After GOP candidates in the craziest primary season in memory spent months, collectively, demonizing Latinos, after Mitt Romney and Gingrich and Trump and Perry all came out against the Dream Act, as if you and your type were cockroaches, after Romney said he favored some bizarre phenomenon called "self-deportation," after the loudest barking attack dogs on the right spent two years defending the Arizona immigration law that basically required anyone who looked Latino, who looked like you, to carry papers proving your citizenship and put up with the humiliation of a search any time a police officer said you appeared suspicious, how could you NOT want to vote for the GOP ticket?

Now Republicans are crying because President Obama is "playing politics" with the immigration issue--an issue they've been playing politics with for years. They wake up, with shock and amaze-ment, to discover that among all likely voters, of ever race, color, shape or size, initial polls find that 64% approve of President Obama's position.

Only 30% oppose; and many of those are angry old folks in funny tri-corner hats.

It's even worse when the GOP looks at polls of Latino voters, worse yet for all of those haters in the political sewer where GOP leaders have been bathing (and we might point out to these poor benighted souls that now we are talking only about legal citizens of this great nation), especially when we keep in mind that this poll was taken before Obama's recent policy decision. Latinos favor Obama over Romney, 66% to 23%.

Curioso!

Mitt Romney might be a decent fellow, albeit a man without any convictions. He might not be able to say, when asked this weekend, if he'd overturn Mr. Obama's order if he was elected president. Really, Mitt's problem is that he doesn't know what he thinks on the issue because he's not sure what to say if he wants to be elected. His problem is that most of the voters he needs to court want him to say he's for electric fences, want him to act like Latinos are all drug-runners and criminals and dark-skinned vermin.

And Romney and GOP leaders can't figure our why Hispanic voters don't like them?

HISPANICS AREN'T BLIND, DEAF AND DUMB; and almost all who can legally vote speak plenty of English. They don't want to elect Mitt, the man of a thousand gutless answers, and they don't want to put a party into power that kowtows to gun-toting facists who want to seal the borders with gunfire and bloodshed.

Or turn on the electric fence and keep out those dangerous children.

A Heaping Plateful of Broccoli and Baloney

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WITH THE U. S. SUPREME COURT set to hand down a decision on the Affordable Health Care Act this week and Republicans getting ready to "spike the football" and dance on the broken dreams of the chronically ill if the law is struck down, someone needs to ask. Where is modern conservative theory leading our great nation today?

Do conservative thinkers really believe the Affordable Health Care Act was intended to make it easy to unplug granny? Is the biggest threat to our freedom really a nefarious plot to make citizens buy and eat broccoli? That's the entire basis of the right's argument against the individual mandate:  the idea that we don't dare let government tell us what to do, like have health care coverage, just because it might be good for us. Is it really "tyranny," in even the most extreme, exotic interpretation of the word, to pass a law that makes it possible for individuals with pre-existing conditions to get health insurance?

Usually, when you think tyranny you think mass murder and gas chambers. Not exactly the same as unleashing doctors and nurses on people who can't otherwise afford to see doctors and nurses.

Tyranny and "Obamacare" are nothing alike.

If you're a thinking person, you find yourself wishing you could stop Mitt Romney in the middle of whatever platitude he's uttering and ask, "Do you really believe liberals have some plan to take away freedom by extending coverage to protect a young, married, white, heterosexual, working-class couple, so that when the husband turns out to have lung cancer at 34, he can get proper care?

Do you, Mitt?
THE WHITE, WORKING-CLASS, MARRIED, MALE is the demographic backbone of the Republican Party. But a poll last April showed half of all Americans believe the next generation is going to have it worse than preceding generations, and only a quarter feel the young will have it better. And no group has a grimmer future, generally, than those white, working-class men. So, you wonder, what do Mitt Romney and the GOP have to offer their most dependable supporters?

Well, sure, Mr. Blue-Collar White Guy, you can keep all the guns you want, even own a few semi-automatic weapons if you want. And we, your conservative champions, promise to erect a giant wall to keep those dark-skinned illegals out--you know, to save your jobs, because we care about you. Of course, we'll be happy, after you vote to keep us in power, to turn around and ship your job to Mexico, anyway, and tell you, "This is how free markets work."

Look at the situation from any angle and it's hard to understand where Republicans stand when it comes to wages and benefits for real American workers. We know they hate unions. Unions are jam-packed with thugs. Watch Fox News and they'll tell you that in scary detail. Unions want to take your dues, Mr. Blue-Collar, and spend them on socialist political causes. You, Mr. Blue-Collar, don't have to stand for that! Unions want to destroy free enterprise. They want to help elect a bunch of commies, who just might happen to stand up for better wages and benefits for workers like you.

Yep:  Unions are anti-American.

Don't worry. The key is "free" in free enterprise. The GOP will save you. The GOP will block health care reform, as they did in the 1990s, so that you remain free to go without coverage. They will place non-activist judges on the U. S. Supreme Court, so that the perfect work of the Founding Fathers can never be destroyed.

Giant corporations will be classified as "people" under new rulings by these non-activist judges.

See, Mr. Blue-Collar. You have connections in high places. Feel free to call your personal friend, the giant corporation, "David," or "Sheldon," or "Hal." "David" will donate $10 million dollars to conservative Wisconsin politicians who want to keep taxes low (yours, of course, but much more importantly, those of billionaires) and take bargaining rights away from teachers, social workers and prison guards. "Sheldon" will donate to politicians with the same agenda in Ohio in an attempt to deny bargaining power to police and firefighters. "David" and "Sheldon" are doing this all for you, Mr. Blue-Collar White Guy.

"Hal," is a giant computer corporation/slash person/slash personal friend of yours. Ask "Hal" to explain how knocking teachers out of the middle class helps you. Ask your corporate friend how trends since 1979 have helped you. That year, when Ronald Reagan was gearing up for his first successful run at the White House, and soon to make it clear that he would not oppose any attacks on unions, the average entry-level wage for male high school graduates was $15.64, adjusted for inflation. By 2011, Mr. Blue-Collar, people like you, or maybe your son, Blue-Collar Jr., were starting out at $11.68 per hour. That's right:  good working-class Americans. People who want to work. Who want to work and get ahead and play by the rules. Not all those "sneaky" illegals Fox is always scaring you about. Not a bunch of  "lazy" welfare cheats, which the GOP wants you to believe are trying to pick your pockets.

In 1979, 63.3 percent of these people had health care through their places of employment. Today only 22.8 percent of entry-level workers are as fortunate.

IT'S PAST TIME TO ASK. In a land where top CEO's wrack up $100 million in salary for a single year, do conservatives think we're better off as a society if we keep taxes at or near all-time lows, so that the poor CEO doesn't see his total tax bill rise to $27 million, from $24 million, and we let that uninsured 34-year-old, working class fellow just die?

Isn't $73 million enough to keep any CEO happy for a year?

The question is, Mr. Romney, or Mr. Paul Ryan, or any other leading light of the conservative movement, how much do you want to see the scale tip in one direction? Will you be satisfied when the last union is dead and the last hard-working blue-collar American sees his health care coverage disappear forever? Will you be content when the average entry-level wage falls farther, say, to $9.91, or will you only be happy when the rest of us work for minimum wage?

You see a story about the sale of Babe Ruth's 1920 Yankees jersey for $4.4 million two weeks ago. And you wonder:  Is a jersey really worth that much in our society; and that policeman who ran up the steps on 9/11, was he really asking too much in pension benefits? Are union cops and union teachers and union bricklayers the biggest threat to our economic health? If corporations can donate tens of millions to politicians who promise to keep taxes low, how come those corporations couldn't pay a little more in taxes to make it easier for Blue-Collar Jr. to get loans to go to college? If you have one individual who can afford to purchase a Mike Rothko abstract painting called, "Orange, Red, Yellow," for $86.9 million, and one individual has that kind of money because he pays hundreds of his non-union workers the lowest possible wages, is that really the way you want the system to operate?

Is the American Dream dead for most of us, Mr. Romney, and do you care?

WHERE DO PLAN TO LEAD THIS NATION IF ELECTED PRESIDENT? What would you say in an effort to offer hope to a homeless American child, whose family lives in a van in some church parking lot? Dad injured his back, lost his construction job in the economic downturn starting in 2008, and has no health insurance. Mom works, alright, but makes only $12.53 per hour and the doctor bills are still piling up. Do you say, "Vote for me. I protected you from the individual mandate, from government-controlled health care, from the tyranny of eating broccoli, saved you from union thugs, made sure your wages would remain historically low, made sure people like your mom and dad had a much harder time ever getting ahead?"

Can you really say, "I'm your man, Mr. Blue-Collar, because I signed a pledge to insure that taxes will never be raised, no matter how lopsided the economic picture becomes?

Is that the core of conservative thinking today?

In the Mail: What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback

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The public relations folks at HarperCollins sent me a copy of Monica Crowley's new book, What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback.

I'm in the middle of the first chapter right now and thoroughly enjoying it.  I wish I could block quote some of Crowley's discussion of Barack Obama. It's some of most incisive comments on this man, distilling years' worth of frustration with his candidacy and presidency. I'll see what I can do later to post some longer excerpts, in addition to a more complete review.

Meanwhile, Jamie Glazov has an interview at FrontPage Magazine, "What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback":

FP: Monica Crowley, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is an honor and privilege to speak with you.

Crowley: Thanks for having me, Jamie.  It’s an honor for me to join you.  You guys do heroic work.

FP: Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book and what it is about.

Crowley: I wrote this book for several reasons.  First, I surveyed all of the destruction and despair wrought by Team Obama and their fellow leftists and thought, “Are we supposed to just to accept this??  Just accept radically redistributionist economic policies, unprecedented spending, record-breaking deficits and debt, non-existent economic growth, socialized medicine, and American decline abroad?  Just lie back and take it?  Oh hell, no!”  I wrote this book to reinforce the notion that America CAN be saved from this assault—-and that she is WORTH SAVING. Obama may be doing his best to turn America the Exceptional into America the Also-Ran, but he didn’t count on us running a great defense.

Second, I wrote it because if you have only listened to the mainstream media, you have only received a small—and very distorted—part of the Obama-era picture.  I put together the entire Obama domestic policy record with the entire foreign policy record—and when you see all of the evidence amassed in one place, it’s devastating.  Part of the power of the book is seeing the sheer volume of leftist madness to which he’s subjected us.  Never before have we had a president so hellbent on redistributing ALL of our greatness, not just here at home, but abroad. I wanted to shine a light not just on the policies he’s implemented but on the very sophisticated leftist psychology he and his team have used to get it done.

I also made the book really funny, because in the age of Obama, if we don’t laugh, we cry, and there’s no crying in a book by Monica Crowley.

And finally and most importantly, I wanted to create a new template for America in the 21st century.  Obama did it from the left in 2008, and now it’s our turn.  I developed the concept of the Happy Warrior as a rallying cry for those of us who want to restore America to its great foundational principles: individual freedom, personal responsibility, fiscal restraint, and economic liberty.  President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.  But Reagan served 30 years ago.  If we’re going to have any hope of getting America back on the rails, we’ve got to take his positive embrace of conservatism and bring it into the 21st century.  Like Reagan, we know we’re in a war for the future of America.  And like Reagan, we join the battle joyfully and with the full confidence that we can win the battle of ideas and bring America back.

This book is the fun, spirited, optimistic battle cry of the new Happy Warrior!

FP:  Tell us about that title!  How did you come up with it—-and what does the “Bleep” really stand for?

Crowley: I was going to call it Fifty Shades of Obama but then thought better of it.

One day last summer, I was having dinner with a good friend.  I told her that I wanted to write another book but wasn’t quite sure as to what its focus should be.  We then started talking about how epically weird the last few years under Obama have been.  Every day, we were getting hit with a new piece of insane leftist social engineering or some new policy to take down American power or prestige abroad—a rapid-fire assault I call “Barack-a-mole.”  Our enemies were getting olive branches, our allies were getting dissed, and millions of Americans were being moved into government dependency at home.  “What the (bleep) just happened?” I sighed.  She looked at me and said, “That’s your title.”  And so it came to be.  Of course, I used an actual unprintable word.  I thought I’d let each reader supply his or her own favorite profanity.

FP: Expand for us on the disasters that have occurred under Obama in your view—and why he has behaved as he has.

Crowley: Obama doesn’t run around wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-esque nameplate necklace that says, “Socialist.”  But his policies, actions, words, background, and associations speak louder than any ID necklace ever could.  As a technical matter, economic fascism (government control of the means of production without ownership) more accurately describes what Obama is carrying out than socialism (government ownership of those means of production), but “fascism” and “socialism” are highly charged words—and arguments over the labels often obfuscate the reality of the policies.  Obama has engaged in extreme government-directed redistributionism to undermine the free market, generate widespread dependency, and further centralize state power.

In the end, the term matters less than his policies and their effects.  This is a man who spent his formative years learning at the knees of assorted communists, from his mother and father to Frank Marshall Davis to the Marxist professors and sundry socialists he admitted he sought out while in school to the self-avowed Communists (Van Jones, “green jobs” czar), Mao admirers (Anita Dunn, communications director) and radical redistributionists (Cass Sunstein, regulatory czar) he appointed as president.  He spent a good deal of time mastering the art of Saul Alinsky’s tactics for advancing the socialist revolution.  In 2007, he said of his years learning Alinsky’s methods, “It was that education that was seared into my brain.  It was the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.”  Indeed.

FP:  You say he then made it to the big stage and governed strictly according to that redistributionist ideology in which he was so steeped.

Crowley: Without a doubt.  Obama never made a mystery of who he was or what he believed.  He employed those revolutionary tactics as a Chicago community organizer and then moved on to pull more formal levers of power.  Once he seized the brass ring in 2008, it was “Katie, bar the door.”  He immediately put the redistributionism of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson on steroids: he spent trillions of dollars—particularly on “stimulus” and other spending projects which stimulated nothing but government, added an unprecedented $5 trillion to the national debt, and engaged in massive social engineering in every major part of the U.S. economy (the financial sector, the industrial base, the energy sector, and health care).

He moved to divide Americans based on class, race, and gender; after all, if Americans are pitted against each other, they are too distracted to focus on what he’s doing.  He has deliberately and quickly moved the United States toward a European-style social democratic state, despite the fact that those nations are currently imploding from decades of socialist redistributionism.  Obama’s intent is to expand government dependency in order to ultimately create a permanent Democrat voting majority.  Any other American president would’ve been flipping his lid over the kind of chronically high unemployment we’ve suffered.  Not Obama.  The more folks unemployed, the more dependency being created.  And if this were allowed to go on, supported by the redistributionist agenda, America would be truly altered.  (This is, by the way, what he meant when he spoke about “change.”)

But the book here. It's great!

Everybody feels like crap sometimes.

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Saturday is finally here, and I feel like crap. This bothers me.
Last night, I went to bed early. Why don't I feel like a spring chicken?
The day started merrily enough. The two J's, RWC, and I went to the Hofbrau House in Newport for Tam Tam's surprise birthday party. We had to be there by 11 am and it was a sunny, cool morning that had no business being in late June.
My dogs have been acting strange lately, not feeling well I guess. I left them in the yard while we were gone. This yard is guarded by iron gates, extra fencing, and an invisible fence. This is canine Alcatraz, and no dog should be able to escape. You have no idea the hundred's and hundred's of dollars I've spent reinforcing it's perimeters.
Having the audacity to leave those dogs out when I wasn't home is not something I felt good about. But I did it anyway, silly fool.
As we pull into the parking lot for Tam Tam's surprise party, my cell phone rings. It's my bestie Karla, who lives across the street, calling to let me know that Katie Houdini is out running the streets.
So we sit in the parking lot for five minutes, trying to find out which of the J's took the spare key from Karla's house and exactly which one never returned it, because now Karla can't let Katie Houdini back in the house.
And then, here comes Tam Tam with her daughter, son, and grand baby, getting ready to walk right by the car. We all hunch down.
We may have missed the surprise, but we didn't ruin it. The party was beautiful, the food was great, the company beyond compare. It was reunion like, all my nearest and dearest from the old neighborhood.
It's only 3 pm now, and I feel like crap. It makes me look for things that will make me feel better. Little things, like drinking cokes and smoking cigarettes because I just feel so exhausted and it embarrasses me. I am just so very deep down in my soul tired.
It would be easy to call it depression, but I think it's wear-and-tear. There is no cheating death, only avoiding it and buying time. I am indeed elusive, and very good at it. But let's not forget, it's buying time that I'm doing, and a price is indeed paid, in the form of the energy that runs my body.
It's as if shards and pieces of my energy goes back into the universe, gone to me forever, in payment for every moment of extra time here. So I am one tired bitch and it has nothing to do with emotion. It's all about energy.
What the hell, I'll take it, it's well worth it because today, I got to eat birthday cake with my Tam Tam.
Good thing there's not a sleep tax. So there you have it.

The Snake, the Wren Family, and Liberty Gold

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Have I ever told you about my friend Liberty Gold? We met in high school, a million years ago, and I was in awe of her from the first moment.
Liberty, even at 15ish, had serious magic, and even back then, I knew it. She could create a piece of art from nothing, draw a portrait of you better than a Polaroid, and nurse a piece of nature back to life from the brink of death. All at the same time. She still can.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a string of terrible storms.
Liberty Gold lives in the branch of Eden located down on River Road. Her neighbors, the Wren family, had been hit hard by the storms, as did many of the inhabitants of River Road Eden.
Discussing the storms, Liberty casually mentions the Wren family. "The parents rounded up 3 survivors and led them off into the woods. I hope they find a nice place to stay till they can fly."
"How many baby Wrens where there before the storm?" I ask. "That's an epic tale of survival and love."
"I'm not sure, I thought 4 but it could have been 5. That snake had a mighty big bulge." Liberty answers.
"OH MY GOD!" I shriek like only an urban princess can, "There was a snake? Fine, now I have to hear the whole story."
"OK, here it is.", Liberty begins, "There was a terrible screeching of Wrens outside the door last evening, after the storms and the hail and the flooding. The parent Wrens were yelling and fluttering about in a mad frenzy. I know not if the babies were screaming as well, it was difficult to hear anything above the din."
"I ran out to see what was the matter and to my amazement, there... wound up around the nest, engulfing it completely, even as to enclose the only opening that would allow escape of the poor doomed chicks within... was a rather large rat snake, it's body writhing as it constricted the once safe and loved home of my little house Wren family."
"Without thinking of my own safety", Liberty grins at me, "I snatched up the snake in one hand as I tried to catch the fleeing babies as they tumbled from the nest in horror. The snake, (dastardly fiend), had a rather largish bulge in it's midsection... too late for that one i thought, as i carried the wicked marauder of to an undisclosed location."
I picture Liberty holding Wren babies in one hand while swinging the snake over her head with the other.
"Once back at the nest," she continues "the young birds were scattered about the porch with the parents diving and calling in obvious and sheer panic. Returning the babies to the nest was an exercise in futility to say the least. Looking closer, one of their siblings was still in the nest... it's lifeless body a horrible reminder of what they were trying to escape."
Liberty gives me a heavy sigh, "Gawd this is taking forever. So, the babies fled in all directions, into the late evening twilight... with more storms rumbling off in the distance."
"Anyway... there were 3 in a nice little pile on the steps this morning and mom and dad in attendance." and that is the end of her story.
I'm in awe and can only muster a "WOW", speechlessness being foreign to me. "That was an epic tale of courage."
That Liberty Gold is my girl. I love her.

Let Me Take You on a Sentimental Journey

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Someday, I will live in a stone house whose interior will have lots of nooks and alcoves. The house will have a library, a breakfast nook, a studio, an office, and two bedrooms.

There will be a large veranda where we will have coffee in the morning. The kitchen will have a fireplace with a large brick hearth, where we can sit and warm ourselves on cold winter evenings.
In the library we will collect books. All kinds of books. I will have an entire section dedicated to nothing but pop-up books. We will have beautiful wooden shelves to hold our books. There will be a great window with a built in seat facing west, so that we can sit and read and catch the last rays of the day.

The library will smell like we do, wood and lavender, mixed together just like us. The kind of smell that drifts unexpectedly by you years later and transports you back in time.
Our studio will face east, to get the best of the morning light. It will be divided into two sides; one side for things we don't want paint getting on, the other side for everything else. One wall of the studio will be a large bay window, where we can set up our easels, and never have to put them away.
Occasionally, when I must, I will sit in my office, with windows on both sides of desk, and make the money I need by working from anywhere. I will become a very famous writer and a very successful media consultant.
When you have to travel, I will always get to go along. I will be able to work from anywhere in the world. We will go visit a lot of amazing places together and get to write it all off as a business expense on our taxes.

The only company we enjoy more than our own is each others. I will remember our secret conversations, the ones in our heads, that nobody else can hear. Revelations and hypothesis flying through our temples like electric sparks as we rub our heads together, conjuring the truth.

To dream it means to see it.  To see it means to believe it.  To believe it means to achieve it.  

The Timely's and the Godsend's

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The year before J1 was born, we bought the house we still live in today. I remember my sister telling my mother "Aw, he bought her a dollhouse.", and that's exactly what it is. She, referring to my dollhouse, sits proudly in an old neighborhood, that's nice and flat, and is covered in a canopy of Oak and Walnut tree's that are older than she is.
When J1 was 18 months old, he met his lifelong friend Z. They met at what I like to call "Baby Harvard" which is the best child care center in the city. The center is housed up on the hill, where both Z's mother and I work. Soon after we met, they moved their family to my neighborhood, and our kids have gone to all the same schools. They are the Timely family.
A year or so later, the Godsend's moved into the old yellow and white Victorian across the street. The house had been broken into two units for decades, and the Godsend's, with all their children, grandchildren, and extended family, restored it to it's original glory of a single family home.
Together, our village has weathered many storms, both figuratively and literally, and we've all been there for each other. Recently, the Godsend's announced that they would soon depart our sweet village, and while I know that change is the only constant, it's a day I've always dreaded.
Once, when we were teenagers, my sister told me she dreamt that I had gone down the drain in the kitchen sink as a big blob of slime. No surprise there, but then she said I suddenly flew back out as a butterfly. I've never forgotten that dream.
I think I'm ready to talk about the long storm I've weathered, because I believe I'm coming out the other side. But this I know for sure, I would have never survived without the support of my village. And for me to tell these stories, you've got to know who the Timely's and Godsend's are, because none of it could have happened without them.

Prediction in Political Science is Doomed to Fail

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If you study political science, and especially the more fundamental philosophies of social science that underlie professional political science research, you will learn that (for many) scientific prediction is the ultimate goal of political science scholarship. That's perhaps a more contentious thesis nowadays (with the surge in popularity of radical postmodernism), but in the first couple of decades after the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, the claim was rarely challenged except by those on the margins of the discipline. Folks can get a feel for the epistemological primacy of scientific prediction by skimming over the first few pages of Carl Hempel's, "The Functioning of General Laws in History" (1942).

After the end of the Cold War, international relations scholars underwent a foundational crisis in the field. No one --- not a single scholar of international politics in the political science profession (with the exception perhaps of Stephen Rock) --- had published a prediction of the end of the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. There were huge debates on this in the pages of scholarly journals for a few years, but one of the most important essays to come out at the time was from the historian John Lewis Gaddis. His essay, "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," was a magisterial review of the literature that explained why each of the major paradigms was unsuccessful in predicting the biggest historical change since the end of World War II. (And see Chapter One of Gaddis 1997 book, We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War.)

In any case, I'm remembering all of this upon reading Jacqueline Stevens' essay at the New York Times, "Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters." This paragraph is especially good:

Many of today’s peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious and policy documents filled with egregious, dangerous errors. My colleagues now point to research by the political scientists and N.S.F. grant recipients James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin that claims that civil wars result from weak states, and are not caused by ethnic grievances. Numerous scholars have, however, convincingly criticized Professors Fearon and Laitin’s work. In 2011 Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch wrote in the American Political Science Review that “rejecting ‘messy’ factors, like grievances and inequalities,” which are hard to quantify, “may lead to more elegant models that can be more easily tested, but the fact remains that some of the most intractable and damaging conflict processes in the contemporary world, including Sudan and the former Yugoslavia, are largely about political and economic injustice,” an observation that policy makers could glean from a subscription to this newspaper and that nonetheless is more astute than the insights offered by Professors Fearon and Laitin.

Critiques like this were kicking up pretty hard at the end of the 1990s, and things really came to a head with the "Perestroika Movement" in political science around 2000.

It's been a while now, and I'm not sure how deep an impact that movement's had, notwithstanding the launching of a new journal at the APSA geared toward methodological pluralism. And frankly, in a lot of respects, I don't care that much any more. The top scholars in my subfield of international politics have largely perverted the discipline with thinly veiled ideological commitments. I discussed this the other day in my essay on Kenneth Waltz: "A Nuclear-Armed Iran May Be the Best Path to Stability to the Middle East." And the kicker here is the Professor Stevens illustrated her own radical commitments in an commentary piece at the New York Times last month, "Citizenship to Go." Basically, state sovereignty over migration should be abolished. That is, borders don't matter --- get rid of them. So while Stevens' new essay argues that positivist political science, now under threat with the loss of National Science Foundation funding, has largely failed and is undeserving of continued government support, her alternative of government funding of "those who use history and theory to explain shifting political contexts, challenge our intuitions and help us see beyond daily newspaper headlines" would likely result in reams of research just like her own, research questioning the legitimacy of the national state and the hegemony of the U.S. in the international system.

The irony is that's much of the basic rational for stripping government for political science research in the first place. I gather Stevens isn't making that connection.

Until Later Roundup...

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I don't see too much I want to blog about this morning, so until later check the roundup at Pirate's Cove: "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup."

And here's some Kelly Brook News, at London's Dail Mail, "You'd bet on her! Kelly Brook looks fabulous in florals and a flamboyant hat at Royal Ascot," and Celebrity Gossip, "Kelly Brook Talks Curvy Figure With LOOK."

And skip over to Althouse and Instapundit to cover all the bases.

For a bonus, Robert Stacy McCain's latest is here: "Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’."

I'll have more later. I have to pick up my kids' cousins in Los Angeles today. They're down here visiting family and will be staying with us for a couple of days, on their own, until their mom (my kids' aunt) get here.

Until then...

Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi Declared Winner in Egypt's Presidential Election

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Well, this is blog-worthy.

The main news stories are at the New York Times, "Morsi Is Winner of Egyptian Presidency," and Telegraph UK, "Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi."

And from the blogs, at Atlas Shrugs, "MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD'S MURSI DECLARED EGYPT PRESIDENT," and Legal Insurrection, "Muslim Brotherhood candidate elected President of Egypt."

Plus, an analysis from Jonathan Tobin at Commentary, "U.S. Must Avoid Embrace of Morsi":

Many in the Obama administration may have heaved a sigh of relief this morning when Egypt’s election commission declared Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi the winner of the country’s presidential election. There were justifiable fears that the Egyptian military would complete the coup d’état it began when the country’s high court tossed the Islamist-controlled parliament out of office by stealing the presidential contest for its preferred candidate. By choosing to attempt to live with the Brotherhood rather than attempt to destroy it, the army may have avoided a bloody civil war that would have drowned Egypt in blood and destabilized the region even further.

But as much as Washington is relieved that the next stage of life in post-Mubarak Egypt will not be one in which the military rules alone, President Obama must resist the impulse to embrace Morsi or to behave in any manner that might lend support to the Brotherhood leader in the power struggle in Cairo that will undoubtedly ensue. As much as the United States should support the principle of democracy, Morsi and his party are no apostles of freedom. Though worries about the U.S. being tainted by association with a military that wishes to perpetuate authoritarian rule are well founded, the danger from a rising tide of Islamism in the wake of the Arab Spring is far more dangerous to American interests.

There's more at the link.

And Tobin links to Eli Lake's piece from earlier, which illustrates the naivety of this administration: "Member of Egyptian Terror Group Goes to Washington."

Plus, lots at Memeorandum.

From MEMRI: Egypt's Safwat Hagazy, 'Muslim Brotherhood Will Liberate Jerusalem'

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Okay, this video from MEMRI is getting picked up in light of Mohammed Morsi's accession to the Egyptian presidency. See Weasel Zippers, "Egypt’s New Muslim Brotherhood President Calls For Jerusalem To Be Future Capital…"

Note that MEMRI's video was posted to YouTube in May, "Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi: Muslim Brotherhood Presidential Candidate Will Liberate Jerusalem."


And see Arutz Sheva from a couple of weeks back, "Muslim Cleric: Jerusalem to be Capital of Egypt Under Mursi Rule":

If Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi were to become president, Egypt’s capital would no longer be Cairo, but would be Jerusalem, a prominent Egyptian cleric said at a presidential campaign rally, which was aired by an Egyptian private television channel.

“Our capital shall not be Cairo, Mecca or Medina. It shall be Jerusalem with God’s will. Our chants shall be: ‘millions of martyrs will march towards Jerusalem,’” Safwat Hagazy said, according to the video aired by Egypt’s religious Annas TV.

The video, which went viral after being posted on YouTube, was translated into English by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“The United States of the Arabs will be restored on the hands of that man [Mursi] and his supporters. The capital of the [Muslim] Caliphate will be Jerusalem with God’s will,” Hegazy said, as the crowds cheered, waving Egyptian and Hamas flags.

“Tomorrow Mursi will liberate Gaza,” the crowds chanted.

“Yes, we will either pray in Jerusalem or we will be martyred there,” Hegazy said.

Hegazy’s speech came during a presidential campaign rally at the Egyptian Delta city of Mahalla, where Mursi attended along with the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badei and members of the group and its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), Al Arabiya reported.

Mursi will challenge Egypt’s former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq in the upcoming runoff elections, scheduled to take place June 16 and 17. Shafiq, an air force general, was the country’s last prime minister before former president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down by a popular uprising in February 2011.

More at the link.

And at Althouse, "Muslim Brotherhood candidate wins the Egyptian presidency."

Also at Memeorandum.

Paraguay President Fernando Lugo Ousted in Political 'Coup d'Etat'

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Technically, it's not a coup, but some folks are still questioning the parliamentary removal of President Fernando Lugo.

See the Sidney Morning Herald, "Paraguay 'coup' prompts isolation threats."

And at Telegraph UK, "Paraguay's ousted leader Fernando Lugo denounces 'coup'":

Paraguay's ousted President Fernando Lugo has broken cover to accuse the country's Congress of carrying out a "parliamentary coup d'etat" to force him from power.

The New York Times also reports, "In Paraguay, Democracy’s All-Too-Speedy Trial."

But see Babalú, "Some good news from Latin America, for a change."

And don't miss Fausta, "Paraguay: Lugo will be spending more time with his families":

As previously posted, Fernando Lugo, the Catholic bishop who’s sired at least a dozen children by several women (at least one of which was underage at the time), has crowned his political career by getting himself impeached.

Well, that adds an interesting twist to the story. I'm sure Lugo and his dozen kids will great ample support from the Obama White House. 3, 2, 1...

Buy One Senator, Get One Free

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IF YOU'RE LIBERALLY-INCLINED and don't read the Wall Street Journal with any regularity, you probably missed a recent editorial (Money and the 'Appearance of Corruption') which ran June 14.

If you're a liberal--or even a living, breathing, thinking American--you might admit to being worried about the toxic effect of the odious 2010 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which unleashed the torrents of money now flowing into our political system, with tens of millions offered by individuals like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, Charles and David, and more tens of millions donated by giant corporations. You might even be concerned by what an earlier U. S. Supreme Court decision referred to as the "appearance of corruption." 

Ha, ha, no way. Don't be ridiculous thinking Americans! Just remember what mom used to say:  "Money can't buy happiness--or politicians."

That's the position taken by Paul Sherman, at any rate, in an editorial defense of the U. S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. Many observers will tell you this was the Supreme Court's worst decision in the last decade (actually the worst decision of the staunchly conservative, five-vote, John Roberts-led wing). But Sherman, an attorney at the aptly named "Institute of Justice," a conservative group which litigates campaign-finance cases across the nation, disagrees. He begins by noting that the State of Montana is challenging the ruling based on laws passed at the turn of the 20th century and designed to deal with a rash of cases of political corruption. (What! Money can't buy politicians!! You people in Montana, in 1916, you must have been fooled into thinking that it could by the lamestream media!)

Sherman finds Montana's position untenable and in the deepest recesses of his conservative soul prays the U. S. Supreme Court will "double down on Citizens United and reject, once and for all, the flawed justification underlying much of America's failed experiment with campaign-finance law--the so-called appearance of corruption standard."

That standard, set in 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, held that Congress and the states could pass laws to address "corruption and the appearance of corruption." Sherman finds that decision misguided and dangerous:

The "corruption" half of that ruling is uncontroversial--few seriously dispute the validity of laws proscribing conduct like offering or accepting bribes. But the power to regulate the "appearance of corruption" has proven dangerously open-ended, leading inexorably to greater government control of political speech.

Sherman offers no examples of this chilling government control and given the skill with which both the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left have stirred political discussion in recent times (and rightfully so), his worries are clearly misplaced. Sherman explains the justification for the appearance-of-corruption standard (that "a deregulated system of campaign finance would lead to public cynicism and distrust of our democratic process") but then makes it clear he's having no part of such lame judicial reasoning.

In fact, the opposite is true.

Sherman is an advocate of untrammeled freedom, a patriot, a hero. This nauseating sense we get when we hear that huge corporations and insanely rich individuals can pour tens of millions into political campaigns, effectively drowning out the opinions of others...why, don't be silly. There's no need to fear any appearance-of-corruption: 

That argument ignores that a healthy distrust of government is vital to ensuring that government stays within its constitutionally limited role. Campaign-finance proponents want to grant government the power to restrict political activity for the purposes of managing its own PR. The result of doing so is that government still has the same amount of power to abuse, but fewer people will notice or be concerned. That is a great way to promote big government but a lousy way to promote trustworthy government.

Yeah. Trustworthy government! That's the ticket! And thank god for guardians of our precious freedoms, stalwarts like Paul Sherman. Thank god for the unbiased positions of the Wall Street Journal when it comes to Big Business influence in government. (Government is the problem! Business heroes are the solution!) Thank god, Sherman has reminded us that our campaign-finance laws, under Buckley v. Valeo, have created a mess that another WSJ editorial described as a "half-dead monster."

Sherman notes, one editorialist for the conservative paper agreeing with another, that the awful monster "keeps shambling forward, wreaking havoc on the First Amendment." Save us, save us, Big Business heroes!

Dump huge piles of money on the monster and kill it!

THE EDITORS OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, reduced now to servants of Rupert Murdoch and his vast corporate empire, and writers like Mr. Sherman would have you imagine that this is a clarion call in the name of liberty!

In fact, Sherman's piece is a pile of steaming horse manure, dressed up in conservative logic in a vain attempt to make it look like fresh-baked apple pie.

Really, what do we have to look forward to if the decision in Citizens United stands, or worse ends up extended? Even Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who leads all individual contributors in this election cycle, with $35 million donated (we must stop Mitt Romney, he's unfit! not conservative enough! vote for Newt; no, wait, Newt can't win; we must elect Mitt Romney! he's actually a great American and I have the money to prove it!) has said he doesn't necessarily agree with the Supreme Court decision but as long as it's legal he's going to spend as much as $100 million to defeat President Obama.

So where does it all end?

Consider a story in today's New York Times, about Swiss bank UBS and its efforts to curtail activities by Robert Wolf, one its own top New York executives, a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Obama? Why does a Swiss banking institution care about a U. S. presidential election? It might have to do with the fact the federal government forced UBS in 2009 to pay a $780 million fine and divulge the names of 4,450 super-rich Americans  who were hiding tens of billions in secret accounts to avoid paying income taxes. You know. The kind of Big Business heroes you can trust to donate unlimited sums of money to politicians. Probably loyal readers of the Wall Street Journal and staunch conservatives who love America more than liberals do, who just don't want to give America any money to meet its needs--stupid stuff, like national defense, health care for seniors and disabled children, roads, bridges, you know, stuff like that.

In fact, conservatives seem to believe they're the only ones with a healthy distrust of government. But every liberal who can remember back to Watergate, to cite but one example, has his or her own healthy distrust of government.

It's just that liberals have an even healthier distrust of government when they think it's going to be taken over, lock, stock and barrel, and run entirely by Big Business interests.

Sherman doesn't dare touch that topic with an editorial ten-foot pole. But most Americans see the obvious danger. If one individual or one corporation can donate unlimited sums, how do we stop them from buying up politicians wholesale? Washington, D. C. is already swarming with lobbyists, like teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert. It's not like Big Business can't already make its voice heard.

What happens next, if the wishes of the editors of the Wall Street Journal come true? Do big drug companies start pouring tens of millions into campaigns for the U. S. House of Representatives? Does Pfizer adopt a dozen Republican lawmakers, maybe a Democrat or two, and avoid unpleasant situations like the one the company faced in 2009:  coughing up $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal complaints for the illegal marketing of Bextra, a pain-killing drug? Do these bought-and-paid-for legislators push for more of a "pro-business" stance at the Food and Drug Administration? Maybe they vote to curtail federal protections for whistle-blowers, too, since whistle-blowers at Pfizer exposed the company to begin.

Or maybe a few bought-and-paid-for members of the U. S. Senate lean on the FDA to go easy in its investigations of the harmful side effects of all-metal hip joint replacements, now failing at alarming rates, often shedding steel flakes into surrounding tissue. You know:  a lot of conservative politicians already believe tort reform, making it harder to sue for medical malpractice, is the real key to "health care reform."

And, aw, shucks, so what if grandma's hip replacement is causing her excruciating pain!

If the Supreme Court stands by or expands its Citizens United decision the possibilities are endless. (Mr. Sherman might even turn to a few news items in the Wall Street Journal if he'd like to see examples!) What! You say ING Bank has been fined $619 million for laundering money for Cuba and Iran, in violation of U. S. sanctions? Time for ING to buy, no, donate to the campaigns, of two or four or six U. S. senators and put them to work fighting Dodd-Frank regulations. Huh? You say Big Sugar, as the Journal itself labels corporate agri-business interests, want to protect billions in farm subsidies? Let them donate $5 million to the reelection campaign of three members of the House of Representatives for Louisiana and get the right kind of men and women into office, you know, fans of sugar. Watch Wal-Mart spread around $50 million to politicians in all kinds of local races in ten different states; because what do we know first and foremost about Wal-Mart? That all Wal-Mart executives care about in the end is expanding freedom! And all Wal-Mart asks is that the politicians they purchase help pass laws to make it harder to organize unions. The politicians get elected and if Wal-Mart likes their work, refinanced, and re-elected. Wal-Mart clerks still earn $11 per hour and still sometimes qualify for food stamps.

And see what happens now when UBS forks over $10 million during the 2012 presidential race. Watch Mitt Romney take a stand against increased federal regulatory power! Watch Mitt opine that President Obama doesn't understand how to run a business! Watch Wall Street bankers, in their enthusiasm for the First Amendment, dump hundreds of millions into Republican coffers! Watch the banking industry prove, as it did in 2008, that only businessmen and businesswomen know how to run a business! Watch the politicians sit idly by; squint a little, and if you look at it just right, it makes a UBS donation seem like a wise investment.

Especially if they can avoid a few hefty fines next time around.

You might say, "This has the appearance of corruption to me." But you would be stupid and probably a socialist and the editors at the Wall Street Journal would insist you were secretly a foe of all human freedom, anti-American at heart, as well, and say that you hated god and your mom and that apple pie, too.

TRUST PAUL SHERMAN on this one. After all, he's a lawyer. Money can't buy happiness or politicians.