The upside of insomnia

Comedy Central doesn't bleep out the fucks at 4 a.m.  Jim Norton uncensored -- if I wasn't wide awake before, I sure am now. 

I'm not sure why I'm awake this early.  I thought it was because the phone was ringing at 3 a.m. and was all set to be annoyed about people drunk dialing wrong numbers, but I must have dreamt it -- when I checked the phone the last call registered by caller ID was from a couple days ago. 

Actually, a drunk dialed wrong number wouldn't bother me too much, at least not as much as the robocalls my cell phone has been getting from one of the local mega-churches.  My minutes (I have a cheap plan with a finite amount) are getting eaten by taped greetings from what sounds like a Stepford wife hoping that she'll see me in church on Sunday.  Christ on a crutch.  If I wasn't an atheist before, that type of mass marketing technique would turn me into one pretty fast.   If you're going to proselytise, people, at least show the same amount of ambition the Jehovahs and the Mormons do and do it in person.  Get out there and start pounding the pavement and ringing doorbells.  Not that either group has much luck when they knock on our door -- our neighborhood tends to get the missionaries who come prepared with the Spanish-language version of the Book of Mormon so the conversations tend to be brief -- but at least they're human. 

Social Security Reform

Whatever happened to Tony Danza?

And what does it mean when a person dreams about bus travel?  Is it more or less significant that Tony Danza was also on the bus? 

I've read enough about dream symbolism to know that travel in any way, shape, or form represents a desire to leave one's current situation, whatever that situation might be.  It's actually fairly accurate, too, because I'm impatient in the short term to get the proposed move from this apartment into a renovated one over with (the latest update is that it might, just might, happen sometime around Labor Day, but the manager didn't sound particularly optimistic), and in the long term I'm anxious to get out of Atlanta.  But Tony Danza? 

I'll just chalk it up to a weird connection triggered by having spent some time on the phone last night with the Older Daughter.  She was a fan, sort of, of "Who's the Boss?"  That didn't come up in conversation, but who knows what sort of odd linkages happen in the subconscious.  My friend Teresa was in the dream, too, and I haven't seen her in ages.  Maybe my subconscious is planning a trip to Grand Rapids?

I'm one of those people who usually doesn't remember dreams at all, so when I do, I'm always a little curious as to just what inspired what I do remember.  Usually I can come up with some sort of explanation . . . but Tony Danza? Very strange. 

New depths of stupidity and revisionist history

What's the first thing I hear on C-SPAN this morning?  We shouldn't blame poor former President Bush for anything, because after all when he came into office he had to deal with the aftermath of 9/11 -- which happened on Clinton's watch. 

Let's see.  9/11 = September 11, 2001.

Bush inauguration = January 20, 2001.

Definitely one of those should I laugh or cry moments. 

That call was followed immediately by someone ranting about Woodrow Wilson taking the country off the gold standard in 1937.  Nice trick, considering that Wilson died in 1924. 

So much for any fantasies a person might cherish about C-SPAN viewers being more literate or knowledgeable than the general public.  Maybe I should stop admitting I watch "Washington Journal" as much as I do.

Stunning display of cluenessness

I was watching The Ed Show on MSNBC last night, and got to witness one of the all-time most clueless displays of white ignorance and racism I've seen in a long time.  The panel discussion was about Dr. Laura's use of the infamous N word in talking with a caller.  The caller had a legitimate problem, and Dr. Laura responded the way she always does -- blame the victim -- and accused the caller of being too sensitive. 

Dr. Laura also did the usual psuedo-naive white person's lament of "I don't get it.  Why is it wrong for me to say nigger, but black people use it all the time?"  The simple answer, one that doesn't even get into the long and troubled history of race relations in this country, is "For the same reason that the Irish can call each other drunks and Poles can tell Polish jokes without being called bigots, but people outside their ethnicity cannot, you dumb bitch."  But that isn't what floored me about the discussion on The Ed Show. 

No, that honor goes to Heidi Harris, Las Vegas conservative radio talk show host.  In debating whether or not Dr. Laura did something wrong, Harris told Joe Madison (a black progressive with an XM satellite radio show) Dr. Laura doesn't dislike black people.  Madison thought the same thing that I did -- that Harris was going to pull out that tired line about "some of her best friends. . ."  We were wrong.  Harris dropped so far into cluelessness that even my jaw dropped.  Her defense of Dr. Laura?  The woman can't be a bigot -- she has a black employee (a bodyguard). 

Holy fuck.  That's in the same class as "I really like Hispanic people. Our gardener Jose is a gem."  No wonder the right wing comes across as a bunch of tinfoil hat types.  They really are dumb as rocks.

Diversity

A recent post over at That's Why got me to thinking about kids, diversity, and education.  Back when the Younger Daughter was really young, the S.O. got recruited by Lockheed to work as a  prototype product structures development mechanic.  We found ourselves living in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, close to the crosshairs formed by the intersection of Roscoe and Sepulveda boulevards.  We enrolled the kids in school, and thought, cool, they're going to be able to walk to school for the first time ever -- Noble Avenue Elementary was just a couple blocks away so there'd be no spending an hour on the bus as it meandered around the countryside.

Then we got the letter.

Turned out the Los Angeles Metropolitan Unified School District was finally going to comply with court ordered busing for integration.  Big meeting at the elementary school so parents would learn just what the ramifications of the court order were and how it applied to their kids. 

The room was packed solid, of course, with angry parents saying, in essence, Hell, no.  No way is my kid getting on a school bus to be driven across the valley to god's knows where just so "those people*" can be integrated. 

Well, at least the system for determining who got on the bus was fair:  it went by birth month.  Kids born in the odd months (January, March, May, July, September, November) got to stay at Noble Avenue; kids born in the even months (February, April, June, August, October, and December) would ride the bus.  I hit August and December in the dropping babies lottery; my two got on the bus. 

Of course, out on the other end of the line, in the much wealthier and whiter suburb of Canoga Park, the parents reacted not with resignation but with last minute enrolments at private schools.  End result?  See above photo. 

As for my kids, who got bused out from the inner city school with too many minority students to the predominantly white 'burbs in the interest of diversity, the younger one is the only girl in the back row of the photo.  I've always kind of wondered if her first grade spelling lists included "irony."

*upper middle class white suburbanites

Maybe your paranoia is seeing a problem where none exists?

I heard a moderately amusing on the news today.  Seems a local watchdog group, Jobs for Georgians, is concerned about undocumented workers being hired to work on a major government construction project, the new Cobb County Courthouse.  So they pushed for background checks of the approximately 700 workers on the project.  The sheriff's department says they've investigated over half the workers, and so far this is what they've found:

Two guys with outstanding warrants:  Lambert Williams, 31, for failure to pay child support, and Ray Lee Roberts, 29, for violating probation.

So much for the vast hordes of mojados stealing jobs from honest Americans.

Weed control revisited

No surprises here

There's been a fair amount of discussion on C-SPAN this morning about corruption in Congress and what a terrible blow it is to Nancy Pelosi that both Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are facing ethics problems.  Why?

This is classic media hype, this whole golly gee, what a shocker, someone in Congress has gotten nailed for sleazy behavior and we're all so surprised that this is happening, a sort of breathless naivete like it's never, ever happened before. 

Get real, people.  It happens every term -- some Congress critter who's managed to get re-elected multiple times and has gone for 10, 20, or 30 years with no meaningful opposition back in his or her home district starts confusing holding a political office with being given a lifetime entitlement.  They start thinking the rules no longer apply to them.  They become addicted to the junkets provided by industry lobbyists, they start giving jobs to their relatives, they cut various corners because they figure they can use their positions to intimidate anyone who dares to remind them there are rules.  They abuse their positions by sexually harassing staffers and Congressional pages, they go out and party hard, abusing drugs and/or alcohol because they figure they can hush up any tickets or arrests, and so on.  The longer they're in office, the more brazen the behavior, and eventually they get caught.  And it's nonpartisan -- both parties have experienced the embarrassment of a senator or representative getting caught, sometimes quite literally, with his pants down (does anyone remember Larry Craig?). 

Similarly, every administration ends up with at least a handful of appointees getting nailed for corruption or other criminal activities.  I think the Reagan administration currently holds the record for number of criminal indictments of appointees, beating out Warren G. Harding by a cabinet officer or two, but no administration is totally immune. 

So why the feigned surprise?  Maybe because the media is like the rest of the American populace and has a hard time remembering anything that happened more than a week ago, but more likely because sensationalism sells.  The headline equivalent of "Holy crap! I can't believe this is happening!!" is going to draw a lot more eyeballs than "Long-held suspicions confirmed."

When I look at cases like Rangel and Waters, I see the inevitable result of gerrymandering, of districts being drawn in a way that makes them solidly safe for one party or the other.  It's a lot easier to grow complacent and corrupt if you think there's never going to be any serious opposition to your candidacy.  When I look at the map for the Atlanta area, for example, and see the convoluted lines for District 13, I know it was created to ensure a district that would be reliably one party or the other -- and, as it turns out, it captures the areas around the edges of metropolitan Atlanta that lean Democratic.  (It's currently represented by David Scott. The two districts in the middle, 4 and 5, are solidly Democratic.)  The sad reality is that in any given year, over 90% of incumbents will be returned to office.  We may talk about throwing the bums out, but the advantages of incumbency mean we're rarely able to follow through.  Most changes in Congress this year, at least on the Democratic side of the aisle, despite the posturing the Tea Party and others, are more likely to result from Congress critters deciding on their own to retire (e.g., Stupak in Michigan) than from anything happening in voting booths.