Is there some blame to share here?

The St. Pete Times reports that the former owner of something called the Academy of Dreams represented herself as the owner of something called the Sago Palm Educational Academy in a request for grant money to teach water conservation techniques. The whole story is here: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/tampa-woman-accused-of-fraud-in-grant-application-to-teach-water/1129476

There apparently is no Sago Palm Educational Academy, and the Academy of Dreams apparently no longer exists, which qualified the former owner for a visit from the law, which charged her with grand theft, scheme to defraud, communications fraud and criminal use of personal identification information.

Her offense: Succeeding in persuading someone at the Southwest Florida Water Management District to stroke her a check for $8,000 last month.

Now I’m not going to defend this former owner, or even applaud her creativity. I am, however, going to suggest that before we send her off to the pokey, we investigate the bright light or lights at Swiftmud who signed off on her application and presumably put it in the pile that went to another bright light for final approval and the cash prize.

The Times reported that the same former owner was charged with similar offenses in May when it was discovered that the state Department of Education had given her more than $300,000 she wasn’t entitled to.

Elnuestros is reminded of that old public service commercial designed to thwart juvenile delinquency and car thefts, the one that suggested we “Don’t Help a Good Boy Go Bad” by leaving our keys in our unlocked cars, and threatened us with charges of contributing to delinquency if we did.

Shouldn’t the bureaucrats who were too overburdened to do the most cursory investigation of her applications be held to a similar standard?

We're gonna fix things when the market turns around. Really.

I'm not sure how a city stuffed with the like of the houses on hubristic display in Port Royal and along the beaches can, with a straight face, plead poverty when it comes to protecting what few natural resources it can still claim.


Shamelessness is as good an explanation as any.


But we have two issues before us, masquerading disingenuously as one, according to Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News, whose sad tale is of a city struggling to make ends meet and forced to ignore its messy freshwater lakes in order to put its energy and limited resources into . . . what exactly?


Basically into continuing to ignore Naples Bay is what I get from reading his story.


http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/oct/05/city-plan-change-naples-bay-cleanup-lake-pollution/


The city's lakes are unquestionably an aesthetic resource for those who live near them, and it's understandable that those who look out for those issues – property value, reputation, charm and beauty – closest to a realtor's heart would be upset about abandoning plans to make them preen like something on Fantasy Island. But they function mainly as stormwater collectors. They are not, most of them anyway, natural waterways. They are holes in the ground left when fill needed to raise building levels was removed. Due to the enthusiastic application of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides in pursuit of picture-perfect lawns over the years, they no doubt have been transformed into devilishly toxic lagoons. The green crown of algae they wear befits their less-than-regal status.


The city's egregious decision to conflate the cosmetic and aesthetic concerns that characterize the "health" of the former borrow pits with the very real and very critical threat to the health of Naples Bay was just sad. Stripping them apart is a sane and defensible, although hardly popular, remedy for helping a 'hood of multimillion-dollar homes get through hard times.


The significant threats to Naples Bay, and its deterioration as a functioning estuary capable of rejuvenating the area's marine life – shrimp, oysters, snook and untold millions of squiggly little things no one worries about (much like, say, the enzymes one's healthy glands produce) until they're gone – was ably documented in 1979. 1979. Thirty-one years ago.


Anyone interested in reviewing that hopeful but ultimately sorry chapter in the city's history can check the archives at http://elnuestros.blogspot.com/2010/03/well-if-all-youre-doing-is-flushing.html


To hear John Sorey, who might be a thoroughly decent and well-intended man (I don't know him) today utter such a vacuous comment as "It was trying to be more realistic. . . " is, again, just sad. He sits on the board that continues to flood the bay with fresh water that is fully as harmful as massive quantities of fresh water injected into a human vein would be.


If the problem can't be fixed without destroying Golden Gate as we know it, he should be honest enough to say that. Asking for more time to afford a solution during the bleak darkness following the greatest real estate boom many of us are likely to witness here is, again, just sad.

Editing done right

I can't imagine how many hours the producer of this video spent acquiring the footage and cutting it together. See the author's explanation below the clip.

rebelliouspixels | October 02, 2010

This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck. 

• English captions are now working in case you're not fluent in duck-speak 

This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Right Wing Radio Duck" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License - permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.

• Please link back to my website: http://www.rebelliouspixels.com

• Learn about fair-use at the Center for Social Media:http://centerforsocialmedia.org

• Learn about transformative works at the OTW: http://transformativeworks.org

• Useful Media Matters archive of Glenn Beck clips: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Jonathan McIntosh

http://www.rebelliouspixels.com

Where have you gone, Judith Miller?

Katharine Q. Seelye, who is to the Times' election coverage what Judith Miller was to that paper's cheerleading for George Bush's invasion of Iraq, bursts forth on the front page today with the kind of vapid thumb-sucker we expect from an honorary member of what David Foster Wallace, in his coverage of John McCain's 2000 Republican primary campaign, called the Twelve Monkeys.


They are, and this I know to be true because I once worked with some of them:

"so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal – twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxforcloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100 percent buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus a uniform of self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every . . . "

Well, you get the idea. They are the eminently serious people who manage the nation's discourse on all things political, and their "objectivity" is their most treasured asset because it allows them to exist in a universe where nothing, literally, matters because no matter how rotten the situation becomes they will go home to their trust funds and their Hallmark Movie family gatherings at the holidays and continue to turn up their noses at anything that doesn't fit their definition of reasonable, balanced and appropriate. It is this determination to be "even-minded" that produced the greatest assault on the Power of the Press we have witnessed in this lifetime, namely the Obsession with False Equivalencies that creates an environment in which it not only is entertaining to see David Gregory hamming it up on stage with Karl Rove, a black-hearted scoundrel who would no doubt seek to outlaw the press if he ever loses the knack of getting that mean old watchdog to roll over and get its tummy rubbed, but gives us tripe of the flavor Seelye today provides.


Some background is in order. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote an informative and typically engaging article about the Republican Party's efforts to infiltrate and co-opt the Tea Party movement, which was veering dangerously close to the cliff when it came to saying things like "throw ALL the bums out." The Tea Party's favorite in Delaware, a state that we mercifully don't much have to acknowledge, is a grifter named Christine O'Donnell, who lies about her academic achievements, doesn't pay her taxes, mismanages her finances in spectacular form, and apparently screwed and drank her way through several years of attempted college before finding the Lord and dedicating her life to speaking out against self-gratification.


It was natural then that in a universe that gives us Bristol Palin as the poster girl for Just Saying No to premarital sex, our gal in Delaware would attract the attention of Bristol's mother, aka Bible Spice, Caribou Barbie, etc., who anointed her the Chosen won. And guess what? She won the Republican primary over a mainstream opponent who by all accounts has never once taken a public stand on masturbation, or had a witch doctor at his church drive off the demons that kept him from using -- with a clear conscience -- his elected position to enrich himself. Nor has he admitted, as O'Donnell has, "dabbling" in witchcraft.


On the day after the primary win, Karl Rove, who is presently supervising a MAJOR behind-the-scenes effort to hand the Democrats their hats in next month's midterm elections, made unkind statements about Sarah's selection. From Politico:

"Karl Rove sounded a depressing tone for Republicans late Tuesday night, warning that surprise Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell has said “nutty things” and has ruined the party’s chances of winning the seat.

“I’ve met her. I wasn’t frankly impressed by her abilities as a candidate,” Rove said during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “One thing that O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election that she didn't in the primary is her own checkered background.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42205.html#ixzz11OVNCxzc

But a couple of phone calls set Karl on the right path, and he stopped dissing the person who could deliver a Senate majority to his side. A similar think happened in Kentucky.


Taibbi focuses his analysis on the Republican mainstream's efforts to rein in Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, who defeated the establishment candidate in a state that thinks, apparently, that Social Security is a socialist plot and that Medicare should be cut except, as Paul has noted, when it has an effect on the money he makes practicing medicine.


His message is condensed in the following excerpt from an article I would love to see discussed on the evening news shows, or maybe even referenced in the kind of thumb-suckers the Times runs:

"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake."

It's that refusal to reference, or even acknowledge the existence of, that so frustrates your faithful, nearly frothing, correspondent.


You and I both know good and damn well that Katharine Q. Seeleye, whatever else she might have done to prepare for her front-page feature on the "softening" of Rand Paul's message, was aware of Matt Taibbi's story. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that her very assignment was predicated on the publicity surrounding the Rolling Stone article. Nothing in Seelye's piece would give anyone a clue that she didn't think the whole thing up by herself, just by being a careful observer of Dr. Paul on the campaign trail and a careful collector of obscure accounts of his previous statements.


What is more unforgivable is that she casts her story in a completely different light than Taibbi has previously shown us. We are surely witnessing the Tea Party being devoured by one of the great political strategists of our age, dressed up like a populist so it can ride to the rescue of the billionaires who are pouring millions – hat tip to the Supreme Court for its continued efforts to make corporations just regular citizens like the unemployed and soon to be laid-off and otherwise prosperous among us – into campaigns to elect stooges that will help those powerful interests continue their dismantling of the Middle Class in America.


But saying something like that would be too extreme for the Twelve Monkeys. So they just give us nice, dull, complacent, balanced coverage like this:

"But Mr. DeMint’s smile may have vanished by morning. During a nationally televised debate on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Paul said that if he were elected to the Senate, he would support Senator Mitch McConnell, also from Kentucky, to keep his job as Republican leader.

Pressed to say whether he would choose him over Mr. DeMint, Mr. Paul said that he would vote for whomever Republicans chose as their leader and that he assumed it would be Mr. McConnell.

It was one more sign that no matter how devoted Mr. Paul is to Tea Party principles, he may be forced to yield periodically to some realities of the old-school politics that he denounces.

This also occurred last month, when Mr. McConnell set up a fund-raiser in Washington for Mr. Paul with several Republican senators who, like Mr. McConnell, had supported the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008; during the primary, Mr. Paul said he would not accept donations from anyone who had done so."

And trust that their readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a DFH rag like Rolling Stone to get the real picture.

Those poor Tea Baggers

A thousand, which, according to the Tea Partiers in attendance, is a typo and should have read 10,000 -- at least -- angry white people who ARE NOT RACISTS but love them some funny Kenyan-style images of Obama in a grass skirt with a bone through his nose, although never admitting such things in public -- gathered on a street corner in Naples, Florida, across from a shopping center that has an ACTUAL bookstore (where, one presumes, the less informed among the horde might find information that would help them avoid the kind of painful public display of ignorance they seem to believe is guaranteed by the Constitution, or at least the Federalist papers) and proceeded to wave signs that prove they love America and wish the Mexicans and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi would just give it back to them. They then shared their comments with the intrepid reporters of the Naples Daily News, who displayed most of the acumen we have been conditioned to expect and transcribed their remarks without, apparently, any effort to question the speakers about such things as their standing to formulate policy or, even, understand why the Founding Fathers even bothered to create a freakin' government in the first place when they could have just dealt out the money and turned everyone loose to play Monopoly -- except it wasn't, invented yet, but it could have been if the liberals and politically correct types like Jefferson and Madison hadn't kept Alexander Hamilton (a real bastard who went all Reaction Formation about his tawdry family history and set about proving his Better Than Thou status by favoring the Haves over Jefferson's simple-minded farmers) from inventing Wall Street right off the bat. 

Well, you can read all about it here. 

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/oct/02/tea-party-blog-more-200-already-gathering-noon-nap/

Goofy 20-somethings waving their conservatism around, but mercifully allowed to avoid the part of the test where they actually, you know, explain what that means and how they incorporate their "conservatism" into their daily lives in an age when Saint Ronny of the Borax Commercial would find himself drawn and quartered, defeated in the primaries, and subject to Ann Coulter's (remember her?) most caustic putdowns were he to show up in what passes for a gathering of Real Americans as defined by an Australian media mogul whose fortune was made by printing pictures of tits in his tabloids but who managed to get himself named a Real American by none other than that Republican in Act Only Bill Clinton, for whom your faithful scribe shares with many of the folks holding signs a similar distaste although for different reasons and none involving cigars or mantraps wearing blue dresses.

Listening to Tea Partiers discuss the mechanics of government, the origins of the nation and the intent of the Founding Fathers is like listening to kindergarten students discuss the musical merits of Miles Davis or John Coltrane.
Before one criticizes, one must understand. A little more time studying civics and political science might have helped. A little more time with something besides Glenn and Sean would help today.
But the Tea Party isn't about solutions. It's a temper tantrum thrown by the willingly uninformed, aimed at the things that make them uncomfortable, dedicated to restoring an America that never was, and financed by ultraconservative individuals and corporations who stand to benefit from the breakdown of participatory democracy guaranteed by the dissolution of an informed electorate.
The Tea Party represents the last gasps of those seeking to restore America's "frontier," when a man was able to stalk across the mountains and kill enough savages to secure a new homestead because he could smell the smoke from a new neighbor's cookfire. It represents the frustration and immobility and impotence of wage-earners and hard workers whose dreams for the future and plans for their children have been co-opted by the mechanics of global finance they cannot begin to comprehend. Their reaction in the face of all this gobsmacking is to make fun of the smart kids, find scapegoats, and fill their carts at China-dependent Wal-Mart while decrying the collapse of their own nation's economy.
They watched their retirement funds vanish as Wall Street played fast and loose with no intervention from government, but think scrapping Social Security and giving the money to the same con men represents "financial freedom."
There really are too many issues to name, but nearly every one can be explained by citing a total and abject ignorance of the mechanics of governing, corporate policies, global trade, and the messy and impractical nature of a true democracy. There is, also, a willful disregard of the true nature of humans, and the consequent necessity of some form of government to prevent such nightmares as Somalia or Haiti. Add the misguided notion to inject Jesus Christ in a curiously unrecognizable, and positively Old Testament version, into public affairs with no apparent recognition of what religion has done for the "nations" of Iran and Afghanistan and you have a thoroughly discordant mess.
Sure they're unhappy. The world is slipping out from under them, and they blame the easy targets. A gay congressman caused the housing bubble, all evidence to the contrary. A black president created the federal deficit, again in opposition to the facts. A pushy woman -- Pelosi's real sin -- makes Congress unworkable.
Poor unhappy tea-partiers. If I were that Russian lady, I think I'd take my teabag necklace and go home where things are just peachy now that the mobsters from Moscow are showing the world how capitalism ought to run.

Sarah Palin IS NOT the dumbest person on the planet.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jun/11/brent-batten-oil-spill-drill-gulf-bp/


Once again, Ol Battin' a Thousand comes out with a puerile and punky piece of punditry squarely in the Nanny Nanny Boo Boo tradition. How many barrels of ink, one wonders, have been squandered on his scrawling.

My refutation of his feeble logic follows. Note the smarmy nature of his false premise, a standard feature of little boys who spend their days building straw men and tearing them apart:


"A favorite pastime of the left of late is to gleefully observe that they’re not hearing much from the “drill baby, drill” crowd these days."

Poor Binary Brett. Everything must be right or left, black or white, on or off, 1 or 0. No wonder his little lizard brain seizes on the gaudy nonsense peddled by the Cheneys and Palins. I'm not saying he robs from them, mind you. Only that the sentiments they voice are so rudimentary and simplistic, so chest-thumpingly self-interested, that those whose brain pans are too small to contain the notion of ambivalence or gradation or relativity become natural allies, sycophants and cheerleaders for the worst impulses of human nature.

All the while, of course, claiming the "high road" of morality and responsibility and grown-up-edness.

Your premise is absolutely false, Brent. I have many -- I mean MANY -- conservative friends who are upset and disgusted beyond measure with BP and Palin and the whole "free oil, come and drill for it" mentality. There is no right-left divide on this one, and your statement to the contrary reveals -- again -- your deep-seated and abiding bias against, I'm guessing, the smart kids who always laughed at your attempts to guess the answer in class.

And even if there were such a thing as a monolithic "left wing" representing a clear line on the issue, you are being disingenuous (as only you can be) and smarmy by suggesting that those upset by the mess BP made are "gleefully observing" as a "favorite pastime."

Let me make it clear for you, you superficial hack: We are sick beyond words at what has happened. We accept our complicity in the events that brought us here; we should have worked harder to elect politicians who would lead us away from the path of cheap thrills and subsidized energy and toward the future Jimmy Carter pointed to more than 30 years ago. Your type, led by Reagan, laughed at him. Instead of acting sensibly, the faction you represent made a mockery of fuel efficiency standards and gave us the reign of the land yacht and the McMansion. We couldn't stop you, and for that we'll take the blame.

But how dare you suggest that what we feel today is remotely related to pleasure or mirth. You are one sick individual to suggest such a thing, and the fact that you do only proves to me that you're what I have always suspected you to be: A hillbilly who wandered into a place you don't understand and proceeded to trash it beyond repair.

It is true that I have taunted you to come out and tell us how your pro-drilling stance would play in today's climate. That you chose to offer the tripe above as your defense marks you as nothing if not consistent. You can't help batting a thousand. Your streak is intact.

Poor people forced those bankers to make bad loans. Really.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/may/05/naples-marco-island-real-estate-risky-pmi/?partner=popular

Naples is still a risky market, although only by a teensy bit according to another analysis of Southwest Florida real estate. Nothing terribly remarkable about the story. It just suggests that prices haven't completely settled down yet, which everyone already knows. As usual, the real fun comes in the comments that follow. It is amazing how many "right" thinkers show up to blame the collapse of the housing bubble -- something that was predicted for years before it happened by experts who were denied a forum in which to share their concerns -- on Democrats, gays and the poor (I suspect they mean people of color).

If it hadn't been for that nasty Barney Frank and his nefarious sidekick Chris Dodd, acting in collusion with Bill Clinton to turn all the good properties over to people who couldn't afford them, none of this would have happened. The poor bankers, they didn't want to loan money to the riff-raff, but the Democrats forced them to.

Missing is any blame for the speculators and flippers and con artists who blew the bubble so big. Missing is any mention of poor Alan Greenspan, who arrived late to the party of enlightenment and was forced to admit that his handling of the Federal Reserve was based on principles that he now realizes do not apply. What principle? That bankers would always operate in the spirit of the common good. Really. He believed that.

But the teabag crowd has been warmed up to believe the unbelievable. In a day and age when people attempt to link Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the Republican platform, why would we be surprised?

Does any intelligent person seriously believe that the world's economy was upended as a result of trying to provide home ownership for lower-income workers?

That is as false as arguing that the food stamp program exists to serve the poor. It doesn't. It serves the grocery industry.

If we can resist the impulse to think shallowly, we can follow the money to the truth. The grocery industry lobbied hard to dismantle the the commodity program and replace it with food stamps. Grocery stores couldn't make money off people getting cheese and rice and peanut butter from the farm surplus warehouses -- which were themselves the direct result of welfare, I mean farm subsidies. Getting the government to hand out stamps let the grocery stores cash in. The poor might benefit, but they sure didn't have the power to put the program in place. They seem to be the only group anyone wants to blame, though.

The housing situation is no different. The Wall Street boys figured out how to bundle bad loans into packages of junk they could peddle to foreign investors. They needed product. So they made bad loans. Lots of them.

Trying to blame a program designed to encourage home ownership for the abuses committed by the Big Money boys is misguided and wrong. But it's easier to blame the poor folks than to look for the real answers.

The Tea Party movement was created and funded by corporate interests. Those same corporate interests benefit by offering scapegoats to deflect criticism of actual policies. Rush and Glenn and Sarah do a heckuva job of keeping those scapegoats -- whether it's Reagan's welfare mom, ACORN, or poor homebuyers -- out in front of the angry mob.

The real crime is that the mob is too angry, too ill-informed, too willfully ignorant to seek real answers. Like a brain-challenged greyhound, it just chases Sparky.

What a scam. And what a sorry commentary on this nation's ability to educate its young, or itself.

Whaaaa. She said she was going to hold the football for me.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/25/controversial-wiggins-pass-development-hasnt-kept-/


Today's link again comes from the Naples Daily News, which reports that a developer . . . wait for it . . . isn't doing what he promised to do when he got the county to approve a couple of condo towers near the beach.


What's surprising is the amount of shock and indignation expressed by readers.


The condo was approved for a piece of ground that once housed the largest marina in northern Collier County. Boaters who didn't want to trailer their vessels all the way to Naples or points south could launch there, or even store their boats there for a fee.


When the condo construction began, that option disappeared. In order to pacify angry area residents, the county commissioners negotiated with the developer to improve traffic near the development and to add public launch facilities. But, hey, the economy went sour and what's a developer to do?


Which prompted one NDN reader to comment:


"Again, money wins,Taxpayers lose and it's all courtesy of the Collier County government."
The mistake this reader makes is identifying three entities where only one exists in the economic monoculture that is Collier County. It works like this: The first faction of this single entity are the developers and the speculators. They put packages together, sniff out financing, line up investors or other sources of capital, and maintain sweet relationships with the consulting engineers and land-use attorneys who know how to run the "machine" known as Collier County, a place where raw land in the form of live oak plains, pine and palmetto scrub and even mangrove wetlands can be magically converted into Vietnamese nail salons, franchise tanning booths, branch banks, used car lots, convenience stores and all the other manifestations of an advanced civilization.
The second faction is the public servants, which includes the county commissioners and the county employees responsible for signing off on new developments.


Our indignant reader is nearly right when he implies that the commissioners' job is to listen to the people who put them in office. But he isn't clear about who makes up that group. He implies it is "the taxpayers." He's wrong.


It's the guys we described above.


Joe Blow might get on the horn and tell Commissioner So-and-So that he doesn't want to see fifty families displaced by the extension of a road that a certain prominent developer needs to provide access to a certain new project out in the boonies. But Joe Blow is just one vote, or maybe a dozen if all his friends call, or maybe a hundred if all the families deliver two calls each. Big deal. Commissioner So-and-So isn't looking for any 100-vote margin. He needs the manifest power inherent in a large, united group sharing a common purpose. He needs the movers and shakers on his side. He needs the developers, and their entourage of contractors, bankers, engineers, environmental scientists, surveyors and everyone else whose paycheck depends on turning raw land into houses or shops.


Such a group, for instance, might be the employees of a humongous consulting engineering firm, a firm capable of providing the expertise to advise the county on where to put that road extension, and, coincidentally, the firm that is helping design and get permits for the new development project. That's where the third faction of our single entity comes in. Let's call them, following the angry reader's example, the "taxpayers." It's amazing how many of them depend on development for their jobs. So the bosses at the firm tell the people working for them that a whole lot of jobs depend on getting the right vote from the commissioners. And the contractors who intend to make a lot of money helping bring that project out of the ground tell their employees the same thing.


And the employees tell the people they give their money to. "You know, if that new development gets squashed by a bunch of tree-huggers, I'm probably not going to be able to afford new acrylic nails every week," they tell the folks at the nail parlor. And the guy running the pizza shop cusses because traffic is a nightmare and his delivery cars need an hour to get around the block, but if the new development falters all those brick masons and carpenters and drywall hangers are going to be ordering less pizza, so what's a fella to do? Why, tell his commissioner to approve that project, and that new road extension, and sorry about the displaced families and tough cheese about the extra traffic but hey, a fella's gotta eat. 


And so it goes.


For every "taxpayer" suffering from the actions of this system there are a dozen more who depend on it for their bread and butter. It IS the economy we've created here, and it rewards handsomely those who play by its rules. The displaced and unhappy can stay and gripe about the loss of beach access, the dearth of places to launch even a piddly canoe, and the time it takes to get anywhere. They can moan about the taxes the county needs to keep the monster machine running. They can make weak jokes about how Naples is still not as bad as Miami. But nothing changes. It never has, and I've been watching it a real long time. The developers, the commissioners who depend on them, and the "taxpayers" whose wages flow from them are all part of the same creature. And as Pogo once said, that creature are us.

First we blame the teachers

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/20/crist-inks-increased-fla-graduation-requirements/


The Florida Legislature has handed Gov. Charlie Crist a new education bill to replace the one he vetoed last week. That one would have essentially linked teachers' jobs to the performance of their students on standardized tests. This one would require end-of-course exams for high school students in math and science classes, and add algebra II, geometry, biology, chemistry and physics to the list of courses required for graduation.


Predictably, the comments that accompanied the story in the Naples Daily News included at least one call for "greater accountability" for teachers. Elnuestros feels strongly enough about this issue to repeat his position here. One never knows when a story or a comment will disappear into the ether. 


Wrote one commenter to the story:


"I saw this on the news, it makes sense but the teachers need to have some kind of accountability."


Responded elnuestros:

I don't think you'd find many teachers arguing against being held accountable.

What you will find are teachers reluctant to be the scapegoats for a failing system.

The rules on what and how to teach roll down from the federal Department of Education, from state education departments, from local school boards and from the education experts working for the superintendents.

The teacher is allowed freedom and movement within the tangled network of standards, practices, regulations, dictates and procedures that results.

But everybody wants to blame the teacher because the product is faulty?

That's like blaming the cook at KFC because the latest whiz-bang creation cooked up in the corporate kitchen is a bomb.

Education, to be carelessly blunt, has been over-professionalized to the point that it no longer works. Teachers with intuition, with the gift of connecting with students and of trying different approaches until they can find the right one, are handicapped in an industrial model that dictates specific tactics and strategies and refuses to acknowledge individual student distinctions unless accompanied by months of painstaking and time-wasting monitoring. That monitoring, by the way, doesn't help the teacher. He or she already knows the problem. It's just to give the supervisors a paper trail and set the stage for the appropriate intervention.

Teaching is a calling, like training race horses, being a minister, or (traditionally) being a physician or nurse. We're turning it into a service position, and telling the best we have to do their paperwork like good technicians and leave the thinking to their "betters" upstairs.

Then we want to blame them when the students don't perform.

Commented another reader:

Thank you for your astute and insightful post. It's comforting to know that sanity prevails.

To which elnuestros was forced to write:

I wish it prevailed. I don't see evidence of it. I know far too many teachers who think the Tea Party offers a solution, that Glenn Beck is right, that Sarah Palin would be better in the White House than that black guy.

It deflates one to see people with advanced degrees, people charged with teaching children, cutting and pasting whatever "credible" lie about Obama they come across: Did you know he lets Muslims pray on Capitol Hill but revoked the National Day of Prayer?

My fear is that by the time the teachers understand that standardized testing has nothing to do with students and everything to do with them, it will be too late.

Once the McDonaldization of education occurs, once the unions are weakened or dissolved, once the kind of "outside contractors" who have done such a wonderful job for the Pentagon complete their infestation of the schools, I envision a world where teachers will report in uniforms, year-round, for the purpose of handing out the materials they are told to, administering the tests they are required to, and uttering not a word that doesn't appear in the accompanying "teacher's" handbook.

When that day arrives, look for an end to extra pay for advanced degrees and for the time off that many experienced teachers know helps "recharge" the batteries for the next season's challenges. Maybe they'll make an advanced degree a job requirement, but I'm betting they won't be paying extra because of its presence.

And folks will line up for those jobs, doing their part not to "teach" our young, but to mold them and train them to color between the lines, sit up straight, stop questioning authority, not be "bullies" as the definition of that term continues to expand to cover more aspects of human nature, and be model little future service workers in the corporate-run world we will have left for them.

Got a problem with that? Look for the same defense of dissenting opinions one now finds among the Tea Party. Those who won't embrace the "majority" groupthink opinion will be ostracized, expelled, made unemployable and otherwise taught to toe the line.

Where will the professionals come from? Private schools. The trend is already under way. Watch for the division between the two to become permanent and beyond repair when the "libertarians" succeed in establishing vouchers, charter arrangements, and other devices intended to dismantle the funding mechanism that supports public education.

What will be left? Special ed. Lots of it. And behavior issues. Lots of them. And even unhealthier food in the lunchrooms, more soda machines in the hallways, and God knows what clever corporate programs designed to hook young consumers before their powers of discretion and critical thinking can be developed.

Ever listen to the garbage they blast on school bus radios these days? That's the sound of the future.

We'll be returning to this thread, I'm sure, since the debate over public education is unlikely to go away. In the current hardscrabble climate, anyone who belongs to a union seems to be fair game for those drowning in the effluvium of Trickle Down Economics. Those who belong to unions, get summers off, and find their creativity and sense of accomplishment plowed under by supervisors who either never taught, or couldn't hack it, are understandably thin-skinned about the public whipping they're getting from the anti-government crowd.


It's an explosive combination, fraught with danger on both sides. Add politicians, those mouth-breathing, publicity-seeking, kneejerk goofballs who, having made a mess of everything but trading political favors for contributions from the connected and the powerful, now feel obliged to "rescue" public education, and you have the kind of pile-up you sometimes see when a heavy fog descends on a California freeway. We'll keep trying to sort it out.


We'll also try to use shorter sentences. No promises, though. You're in the deep end. You have to concentrate.

The Mighty Brent Wades into the Tea Party

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/15/naples-tea-party-infiltrator-Obama/

Well, the Tea Party gathered in Naples today, waving their signs and pretending that the corner of the North Trail and Pine Ridge Road was Independence Hall, circa the late 18th century, when men were men and fathers were founding or some such.

Right into the midst of the fruitcakes stomped that intrepid gatherer of low-hanging fruit, Brent Batten. He's the only columnist the Naples Daily News has, if you don't count the assorted quasi-celebrities, real-estate hucksters and others willing to pen some dribble to keep their names in front of a public that might need what they're selling. (I don't include Ben Bova among that number, by the way. To even things up, I'll count Don Farmer twice.) That means his opinions should be especially cogent, analytical, precise and reasoned. I'm sure he thinks they are.

Anyway, ol' Brent just waded into that melee, right past the lady shrieking at the top of her lungs -- or maybe it was the bird on her shoulder -- and right past the fat guy in flip-flops and baggies who wanted the government to spread his work ethic, not his wealth. A couple of little kids were decked out with signs linking Obama to "bin Lyin," whoever that is, and calling for "ObamaCare" to be flushed. The little boy's sign had a picture of a toilet on it. Cute. Almost everybody wanted to protect the Constitution, although nobody seemed to be bothered by that back when George Bush was paying private companies to gather data on Americans because it would have been illegal for the government to do the gathering itself.

Brent was there because he'd read an Associated Press story about a fellow who planned to organize infiltrations of Tea Party protests across the country. The plan was to have people engage Tea Party types in discussions about their signs and slogans. The predictable result, this fellow told the AP, was that many of the Tea Party arguments would be exposed as silly, ill-conceived, impractical, or just so much blowing off without benefit of facts or logic to argue a case.

Brent wanted to see if there were any of those infiltrators in Collier County. Almost anyone who knows anything about the demographics of Collier County could have told him there probably weren't. But since Brent's only been a columnist for the Naples Daily News for about umpteen years, he couldn't have known that. Brent came and saw and concluded that "They just don't make infiltrators like they used to." Pithy, huh? A regular Mencken, that boy.

Brent also wanted to assure people that there weren't any nasty people among the Tea Party crowd. There were no racists. No homophobes. No "general meanness," whatever that means.

Brent neglected to mention the overwhelming support of Sarah Palin by the Tea Party, and the "general meanness" if not downright snarkiness that exudes from her every time someone turns on a camera. And we wouldn't expect him to recognize racism, since he himself achieved fame for a particularly insensitive column several years back that attempted to communicate a black music event in a dialogue that he fooled himself into thinking was a) clever and b) urban cool. All he did was inflame nearly every black person who heard about it. It did get him, and his newspaper's owners, quite a bit of publicity, though.

Beyond that, Elnuestros has trouble suggesting any possible point at all to the column. 

Was Brent surprised that in Collier County there was no noticeable infiltration of the protesters? He picks a quote out of a national wire story, finds its general message inapplicable in a specific situation and thus finds it false? There's a word for that kind of faulty logic,, but I'm not going to go over Brent's head by speaking Latin.

The New York Times yesterday devoted a huge chunk of its front page to a story summarizing a fairly ambitious poll of Tea Party members. While all polls have a margin of error, was it Brent's intention to suggest that his personal -- and anecdotal -- account trumps the insights into that group's constituency the poll provides? Is that logical? Is that good journalism?

Brent is a knee-jerk reactionary who blew like a hayseed out of Hillbilly Heaven, Ohio, and landed in the closest thing to a haystack his meager talents likely will ever help him acquire. He plays the part perfectly, telling all the wealthy retired Midwesterners who share his taste for goofy humor and meat loaf that they truly are superior to those who think differently, or at all.

His reactions are instinctively protective of the specious success he and his faithful following have achieved, and worthless as anything but a reflection of his limited world view. He's so proud of them he's bundled them into a book with a title that vaingloriously suggests he's never struck out. Most readers know better.

You're still battin' a thousand, boy. Keep swinging.