Barbarous Africa

Not the whole continent, of course, or even a majority of its residents, but there are a few hate-mongering, ignorant bigots in Uganda that need a wake-up call. They’re trying to expand the death-penalty provisions in their already draconian anti-homosexual policies.

Sign this petition. It’s not much, but at least it will send a message that the rest of the world looks on their brutal homophobia with contempt and disgust.

And yes, I know that American evangelicals have been responsible for fanning the flames of hatred in Uganda. Do you doubt that I look on them with any less contempt?

Florida State University sells its integrity for $1.5 million

That’s a bargain price for throwing a reputation down the drain. FSU has turned over some hiring decisions to a billionaire ideologue.

A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.

This deal has been in place for a couple of years, and Koch has already meddled in at least one hiring decision, rejecting 60% of the candidates that the faculty favored. If I were a faculty member who found my choice of colleagues dictated by Koch (or Soros, or Gates, or any similar filthy rich dilettante), I’d be a bit peevish, and I don’t think the golden candidate would get much respect from his peers. On the other hand, if I were applying for a job and was rejected because I didn’t fit the ideology of the Koch brothers, I’d feel darned good and also be well satisfied that I wasn’t going to be affiliated with such a cheap brothel university.

On the third hand, if I were a graduate of the econ department of FSU, I’d be extremely embarrassed about my degree at this point.

David Rasmussen, the dean of the college of social sciences, is trying to defend the deal by saying they needed the money, an argument with which I can sympathize, since every university is struggling right now. But selling your principles of academic freedom undercuts your ability to support independent thought, and means you aren’t really a university anymore. You’re a corporate propaganda arm. Other universities, more respectable universities, have a clear understanding of that idea.

Most universities, including the University of Florida, have policies that strictly limit donors’ influence over the use of their gifts. Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was “unheard of.”

Say, Michael Ruse is at Florida State — will he condemn this policy, or will he make the same weasely excuses for it that he does for creationism?

Collusion

Salman Rushdie has an interesting insight into the fate of Osama bin Laden. He hasn’t been an underground agent, stealthily hiding in caves for the last ten years — he’s been living well in prosperous safety in plain sight, with the obvious assistance of…guess who.

Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?

So Pakistan is exposed as concealing the very fugitive their American allies were supposedly hunting, with Pakistani assistance, and what’s got to be even worse for them, American forces blithely fluttered in to a site right next to a major military installation, took out their targets with no loss of life on the American side, and then just as blithely flew back out again.

There are probably heads rolling right now.

Let them buy yachts

I’m just amazed that Texas citizens will elect congresspeople who will do things like this:

In response to the worst state budget crisis since World War II, the Texas House has proposed slashing $27 billion from the budget, including huge cuts to education, nursing homes, and health care for the poor. Yet last Friday, the Texas House Ways and Means Committee approved a tax break for those who want to buy yachts costing $250,000 or more.

I think every unemployed worker, everyone struggling by on minimum wage, every waitress working for less than minimum wage, every teacher watching her support dwindle, every farmer, every working class person ought to be storming the capitol and lining up the fat cats against the wall…but barring that extreme reaction, shouldn’t we at the very least expect those same people to walk into their voting booths and throw the rascals out?

Republicans kill women

It really is that clear and simple. Republican policies lead to women dying of neglect and abuse, and they don’t care. Tom Levenson does the estimates, just using their recent opposition to Planned Parenthood as an example — and that’s a legislative jihad that has a body count.

Planned Parenthood does lots more than screen for gynecological cancers, of course. This is just one example of the real commitment to saving lives, to life, that marks that organization. But this story makes the point well enough: when you cut poor and vulnerable people’s access to health care real harm results.

Which means that Mitch Daniels is presenting his bonafides to the Republican electorate with an action that will lead directly to the deaths of women whom he doesn’t know – whom he and we cannot know. That anonymity, the statistical nature of the crime, means that Daniels will almost certainly never pay any price, let alone a criminal one, for his role in their deaths. But they will be on his hands, and should be on his conscience.

And to go larger than just one politician whose ambition has swamped his capacity for moral reasoning, this is why we must work for more than just an individual electoral defeat for today’s Republican party. Mitch Daniels may indeed by the best they’ve got over there. That’s as damning an indictment as I can imagine.

I know there are reasonable, rational conservatives; I also appreciate that progressive policies are not all certified guarantees of success, so there should be a check on government action. But the current Republican party is a nightmare of stupidity and thuggish vileness, and they must be defeated at the ballot box, even at the cost of some sensible politician’s careers. Shut them down. Do not vote for any Republican, ever. The party has to be demolished, or the adults in the group have to rise up and slap down the idiots, the teabaggers, the Breitbarts and Palins and Bachmanns.

Why education suffers

Eggers and Calegari have an excellent op-ed on the problem of American education: in short, it’s the money, stupid.

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

I’ve been getting a bit annoyed lately at the deference paid to the military. I keep seeing special acknowledgments paid to servicemen — on a recent shuttle ride to the airport parking lot, for instance, a fellow shouted out to the driver that he should drop off the guy in uniform first, to thank him for his service to the country…and then the driver had to take an awkward route through the lot, passing by other passenger’s cars, to drop this one fellow off first. It was extremely annoying — and to the credit of the fellow in uniform, he was also clearly uncomfortable with this pointless special treatment — but the guy who shouted out the demand sure looked smug and pleased with himself the whole way.

I do not lack appreciation for our soldiers, but seriously — they are not an elite caste. They are working class people like many of us. Why doesn’t someone shout out for special attention to cooks, or park rangers, or high school teachers? They all do great work for us, and the teachers in particular do an invaluable service at budget rates. But for some antiquated reason, we still think it more important to give Gomer Pyle a gun than to give a teacher the tools to do her job.

Also, you’d be financially deranged to go into teaching.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

Isn’t this absurd? It’s also not just a matter of averages: teachers in prosperous suburban schools get paid more than teachers in poor inner city schools. Those who need education the most get it the least. There ought to be a greater commitment to public education and more respect given to those who deliver it.

I know what you’re thinking, and so do the authors.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

It’s going to take a great deal of political will to accomplish this sort of change. Right now, the biggest obstacle to a better school system is a creaking, useless mechanism for funding schools that comes right out of the 18th century, and simply doesn’t work: the local tax levy. Schools should all be funded at the state level, at least (preferably at the federal level) and the game of bi-yearly begging for pennies on a property tax should end. Instead, though, our government is full of awful, anti-common-sense ninnies who prattle about vouchers and private schools instead, who want to reduce investment in education.

Osama Bin Laden dead

There isn’t much information available, but apparently Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body recovered. I’m expecting his head to be mounted on a pike outside the White House now.

So…are we done? Can we bring the troops home and call off the war on terror?

Some people don’t seem to realize that my words above are sarcastic. Allow me to clarify.

While it’s necessary to stop terrorists, sometimes with violence, it is barbarous to gloat over the execution of an enemy. I find the chanting crowds cheering over the corpse disturbing, and the triumphal tone of our leaders is misplaced. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and threw away trillions of dollars, and our trophy is the bloody corpse of one old man? There’s no victory in that.

I’m also cynical. What was the point? Nothing will change. We live in Idiot America, which is also Fearful America, which is also Paranoid America, which is also Solve-Our-Problems-With-A-Gun America. One figurehead is dead, now the focus of our country’s fear will shift to some amorphous mass of generic Muslims, and the troops will continue their destruction, and we’ll still flag our cowardice with pointless color changes at our airports, and we’ll continue to sacrifice our civil liberties at the altar of national security. Nothing was accomplished, our purpose is as vague and tyrannical as ever, we’ll need to continue to kill more to feed our illusion of safety.

Oh, there is one thing we’ve got now. A few more politicians will cloak themselves in the blood of our enemies in the next election, and victory will be achieved for Blowing Shit Up in the name of Getting Things Done. And we’ll perpetuate the violence because it appeals to our citizen savages.

He’s not a racist — he’s just a Patriotic Tea-Partier

Say hello to Grady Warren, presidential candidate representing the Florida Tea Party. He’s not a racist, he says, he’s just “tired of Blacks, nigras, Muslims, and Hispanics, especially the illegals, calling us racist for trying to save the America that we love.”

I bet you can’t make it all the way to the end of this video. I only got about halfway before I shut it down.

That’s our Michele!

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.

She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren’t aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”

Shorter Michele Bachman: “Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!”