"Sarah Wingo didn’t want anything to do with cutting up the reptile, a long standing science project, and her parents signed a waiver asking her to be excused from the project.”
A frog, for crying out loud, is an amphibian. Maybe the reporter got her mom to write a letter asking that she be excused from learning anything about biology, since everyone knows that biology is evolution’s first cousin twice removed, and Charles Darwin was Satan’s mole, sent to Earth to trick Eve into eating the Apple, which she made flavorful by rubbing on Lot’s wife’s shin. Or something.
Illiterates.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
And the morons, they go round and round
Elnuestros doesn’t pretend to possess the kind of cojones that would enable him to strap himself into a modified stock car and drive it in a circle at 200 miles an hour, inches from cars in front and back and on each side. He would sniff his hanky and swoon were he ever confronted with such a manly challenge. He also would get bored out of his mind at the idea of doing that for, what? Five hundred miles? Are you nuts?
But as much as he admires the hairy descenders of the original moonshine runners –– we’re talking to you Junior Johnson –– and as much as his sense of self was formed by driving the highway outside of Asheville, N.C., where Robert Mitchum flicked his cigarette into the face of the revenooer in that cinema classic, “Thunder Road,” he would maintain that the federal government has no business sponsoring stock car races if it can’t sponsor young minds.
Take that NASCAR money and invest it in HeadStart. Slap a sticker on those little black kids if you need to, but set ‘em up to win. Give them some factory backing.
That’s the kind of thing Elnuestros can’t help but think when he reads that some tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, cousin-porking, inbred, bass-fishing, Vienna-sausage-eating, Winston-smoking Son of the South has faxed a death threat to a member of Congress from Minnesota for having the temerity to suggest that the $7 million a year the Pentagon is spending to sponsor a NASCAR team might be better spent elsewhere.
But as much as he admires the hairy descenders of the original moonshine runners –– we’re talking to you Junior Johnson –– and as much as his sense of self was formed by driving the highway outside of Asheville, N.C., where Robert Mitchum flicked his cigarette into the face of the revenooer in that cinema classic, “Thunder Road,” he would maintain that the federal government has no business sponsoring stock car races if it can’t sponsor young minds.
Take that NASCAR money and invest it in HeadStart. Slap a sticker on those little black kids if you need to, but set ‘em up to win. Give them some factory backing.
That’s the kind of thing Elnuestros can’t help but think when he reads that some tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, cousin-porking, inbred, bass-fishing, Vienna-sausage-eating, Winston-smoking Son of the South has faxed a death threat to a member of Congress from Minnesota for having the temerity to suggest that the $7 million a year the Pentagon is spending to sponsor a NASCAR team might be better spent elsewhere.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
I want my Chick-fil-A
Poor Florida Gulf Coast University. Not only does it have one of the world’s truly unfortunate combinations of initials –– FGCU? Were they paying attention –– but it also finds itself constantly embroiled in the kind of petty disruptions that local newspapers love to cover for the color they provide.
The latest example is the tempest in a teaspoon stirred up by one Rashad Davis, who holds the title of director of multicultural relations for the Student Government Association.
Given the Wonder Bread demographics that characterize the college-attending population of Southwest Florida, we’re sure he’s probably hard-pressed to stay busy. But still . . .
Rashad complains that plans to renovate a food court and bring in Chick-fil-A represents a blow to gay people because of what he calls the company’s support of homophobes. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In fact, he’s about about as uninformed as they come.
Chick-fil-A doesn’t “associate with homophobic groups.” The corporation, which is family-owned and known for its devout and largely private attitude toward its faith, agreed to a request to furnish food for a gathering attended by some who are intolerant of gay marriage. That fact was incidental to the company’s decision to serve as a vendor for the gathering, but knee-jerk twits have jumped on it as evidence of some nefarious “campaign” to hound gays. That’s malarkey, but understandable in an age in which self-aggrandizing clowns like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made the demonization of perverts a line item in their annual fund-raising budgets.
The admirable and uncompromisingly tolerant behavior exhibited by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, and maintained by his sons, has nothing in common with the public posturing of those who have long profited by preaching intolerance for the sake of greed and wrapping themselves in their own, mercenary facsimile of words no real Christian could ever imagine hearing Jesus utter.
Rashad needs to learn about the Google. He could use it to get to the truth about the issue in question. That would be much easier than engaging in the kind of rigorous academic research we taxpayers might have assumed he was prepared to assume as a college sophomore.
Obviously, we overestimated the quality of the education he is receiving at FGCU. He obviously overestimates, too, not only his importance in the battle to protect the rights of gays, but his command of the facts.
As he so blithely charges up the personal San Juan Hill on which he’s chosen to establish his fame and glory, it would behoove him to remember that tolerance is a two-way street, that actions based on assumptions are invariably unfair, and that latching onto an easily discredited cause is unseemly, whether one is doing so to promote bigotry, or to protest it.
The latest example is the tempest in a teaspoon stirred up by one Rashad Davis, who holds the title of director of multicultural relations for the Student Government Association.
Given the Wonder Bread demographics that characterize the college-attending population of Southwest Florida, we’re sure he’s probably hard-pressed to stay busy. But still . . .
Rashad complains that plans to renovate a food court and bring in Chick-fil-A represents a blow to gay people because of what he calls the company’s support of homophobes. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In fact, he’s about about as uninformed as they come.
Chick-fil-A doesn’t “associate with homophobic groups.” The corporation, which is family-owned and known for its devout and largely private attitude toward its faith, agreed to a request to furnish food for a gathering attended by some who are intolerant of gay marriage. That fact was incidental to the company’s decision to serve as a vendor for the gathering, but knee-jerk twits have jumped on it as evidence of some nefarious “campaign” to hound gays. That’s malarkey, but understandable in an age in which self-aggrandizing clowns like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made the demonization of perverts a line item in their annual fund-raising budgets.
The admirable and uncompromisingly tolerant behavior exhibited by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, and maintained by his sons, has nothing in common with the public posturing of those who have long profited by preaching intolerance for the sake of greed and wrapping themselves in their own, mercenary facsimile of words no real Christian could ever imagine hearing Jesus utter.
Rashad needs to learn about the Google. He could use it to get to the truth about the issue in question. That would be much easier than engaging in the kind of rigorous academic research we taxpayers might have assumed he was prepared to assume as a college sophomore.
Obviously, we overestimated the quality of the education he is receiving at FGCU. He obviously overestimates, too, not only his importance in the battle to protect the rights of gays, but his command of the facts.
As he so blithely charges up the personal San Juan Hill on which he’s chosen to establish his fame and glory, it would behoove him to remember that tolerance is a two-way street, that actions based on assumptions are invariably unfair, and that latching onto an easily discredited cause is unseemly, whether one is doing so to promote bigotry, or to protest it.
I can't drive 55, Version 2.0a
Rick Scott tells President Obama to take his high-speed rail and shove it. Why not? Hey, I’m sure Rick Scott is used to getting around in a private jet. Why should he care that a family in South Florida or Tallahassee has to drive six hours to Disney World? Or that they might not be able to buy the gas and the tickets to the park.
Let’s don’t even begin to talk about the jobs. We all know, or we would if we read the mouth-breathers who commented on this story, that only overpaid, lazy union workers would be hired to build the rail system, and that they would drag their feet and take forever to finish the job because that’s what overpaid, lazy union workers do. And the money they were paid, I mean overpaid, to build the system wouldn’t be spent to improve the American economy or to pay local taxes that support schools and cops and libraries. No, these lazy union workers would probably spend their money at Wal-Mart, so the profit would barely touch the poor non-unionized schmucks stocking the shelves and handing them their shopping carts and go straight overseas to China, which is like Wal-Mart’s Eternal Berry Patch of Happiness or something.
The comments that follow the stories in the Naples Daily News are far more informative than anything its crack team of reporters typically provides. Arguments in support of Scott, who, we are contractually required to mention, took the Fifth Amendment –– the one against incriminating yourself –– 75 times while being questioned about the billions his company ripped off from the taxpayers by overcharging Medicare, take the following approach:
• High-speed rail is a failure in this country. Look at Amtrak.This argument ignores the fact that Amtrak, while subsidized, isn’t nearly as heavily subsidized as highway transportation. Every trucking company, every strip mall developer, every clown with two acres of land withing a miles of an arterial highway, supports the expansion of highways, and therefore the extension of the gridlock that allows so many Americans to get on the phone and do business in their personal automotive cocoon, unlike in Europe where people have to sit next to strangers that include swarthy French women who don’t shave their pits and smell like a stack of stone crab traps in June.
• The people building it will be union workers, and therefore it will cost too much. See above.
• Nobody will ride it. Let me tell you something: A lot of people would be be riding it. Look around, and you’ll see an increasing number of hard-working Americans who no longer have the means to keep reliable, long-range transportation in the driveway. See the USA in your Chevrolet? Yeah, right. With gas headed toward four bucks a gallon and NEVER coming back down, no matter how many rigs we put off the coast, the average American family will be buying fuel-efficient cars that nobody would want to spend six hours in on the interstate, surrounded by crazy long-haul truckers jacked up on who-knows-what, and answering to the dispatcher watching them blip like Pong balls across the screen back at headquarters. They sure won’t be able to afford the gas.
• The rail system is another “government subsidy,” forcing us deeper into the arms of Big Brother and threatening our right to Be Free, as measured by our ability to go where we can no longer afford to go in cars we no longer can afford to buy or gas up. The subsidies that support the highway system, which serves those freight companies more than anyone else, don’t get mentioned.
We kill fifty thousand people a year on the highways, and act like we can’t do a thing about it. If the Muslims or the gay people trying to get married or the teen-aged girls choosing abortions over having a baby alone while in high school were killing that many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends, we’d declare war on them in a heartbeat. But we accept death on the highway as our unique American rite of passage, and defy anyone who challenges our right to continue the carnage.
The commenters on the Daily News site are cheerleaders for a status quo that has its fingers on the scales and declares triumphantly that the “numbers don’t lie” in pursuit of their own selfish agenda. They are short-sighted, determined to make the argument a “liberal vs. conservative” thing that they betray their own best interests, especially in the long-term.
But long-term isn’t a view that appeals to them. It’s like the “big picture,” a concept that makes them hunker down and close their minds to anything that isn’t a surefire short-term win.
So they laugh and declare themselves superior to the lemmings as they march blindly toward the cliffs they create with their ignorance and their pride, mocking those who suggest that there’s a better way forward than to “keep on trucking.”
The guy at the head of the pack, the one in the silk tights carrying the flute, is Rick Scott, the Pied Piper of Florida.
Let’s don’t even begin to talk about the jobs. We all know, or we would if we read the mouth-breathers who commented on this story, that only overpaid, lazy union workers would be hired to build the rail system, and that they would drag their feet and take forever to finish the job because that’s what overpaid, lazy union workers do. And the money they were paid, I mean overpaid, to build the system wouldn’t be spent to improve the American economy or to pay local taxes that support schools and cops and libraries. No, these lazy union workers would probably spend their money at Wal-Mart, so the profit would barely touch the poor non-unionized schmucks stocking the shelves and handing them their shopping carts and go straight overseas to China, which is like Wal-Mart’s Eternal Berry Patch of Happiness or something.
The comments that follow the stories in the Naples Daily News are far more informative than anything its crack team of reporters typically provides. Arguments in support of Scott, who, we are contractually required to mention, took the Fifth Amendment –– the one against incriminating yourself –– 75 times while being questioned about the billions his company ripped off from the taxpayers by overcharging Medicare, take the following approach:
• High-speed rail is a failure in this country. Look at Amtrak.This argument ignores the fact that Amtrak, while subsidized, isn’t nearly as heavily subsidized as highway transportation. Every trucking company, every strip mall developer, every clown with two acres of land withing a miles of an arterial highway, supports the expansion of highways, and therefore the extension of the gridlock that allows so many Americans to get on the phone and do business in their personal automotive cocoon, unlike in Europe where people have to sit next to strangers that include swarthy French women who don’t shave their pits and smell like a stack of stone crab traps in June.
• The people building it will be union workers, and therefore it will cost too much. See above.
• Nobody will ride it. Let me tell you something: A lot of people would be be riding it. Look around, and you’ll see an increasing number of hard-working Americans who no longer have the means to keep reliable, long-range transportation in the driveway. See the USA in your Chevrolet? Yeah, right. With gas headed toward four bucks a gallon and NEVER coming back down, no matter how many rigs we put off the coast, the average American family will be buying fuel-efficient cars that nobody would want to spend six hours in on the interstate, surrounded by crazy long-haul truckers jacked up on who-knows-what, and answering to the dispatcher watching them blip like Pong balls across the screen back at headquarters. They sure won’t be able to afford the gas.
• The rail system is another “government subsidy,” forcing us deeper into the arms of Big Brother and threatening our right to Be Free, as measured by our ability to go where we can no longer afford to go in cars we no longer can afford to buy or gas up. The subsidies that support the highway system, which serves those freight companies more than anyone else, don’t get mentioned.
We kill fifty thousand people a year on the highways, and act like we can’t do a thing about it. If the Muslims or the gay people trying to get married or the teen-aged girls choosing abortions over having a baby alone while in high school were killing that many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends, we’d declare war on them in a heartbeat. But we accept death on the highway as our unique American rite of passage, and defy anyone who challenges our right to continue the carnage.
The commenters on the Daily News site are cheerleaders for a status quo that has its fingers on the scales and declares triumphantly that the “numbers don’t lie” in pursuit of their own selfish agenda. They are short-sighted, determined to make the argument a “liberal vs. conservative” thing that they betray their own best interests, especially in the long-term.
But long-term isn’t a view that appeals to them. It’s like the “big picture,” a concept that makes them hunker down and close their minds to anything that isn’t a surefire short-term win.
So they laugh and declare themselves superior to the lemmings as they march blindly toward the cliffs they create with their ignorance and their pride, mocking those who suggest that there’s a better way forward than to “keep on trucking.”
The guy at the head of the pack, the one in the silk tights carrying the flute, is Rick Scott, the Pied Piper of Florida.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Five points ahead of an empty hat
CNN is reporting that Florida Sen. Bill Nelson “can’t crack 50 percent against any GOP challenger” in a new survey conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research.
The poll shows Nelson losing to Jeb Bush, who isn’t expected to run, but only five points in front of Connie Mack, who lives in California with the former Mrs. Sonny Bono and who pretends to have a Florida address in order to keep his seat in Congress.
Voters in his Southwest Florida district seem to have no issues with that. They just keep sending him back.
Rick Scott as governor? Mario Rubio and Connie Mack as senators? Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen together couldn’t come up with a scene this absurd.
The poll shows Nelson losing to Jeb Bush, who isn’t expected to run, but only five points in front of Connie Mack, who lives in California with the former Mrs. Sonny Bono and who pretends to have a Florida address in order to keep his seat in Congress.
Voters in his Southwest Florida district seem to have no issues with that. They just keep sending him back.
Rick Scott as governor? Mario Rubio and Connie Mack as senators? Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen together couldn’t come up with a scene this absurd.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Floridians are gloomy, survey shows
The fields have turned brown and more Floridians than ever are ready to pack up the the horse they rode in on and skedaddle.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
No entiende 'Elnacho'
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/feb/14/immigation-laws-illegal-florida-arizona/?comments_id=953765
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
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?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 4, 2010
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:
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:
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:
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:
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#ixzz11OVNCxzcBut 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.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Poor people forced those bankers to make bad loans. Really.
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.
Monday, April 26, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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:
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.
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.
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