Category: Quick Hits

The first three posts for this week have been fairly in-depth, and I'm trying to make major financial decisions at the moment. In the meantime, please continue to enjoy Monday through Wednesday.

Oh, and this. Chew on this for a while too.

I recently asked my neighbors' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, are liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?'

She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'

Her parents beamed with pride.

'Wow…what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don’t have to wait until you're President to do that!

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You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.'

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?'

I said, 'Welcome to Conservatism.'

Her parents still aren’t speaking to me.

I place the odds that this happened at around 0%. But true story or not, it teaches us all a valuable lesson: that the guy who wrote this is an unbearable d-bag.
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Part II from Monday's post will have to wait a day; this is a story I have to pass along.

The Newton County Sheriff’s Office is investigating why a couple was confronted at gunpoint by neighbors and then arrested and forced to spend the night in jail when they tried to move into the home they had just purchased, Channel 2 Action News reported.

Jean Kalonji, an immigrant from the Congo, said that being confronted by armed neighbors brought back painful memories.
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The Kalonji family had just closed on a foreclosed home and were told by their real estate agent they should go over to the house and change the locks.

But when Jean Kalonji and his wife, Angelica, started working at the home, an armed man and another person who appeared to be the man’s son allegedly confronted them.

"He say to put the hands up and get out from the house, otherwise he would shoot us," the husband told Channel 2.

The neighbors didn’t believe the couple when they told them they had bought the home and called the Newton County Sheriff’s Office. The Kalonjis didn’t have the closing papers with them, so deputies arrested them, charged them with loitering and prowling and took them to jail.

A few things.

First, I'm not surprised they were arrested. Being in a foreclosed (and presumably unoccupied) home without any proof of ownership or residence…I can see why the cops would be suspicious. That is not the issue. I would, however, love to hear an explanation of why it took a full day to verify that they own the home and release them from jail.

Second, "Mark Mitchell, spokesman for the Newton Sheriff’s Office, said authorities are 'looking into it, exactly what occurred, why it occurred.'" That's big of them.

Finally, I'm starting to realize that the NRA is right.
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Guns don't kill people; people kill people. So I'm not sure why they fight to ensure that every walking personality disorder in this country can get his hands on a bunch of guns. I'm not sure if it's something in the water down here or if this is a predictable response to social and economic problems over the past few years, but there seems to be a spike in suburban commandos embracing their fantasies and playing Cop. Rather than calling the police and reporting, "There are some strange people in a vacant home across the street. Please check it out." these rocket scientists decided that the best course of action was to swing into vigilante mode and start pointing guns at (black, not coincidentally) people.

I'm at a loss to explain why an appreciable portion of the American public seems to view this as rational behavior.
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Maybe the same way that WebMD has turned everyone into a doctor and the internet has made everyone into an expert on everything, some people believe that having a gun turns them into a cop. I almost wish the homeowners had been burglars – armed ones with hair trigger tempers, so that perhaps the two gun-wielding neighbors would have ended up a cautionary tale to other would-be Rambos making decisions in a cocktail of racism, delusions of grandeur, and fear.
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You know what I can't stand?

Wait, I have to take a minute to process and accept the fact that I just started this post exactly as Andy Rooney would if he could use a computer. OK. Done.

I can't stand it when white people start saying incredibly racist shit to me, or in my presence, in that grating "Well now that there are none of THEM around we can be honest, right?
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This guy knows what I'm talking about" tone. Casual acquaintances or even total strangers do this. As long as they see a white face, they figure it's safe to tell me how they really feel. I'm trying to determine if this actually happens to me more now that I live in the south, but suffice it to say that it happens a lot now and throughout my life. The speaker in these situations is almost inevitably a white person over 40 boiling over with the frustration of being rhetorically castrated at work and in polite society. They frequently rail against "political correctness", which is a poorly disguised way of venting their resentment and humiliation at not being able to call the President a n*gger without getting fired or ostracized.

These people automatically assume that I – or you, or any other white person – feel exactly the same way. We are stewing in anger and biding time until we can feel free to cut loose and engage in some real talk about the fags, Mexicans, black welfare queens, and, if the company happens to be exclusively male as well as white, bitches. They think that you want to hear their 20 year old racist joke (which inevitably commits the even bigger sin of being completely un-funny.

Note: if you're going to be offensive and an asshole, at least be funny.

) about chicken and watermelon from a forwarded email. They think that anything they say will be OK because you're white, and all white people understand how They are. Hell, you feel the same way!

I have no idea if people of other races talk shit about white people when there are none around, or if women engage in as much epic man-hating when alone as movies and TV would lead us to believe. What I do know is that it's incredibly ballsy to assume that anyone who shares your genitals or skin color agrees with your racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant attitudes.

Wait. Is "ballsy" the word I want here?
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Actually, what I meant to say is "delusional."

In August of 2011, MSNBC personality Dylan Ratigan became a viral video star courtesy of a clip of him going on a loud, angry rant about the subservience of our elected officials to the financial sector. He makes some good points about the problems at hand, but I felt like his performance got silly in a hurry once his (taken aback) co-hosts asked him to propose a solution. His response began with "The President needs to give a speech…" and the first time I saw this, I was laughing too hard to notice that it went downhill from there. The twin assumptions that A) the president is not "bought" in the same sense as the Congress he lambastes and B) that a presidential speech could accomplish anything in contemporary politics except to give the talking heads a topic for a few days are both naive and ridiculous.

Last week I spent a decent amount of time prepping my "Last Lecture" – and incidentally, thanks for all the suggestions. I considered going the "This is what's wrong with politics and this is how you can fix it" route. The more I struggled to address the second half of that equation, the more Ratigan's lame response made sense. It was jarring to realize that for all the time spent pointing out what's wrong with the political process, economic system, and society as a whole, I have next to nothing to offer as a solution. I don't even know where we could plausibly start fixing this mess. Maybe Ratigan realized the same thing and that's why he was so angry. Maybe being forced to admit that we don't have any answers makes us feel like the designated mourners for a society that kills another piece of itself every day.

Sure, we all recognize things that could improve the political process; getting money out of elections is a popular suggestion (albeit one with some fairly obvious constitutional hurdles), for example. Would that really fix anything, though? If we draw the necessary distinction between incremental improvement and legitimate reform, it quickly becomes clear that there is no viable "solution." Our society has broken down since 1970 in ways that we spend our days cataloging: income inequality has exploded, public education has collapsed, the health care system is broken, Congress is barely functional, lobbyists are more powerful than elected officials, the media is a horrorshow offering everything from a milquetoast Beltway consensus echo chamber to Der Stürmer style propaganda and outright misinformation, unemployment is up and wages are down, job security and retirement are terms discussed only in history classes, and the military is both a budgetary and foreign policy behemoth draining away what treasure remains from the empire. And that list is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our problems are not insoluble, but they certainly are overwhelming. Clearly the world needs individuals with more vision and long term problem solving skills than either Dylan Ratigan or me. Or maybe our guess is as good as any other when facing an interwoven set of problems so big, complex, and deeply rooted that nothing short of detonating the building and starting over from scratch appears to have potential as a solution.

I wrote a big goddamn thing about health care reform and then the post got eaten and I haven't anywhere near the energy to write the whole thing again at 1:12 AM.
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Synopsis: Of course the Court is going to strike it down. That much was painfully apparent the moment the White House and congressional Democrats decided that it was less important to reform a broken system than it is to keep the insurance companies happy and rolling in our money. The idea was ridiculous from the beginning, especially given that it would not only inevitably end up in the courts but would end up before a conservative Supreme Court. So as his signature (only?) legislative accomplishment is undone in the next few weeks, Obama has no one but himself to blame. When he decided that universal coverage could or would be achieved by contracting things out to a broken, profit-driven health insurance industry, he might as well have pulled the plug then and there. The law isn't going to be killed – it was essentially stillborn.
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In grad school I had a professor who was big in the study of state politics, and he enthusiastically referred to states as "laboratories of democracy." He didn't coin the term but he certainly believed it with all his heart.

Basically it means that in a federal system, one state implementing a new policy offers the other states an opportunity to watch and learn.

If it succeeds it is imitated; if it fails everyone learns a valuable lesson from someone else's mistake.

Pavlov and Skinner and the other pioneering behavioral psychologists proved that almost any animal can be trained to learn from its mistakes through reward and punishment. That is, all animals except Republicans, whose brains never progress beyond an attachment to ideology.

Combined with never-ending internecine litmus testing, it makes damn sure that no one ever learns from experience or the available evidence. Just keep doing the same thing over and over again, torpedoes be damned.

John Carl Baker has an outstanding piece ("Austerity in Heaven's Corridor", h/t Mike) on one little Laboratory, Florida, that has dived headfirst into austerity with its 2012 budget. It's like a sneak preview of what other states, and likely Congress as well, will be doing in the immediate and near future. No one will wait to see if it works in Florida or learn any lessons when it fails. It's just the only acceptable course of action, and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it. Baker points out that what little opposition gets in the majority's way comes from factions bought off by lobbyists. For example:

The reality is that Governor Rick Scott, elected during the 2010 wave of Tea Party victories, is so stridently right-wing (and the state Democrats so weak) that opposition to the leadership’s more draconian proposals inevitably comes from other Republicans. A few, such as centrist Paula Dockery, have fairly consistently voiced disapproval of their colleagues’ more egregious actions, but this dissent is highly circumstantial: decisive opposition to the notorious prison privatization plan, for instance, came from two Senators with direct ties to law enforcement. And the Parent Empowerment Act, a highly controversial proposal allowing for the swift conversion of neighborhood schools into publicly-funded charters via parental petition, was scuttled not by a united front of political moderates, but by intra-Republican skepticism.

Florida narrowly dodged $100 million in cuts to mental health and substance abuse programs, once again through a last-ditch ad hoc coalition: a motley crew of law enforcement officials, Republican politicians, health care advocates, and members of the judiciary successfully lobbied for funding that approximates 2011 levels. Florida’s per-capita mental health financing is already ranked 50th in the U.

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S. [pdf], and deep cuts would have had immediate disastrous effects across the state. Even redneck county sheriffs recognize the apocalyptic shadings of forcing hordes of the mentally ill to roam the state’s multitudinous strip malls.

His brief description of the benefactors and the driving force behind these legislative moves struck me as particularly keen:

The full list of tax breaks paints a grotesque but accurate portrait of the diverse subgroups within Florida’s bourgeoisie: faux-populist ranchers, managerial charter profiteers, neo-Confederate citrus plantation owners, still-panicked real estate swindlers eager to take a mulligan and rewind to 2005. But Scott’s plan—which may eventually eliminate corporate taxes entirely in a right-to-work state that already lacks a personal income tax—is the Hayekian wet dream everyone in Florida’s ruling class freak show can agree on. Banks got in on the feeding frenzy too.

For the better part of my post-adolescent life I've been waiting for the voting public to figure out that the Republican Party is a front group for both the New Money and Old Money plutocracies, and it isn't happening. Intellectually I understand why people who vote for guys like Rick Scott do so.

But on a psychological level I don't get it. I can't empathize with some woman with three kids and two jobs who lines up to support the Palin/Gingrich/Scott/Walker/Ryan types. Regardless of how little sense it makes, it's not going to stop anytime soon. Consider Florida's budget a sneak preview of what will be appearing in your local legislatures soon. The Florida Experiment has been a smashing success at the one and only thing it was designed to do – line the pockets of the usual suspects on the right – and as such other states will be tripping over themselves to replicate it.

I have been in fail mode with respect to timely posting this week.

Last evening I did something I do approximately once per decade: fall asleep at 8 PM and sleep for 12 hours. This conflicts with my 11:00-Midnight writing routine.
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Sorry. I blame the pollen.

In place of an actual post, check out this column by Dan McLaughlin and tell me how much (using any scale you find appropriate to the question) it needs to be FJMed.

Just a quick update on Monday's post regarding Trayvon Martin. Apparently the attorney for the boy's family has a (recording? transcript? This remains unclear.) of a cell phone call between Martin and his girlfriend as he was being pursued.

"He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man," Martin's friend said. "I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run, but he said he was not going to run."

Eventually, he would run, said the girl, thinking that he'd managed to escape. But suddenly the strange man was back, cornering Martin.

"Trayvon said, 'What are you following me for,' and the man said, 'What are you doing here.' Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell.
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I called him again, and he didn't answer the phone."

The line went dead. Besides screams heard on 911 calls that night as Martin and Zimmerman scuffled, those were the last words he said.

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Remember: self-defense.

I still believe that the most likely outcome is a trial wherein a jury of Zimmerman's peers – 12 old white people from the Orlando suburbs – will hand down a Not Guilty verdict.

Alternatively, Zimmerman could be convicted of something as a way to take heat and attention off the Sanford police. Or there might be so much evidence piled up that jurors and Federal investigators cannot help but come down hard on both the police and the shooter.

It will be very interesting in the next few days to see if (when?) the Sanford police realize that their optimal strategy is to thrown Zimmerman under the bus and run over him repeatedly until the story goes away.

I need your help, because I'm dying.

OK not really. But I've been invited to be this year's speaker in a "last lecture" series on campus. The goal is to pretend this is the last lecture we'll ever get to give and make it about whatever we want. It's an interesting thought exercise, if nothing else.

If I really was going to die tomorrow, what would I want to be the last thing I said to students, readers, my rats, etc.

? Part of me would want to give a rambling three-hour political valedictory.
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Part of me would want to say "Eh, be nicer to each other" and leave it at that. Assuming that I don't want to subject the university community to either of those, I have to split the difference.

What's your favorite Gin and Tacos post?
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What if anything have I said that would be fitting – that is, important enough to qualify as "last words" but interesting enough that someone will actually want to listen to it. I've been doing this for so long that I've probably written about everything I could conceivably want to say to anyone, and I'm not the best judge of what will be well received or interesting as I write.

So help me out here, or these people may end up spending 22 minutes watching me air guitar and karaoke Milo Goes to College in its entirety.

Late comedy night on Tuesday, so this will have to be brief. Thankfully someone already said 99% of what I want to say about this, so I will simply direct you to this discussion of how sad-creepy-terrifying Callista Gingrich is. She is in many ways the ideal Republican woman – silent, dressed like a funeral home director, and her face frozen into a frightening rictus.
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Callista Gingrich definitely looks like she's trying to be a proper Republican candidate's wife. She has the frozen devoted spouse gaze down pat.

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She shops from the Serious Candidate's Wife clothing catalog, all clothes tasteful and designed not to call to much attention away from her husband.

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She unfortunately still needs to work on a genuine smile, but with Republicans, it's not that big priority.
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But all may not be well with this cultivated persona, as this clip suggests.

When asked by a reporter what he was giving up for Lent, the hefty Newt admitted sheepishly that he was giving up sweets. Perfunctorily, the reporter asked the same of Callista. Her response had just a tinge of bitterness to it: "My opinion".

Yikes. Anyone want to guess what precipitated that response? Whatever it was, it's clear that for many in the GOP, that's the definition of a perfect Republican wife.

She most definitely has the Laura Bush "silent and obedient" thing down pat. Overall you really have to question the sanity of any woman who would become Mrs. Newt Gingrich and especially Mrs. Newt Gingrich #3. Part of me wants to pity her but the rest of me remembers that she did this to herself. Regardless, she offers all of us a glimpse into the twisted Republican Utopia, the ideal America in which the women are silent, the men do the talking, and the poor and colored folk Know Their Place.