I am getting really tired of ripping on Hasso Hering. In Corvallis, the League of Women Voters calls Measure 49 the “legislative answer to the massive problems created by Measure 37.”
No, really. I am, I swear.
I guess I'll just have to redouble my efforts, or maybe eat a granola bar, or something.
His latest is just, well, dishonest:The campaign for Measure 49 has begun, and if the start is any indication, you are in for a pile of baloney.
The idea now is to scare us about Measure 37’s effects.
Since I am tired of this, here: Hering is lying by omission. To be honest, he needs to provide the worst examples of M37 excess he can find, and if those aren't massive problems, then he wins. I know it would take some digging (one might call it "journalism" or "research"), but apparently that's too much for Hasso. Either that, or he's really against land-use laws, which, given his psuedo-libertarian status, doesn't really surprise me. In either case, the guy needs to be honest, more honest than he is being here.
The second thing Hering could do provide an honest look at what would happen without land-use laws. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Get Off My Lawn, Part IX
On the Reading
A list of books I have read in 2007:
Irish on the Inside, Tom Hayden
On Truth, Harry Frankfurt
The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory, Amanda Anderson (yet to finish)
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (for the third or fourth time)
The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby
The Last Intellectual, Russel Jacoby (yet to finish)
Kiss My Tiara, Susan Jane Gilman
Iran Awakening, Shirin Ebadi
Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti.
How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev.
Books I have acquired and not touched:
Rhetorical Grammar, Martha Kolln
Environment and Society, Charles L. Harper
I think there have been a few more, but these are the ones I remember at the moment.
Also, writing them down makes me realize how many there are. I often feel like I don't read that much, but seeing this list makes me feel a lot better about what I do read. I know, I know - it doesn't compare to many people, but who cares?
I had also considered doing reviews on the blog for some of the books on this list, but I realize now that reading with a review in mind and reading for pleasure and comprehension are two different (perhaps three different) things for me. Sorry!
Finally, see the two books I've yet to open? By far and away the most academic of the books I've obtained (I found them on campus in a discarded pile). I don't think that's a coincidence. The Jacoby books and the Anderson book are also pretty dense, but so were Irish on the Inside and How the Irish Became White, so I don't think that I'm avoiding dense books, just academic ones. That college still has such an effect on my reading says something about college, I think, or at least my experience with it. I was a pretty voracious reader of books before college; now, I tend towards blog posts and news articles. I've also found that the reading schedule in college totally wrecked my reading comprehension. I need far more time to properly absorb material I've read.
Please feel free to leave a list of books you've read in 2007, or even just over the summer, in the comments. I would be really interested in seeing that. Thanks.
UPDATE: I also read Remembering Tomorrow: From the SDS to Life After Capitalism, by Michael Albert.
A Very Strange Story
A short while back, some Democrats joined with Republicans in the Senate to pass a bill that essentially legalizes warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. This really pissed off the liberal blogosphere, and with good reason. At the time, lots of bloggers were really confused as to why the Dems would do something so obviously stupid.
Well, the New York Times has a story out this morning that purports to explain it....except that it doesn't, not really:WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.
Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.
You would think that I would have excerpted the part where the reporter explains why the number of intercepted communications had dropped so much, since surely that would be important, right? I mean, the obvious reason for the decrease would be a variety of court cases and laws that "hindered" the national intelligence apparatus from doig their job.
I didn't excerpt that paragraph because I couldn't find it. It's not in the story. I mean, there is this:A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear — restricted the government’s ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication “switches” on American soil.
The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications “kept getting ratcheted down,” said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. “ We were to a point where we were not effectively operating.”
Mr. McConnell, lead negotiator for the administration in lobbying for the bill, said in an interview that the court’s restrictions had made his job much more difficult.
“It was crazy, because I’m sitting here signing out warrants on known Al Qaeda operatives that are killing Americans, doing foreign communications,” he said. “And the only reason I’m signing that warrant is because it touches the U.S. communications infrastructure. That’s what we fixed.”
But that's just bullshit. There's no reason a warrant is unnecessary there. McConnell does a good job normalizing the idea that warrants are unnecessary, but I'm not buying. It is not, in fact, crazy to sign warrants that deal with Al-Qaeda. It was, until fairly recently, standard procedure, and it worked. Warrants did not cause September 11, which is what McConnell is very subtly implying here.
For that matter, it's not like anyone was asking that this information be made public anyway - all that the lawsuits did was require that the Bush Administration go through an existing secret court, the FISA court, which hardly ever turned down warrant applications anyway.
In fact, for many people, cutting down the number of intercepted communications is in and of itself a good thing, since trust for McConnell, Gonzales, and the like is pretty low. Let me make that clearer: Many people, myself included, have so little trust for them that we consider limiting their power more important than intercepting communications willy-nilly.
While the NYT does ask McConnell and Co. why communications were down, it doesn't actually examine the answer he gave. That's just bad reporting - but it's par for the course these days.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Another Dose of Digby
She is - perhaps by far - the smartest political analyst in the liberal blogosphere for my money. In the last several years, I've basically never seen her make a mistake. Hell, at this point I don't know if she even has critics, and all the big names in the liberal blogosphere have critics. Anyway, this struck my eye:Hey, you can't really blame people overseas for thinking this way. I doubt that anyone overseas has been any more impressed with their commitment to democracy than I have since they launched it directly after stealing an election at home and telling everyone who raised the slightest protest to go cheney themselves. There may be people in the world less credible on the issue of democracy, but I can't think of any who have made such a fetish of insisting that other countries do as they say but not as they do.
Furthermore, the Bush administration has such a reputation for lying and incompetence, the smart bet is to do exactly the opposite of what they prescribe in any situation. You can't go wrong assuming that if they want something it's for self-serving reasons and that if they get what they want, they will screw it up so badly that even if it were well-intentioned it would come out badly anyway.
...
This is going to be a big problem for the US for a long time to come. People may recognize that Bush and Cheney are somewhat unique cases, but they also know that the bipartisan political establishment pretty much backed everything he did. It makes it very hard to argue that anyone else will be substantially different.
...
No matter what a new administration does, the single most important rhetorical tool they must employ is Bush bashing. And I mean that seriously. Our credibility around the world is moribund until the US government repudiates George W. Cheney.
There's a radicalness to her critique of the U.S. political system in there, and that radical critique - which is of the structural (as opposed to people-based) nature of the problems in Washington, D.C. - didn't really exist in the mainstream before the liberal blogosphere came along.
The big liberal bloggers and their hordes of commenters, co-bloggers and readers want to love America so bad, but the more they've learned, the more they - as an overly broad generalization - realize how deep and nasty the structural problems are.
It's enough to make my cynical black heart laugh.
Hometown Insanity, Comment Edition
Well, the first post I did on the LCSD School Board and Robinson now has 10+ comments. That is by far the most of any post of mine. Interesting.
I want to highlight one comment that just came in:Anonymous said...
This mess is going to set education in Lebanon back by years. It is highly unlikely that Dr. Robinson will be able to return to effective leadership and what talented administrator will want to walk into this disaster? The district will get an ineffectual trainee at best and this is a very big, very serious job. My only hope it that principals and teachers, in a leadership vacuum, will pull together at some level and produce some good education.
Rick Alexander, of course, is just a destructive force. He put his own kids through private parochial school. He does not believe in public education and is making it his personal mission to use politics to impede success of Lebanon's regular schools so that even more students will be driven out. This guy is bent on destroying the school system so he manages to get himself elected to a local school board. It is just bizarre.
I'm not so sure the first point holds - the district might still be able to find someone with some amount of talent, but that person will be a tool as far as the school board is concerned. Unless, of course, Alexander disappears. I will agree with one thing: The board and the teacher's union have done such a good job conflating hatred of the small schools initiative with their hatred of Jim Robinson's management style that they've all but guaranteed that a) any innovation will be from the bottom up, which could be a good thing, except b) any innovation will be easily crushed with a reference to the recent history of the district. No one is going to want to propose anything remotely forward-thinking in that environment unless they get the blessing of Alexander and the Lebanon Education Association. Which brings me to point #2...
The suggestion that Alexander got himself elected to the school board for the purpose of destroying the public school system is not at all bizarre. In fact, it has been a pretty common M.O. for conservative operatives of all kinds for years. The Republican Party, and by extension the people they appoint - and I am deadly serious about this - do not believe that government can be a force for good, and they are intent on proving it through a combination of mismanagement and a predisposition towards lining the pockets of their supporters at a huge cost to the general public. They the proceed to point to the programs they've just destroyed and use it as evidence for their claim that government needs to go. What Alexander is doing seems very much the same thing to me; it's slash-and-burn politics that, if successful, leaves the instigator as the only person left standing in a large pile of wreckage. In this case it will be Alexander and maybe the LEA, and since Alexander is an idiot, I don't consider that a particularly good thing.
What gets me is everyone else is apparently so blinded by their anger at Robinson's authoritarian style they don't see the possibility that Alexander could be worse.
However, I will say that I think essentially removing the top level of day-to-day administrative oversight may or may not be a good thing. The School Board cannot effectively replace Robinson in that capacity, as much as they may try (and it will be a disaster if they do). Micromanagement by one person is nothing compared to micromanagement by the likes of an entire board, especially one that contains Alexander (and especially given that micromanagement is very explicitly not what the board is there to do). On the other hand, it could actually serve to leave people with more freedom to innovate at the school or classroom level - under the radar, so to speak. Unfortunately, that could go either way, and in any case getting support for innovation in the future is a dicey proposition.
I would not want to be a parent with a kid in that district right now.
Does anyone know for sure if Alexander's kids went to a private school? If so, which one? Was it in Lebanon?
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Get Off My Lawn, Part VIII
This is a short one:A Portland city commissioner has proposed restrictions on the sale of cans of spray paint. Buyers would have to produce ID, and stores would have to keep track. And on the slippery slope toward the 21st century police state, we slide down another notch.
...
What towns need are not new regulations on the sale of spray paint. What towns need is the gumption to get tough with one or two taggers who are caught, as an example to all the others. How tough? As tough as need be to stop this particular wrong. More nighttime neighborhood patrols, more arrests, and longer jail terms — that might do the trick.
1. In the first paragraph, Hering apparently deplores the slippery slope towards the police state. In the third paragraph he encourages bringing the hammer down on taggers. I'm confused....wait! I get it! Hasso thinks he's libertarian! This explains a lot. However, it doesn't explain the annoying disparity on display here.
2. This editorial isn't really surprising. Power - violence on the part of the State - is what Hasso seems to understand and countenance. I would prefer to see someone ask these questions: Why do people create graffiti in the first place? Is graffiti art? Can we delineate cases where graffiti causes damage (when it's on works of art, historical buildings, etc.) and when it doesn't (on the back of a dumpster or on an abandoned building or on the side of a train car)? Metaphorically taking a kid out back and beating their ass with a paddle isn't going to solve anything. I really wish Hering would realize that the rest of the world is not like him.
3. Of course, the proposal by the Portland City Commissioner is stupid. He's thinking with his cock been well socialized by U.S. culture into thinking, just like Hering, that state-sponsored violence is actually a solution and not a problem.
Shared Post Trends
Looking at my shared posts, apparently what I feel is important to share are posts containing horrifying stories about women who are being mistreated at the hands of the state, usually after being mistreated at the hands of sexist assholes males.
Given that the shared items list is meant to be a snapshot of what my daily reading is like, I'd say it's fairly accurate, and it may provide y'all with a shred of insight into why I am the way I am.
Has anyone noticed this, or any other trends with the shared items? Are there blogs I always share posts from?
Please leave a comment if you've noticed something.
The Stupid, It Burns
Via Afro-netizen, an NYT story about paying students to take and perform well on standardized tests:Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
I have nothing to say besides that this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and it's wrong to boot. Blech all around.
Talk about just applying capitalist values to everything.
There Is At Least One Good Dennis
From the liveblogging thread over at Americablog:6:55: Joe: ENDA issues - what do you see as a hurdle to getting it done.
Kucinich commends Barney Frank for leading on the legislation. The issue of employment non-discrimination affects everyone; there should be no reason to discriminate. The same kind of hurdles are faced in marriage equality issues as well. One plus one, when you're talking about gay couples currently equals zero under the law.
Summary: long pregnant pause before he starts to speak. He says we need a president to understand love in the deepest sense. He couldn't imagine meeting the love of my life and being told that you cannot be married. That would be devastating. He's ready to be the person that transforms this nation and reconnects us with the deepest truths there are.
There are some things that make it crystal clear to me how far away our value system is from one in which people are allowed and even encouraged to give freely of themselves, especially when it comes to love.
I am also talking about, of course, the fact that Kucinich gets laughed at by people for not being "serious" enough, what with his talk of a 'Department of Peace' and his talk about love and whatnot.
There is nothing more serious than love.
