FIRST DRAFT

Hit the UW again! HARDER! HARDER!

To paraphrase Lloyd Blankfein’s character from “Too Big To Fail,” the legislature today fumbled the ball, kicked the ref in the nuts and took a dump in the quarterback’s helmet.

In what seemed to be a game of “Whatever Draconian Shit Scott Walker Can Do, We Can Do It Better,” the state budget committee not only froze tuition for the state universities, but it gutted the state support that Walker had proposed to give to the system. This was after Walker already cut back on the support he had planned to give to the UW. Couple this with the loss of flexibility that the state swore it would give the system and you can practically hear the higher ed system begin to crumble in this state.

This wasn’t the only fun bit of news to come out the state house this week. Walker sought the ability to sell off state buildings pretty much as he saw fit, so we’ve got that going for us. In addition, the budget committee has virtually crippled the longest-standing student advocacy group by changing how they get their funding. The group’s most recent big push? Tuition freeze. In other words, even if you’re on the side of the issue that Walker is supporting, don’t plan to get much support.

There are days I wonder why I work here. Today is among them.

On the plus side, I made about $200 from a rummage sale today.

This will help greatly when I’m told we’ll be furloughed or something.

 

Seattle Basketball: A Steal at Any Price!

Every fan who has ever experienced it has “that moment” etched in their minds. For the folks who loved the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was the demolition of Ebbets Field by a wrecking ball that was painted to look like a baseball.

For fans of the Baltimore Colts, it was the Mayflower moving vans tearing ass out of town under the cover of night.

The Raiders, understanding that you can actually unmake a mistake, moved from Oakland to L.A. and then back to Oakland. The Cardinals flew the coop from St. Louis and landed in Phoenix. (Shortly there after, they were renamed the Arizona Cardinals, in order to diffuse the blame for this horrific assemblage of misery. Hey, why should Phoenix alone have to suffer?)

For me, it was a cartoon on the cover of Sports Illustrated: A caricature of Art Modell sucker punching a Cleveland Browns “dog pound” fan. The article spoke of hope that the city could some way stop Modell from squiring the Browns out of town. In the end, it couldn’t. My team was gone. It would never be the same again.

Basketball has been no exception to this, even if you discount the ridiculous ABA days when teams seemed to move more often than most people change socks.

The only reason there is jazz in Utah is because the Utah Jazz were taken away from New Orleans. The same thing is true of the Los Angeles Lakers, as they came from Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes and ended up in the land of 10,000 flakes.

The list of “who-came-from-where-and-landed-over-there” is endless. Some of this stuff is easy enough to understand: teams were losing money or teams couldn’t find local owners. The Brooklyn Dodger president, Walter O’Malley, had an ongoing feud with New York “Don” Robert Moses as he attempted to build a new stadium in Flatbush. When years of efforts had failed, he took the advice most notably attributed to Horace Greeley: “Go West, young man.”

What is a lot less easy to understand are the cities that are pillaged who return and pillage others. In one of its few cock-block moves in the last 112 years, the NBA vetoed the sale of the Sacramento Kings to an investment group that would move the team to Seattle. The group was attempting to replace the lost NBA team (the Supersonics/Sonics) that left when Clay Bennett bought the team and moved it to Oklahoma City. Sacramento and its mayor, former NBA star Kevin Johnson, were fighting to keep the team local and pushing for the Maloof (if ever there was a perfect dumb-ass rich-guy name, that’s it) brothers to sell to a local group. Finally, after the NBA owners refused to let them move, the Maloofs agreed in principle to sell the team locally.

Seattle rich guy Chris Hansen expressed disappointment in the decision but swore he’d bring basketball back to Seattle. As much as this probably makes the Seattle fans happy, it should worry the hell out of everyone else. Any team that needs a free new arena, isn’t getting 41 sellouts per season or a fan base that’s not pouring buckets of cash onto a sub .500 squad will likely have Hansen circling like a beneficent buzzard.

And after he snakes it away from it’s current home, the carousel of “who’s-going-where” will start all over again.

And that sucks.

Say what you want to about my Cleveland Browns, but at least Cleveland didn’t steal someone else’s team to replace its own. We came by this steaming pile of poor play honestly. The fans there knew how much it sucked to have a team pulled out from under them, so they got on the expansion wagon and got a team as part of a really bad deal.

Of all the places I thought my Browns would land, Baltimore was the LAST place I would have imagined. The fans in Maryland had the image of those damned moving vans etched into their brains as their team fled to Indiana. The fact they would be OK with someone else doing this to someone else on their behalf was mindboggling.

L.A. went from having two football teams to having none in a matter of years. In the case of the Raiders, at least Oakland was taking back what was once its own. The Rams? They fled to St. Louis, which had lost the Cardinals to Phoenix.

The same is true of New Orleans, who got a kick in the balls back in 1979. That year, the team not only moved to Mormonville, but kept the city’s moniker and colors. When the city smelled blood in the water, it grabbed up the Hornets from Charlotte. (Of course, they had to take owner George Shinn as well, so I guess the punishment might fit the crime.)

I now live in one of the last truly safe vestiges of team sport: Wisconsin, where the Green Bay Packers are community owned. Of course, after the NFL became big business, the owners grandfathered in this concept for us and outlawed it from ever happening again. Still, somehow, we keep doing OK. The facilities are nice, the team is good and people are happy, shocking as that may be.

For the rest of the world, happiness is apparently only one rich guy away, if he’s willing to steal someone else’s team for you.

The Shadow Box

When I think of U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, I remember the shadow box that hung on the wall of his Madison condo.

It was a weekend afternoon and Pocan was throwing a housewarming party at his new condo. I was dating a city council rep at the time, so I found myself invited to this shindig.

I had met Pocan a few times as a reporter and via a few friends I had in Madison’s gay community. He served as a county board rep and was a solid fixture in both the area’s political and LGBTQ communities. I always found him to be extremely well grounded, humorous and generally just a good guy to be around. When I was fumbling my way through county politics as a student reporter, he took time out to help me understand what was going on, all without making me feel like I was a fool or that I was wasting his time.

As I perused the condo, checked out the deck and nibbled on some hors d’oerves, I came across a beautiful framed set of letters, about the size of a shirt box. In between the two letters, written on official federal stationary rested a set of rubber gloves, the kind you would expect a stereotypical housewife to don before washing the floor.

In reading the letters, I didn’t quite get the gist of what I was seeing, so I asked my date, who told me, “Hang on. Let me get Mark. He tells the story so much better than I can.”

Pocan left whatever he was doing and came over to explain what ended up being inexplicable.

He and a few other politicians from the gay community had been invited to Bill Clinton’s White House to meet with the president and discuss various issues. The Wisconsin contingent road tripped out there and met up with LGBTQ folks from across the country.

Prior to meeting with the Big Wigs in D.C., the Secret Service did what they considered to be a standard frisking of the guests.

However, since these people were gay, they donned rubber gloves.

The guests were hurt and outraged. The Secret Service didn’t back down. One of the letters explained that they were following protocol due to fear of disease. I can’t remember if the term “AIDS” was used or not, but the connotation was clear.

The guests voiced their disapproval both at the time and upon returning home. Sometime there after, Pocan and others received a letter from Bill Clinton, apologizing for their treatment and offering his regrets.

Pocan framed both letters and in between them, he placed a set of rubber gloves.

I don’t know if he forgave, but he made sure he never forgot.

I thought of Pocan this morning because of a report that his husband, Philip Frank, received a federal ID issued only to the spouses of federal lawmakers. Pocan and Frank were married in Canada in 2006.

“It’s significant,” Pocan told the Wisconsin Gazette. “It’s the first time.”

The card provides no benefits and is mostly symbolic, but Pocan is right, because each step taken in the right direction is at least one step taken away from the wrong one.

Malaka Of The Week: Jim Porter

The GOP, I mean NRA, is having a convention in Houston, which is named for the great Texan Sam Houston who refused to secede with the Lone Star state in 1861. The NRA's new President (a figurehead since Crazy Wayne LaPierre rules the roost) is a Confederate irredentist from Alabama named Jim Porter. I'd never hear of this bozo until today but he's a lulu, y'all:

In a June speech, Porter noted the NRA was “started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’ ”

“Now y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ down South,” Porter said to the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association.

Not everyone down South calls it that. I don't. I've never met a black person who calls it that. In fact, I've  lived in the South for 30 years and have been lucky enough not to meet *anyone* who calls it that. I know that they're out there and I've had people say equally Porteresque things to me because I'm a white guy. I think of it as the war to preserve the union that led to the slaves being freed. People of Malaka Porter's ilk always skip that miniscule detail about the Civil War.

I thought the NRA was a national organization as opposed to a branch of the CSA. Guess I was wrong about that. Of course, the GOP is essentially a branch of the CSA and the NRA-an ostensibly non-partisan organization-is essentially a branch of the GOP, so I guess it all works out for those folks. By CSA, I mean Confederate States Of America, but you knew that already.

I was under the impression that people stopped re-fighting the Civil War years ago. Guess I was wrong about that too. I wonder if Jim Porter knows that Sam Houston refused to secede from the Union with the state he did so much to help found. I doubt it. Hell, I doubt that Rick Perry knows that. Ted Cruz might but he probably thinks that Houston was a "squish."

Jim Porter is malaka of the week for obvious reasons. I really wish I'd never heard of him but now I have, alas. I'm sure he'll continue to say stupid and inflammatory things that will play poorly in the Midwest and Mountain West, which is fine with me. When he's done alienating people, they should send the stupid redneck peckerwood back to Alabama where he can sing this song to his heart's content:

 

Didja see that crazy teabagger slide show? I had no idea that ole George Washington was a Skynyrd fan. I'm trying to picture stiff GW at an arena show flicking his Bic and shouting: "FREEEEEE BIIIIIIIIRD."

False Flag Puke Cornered In Cambridge

Remember the infowars malaka who asked Deval Patrick about guvmint complicity in the Boston Marathon bombing? He was in Cambridge recently where he ran into a guy who gave him the full Jude treatment and cussed his worthless ass out. Do not listen to this out loud at work or in front of impressionable chirren unless you want to expand their vocabulary, that is:

 

Via All In with Chris Hayes.

GOP Logic: UW spending money is bad, but saving is worse

“It’s not how much you make. It’s how much you save.”

This was the edict my great-grandfather passed down to my father and the one my father gave to me. Dad recalled the story at least once a month when I was living at home. Each time, he told it, I listened as if I had never heard it before, mainly because the story was so honest and truthful.

As a young man, he had just gone to visit great-grandpa after being paid for some summer work.

“I was telling him how much I made and how great it was and how I could buy whatever and he stopped me. He asked, ‘Did you put any of that away for later?’ When I told him no, he shook his head.  ‘It’s not how much you make. It’s how much you save.’”

The man knew something about austerity. He raised four children through the heart of the Great Depression. He had a tiny plot of land in the backyard where vegetables grew throughout the spring, summer and fall. He would turn the earth over by hand and every time something was picked from the garden, something else was immediately planted to take its place.

His plum tree yielded a bounty that was served as fruit, preserves and plum wine. He dried his own garlic in the rafters of the garage.

When he walked to church, he would pick mushrooms along the way and store them in a paper sack he brought with him. By lunchtime, great-grandma had turned his find into mushroom soup.

Money was squirreled away in various parts of the house: a jar of quarters here, several rolls of pennies there. He had a wallet hidden away that spare money went into for emergencies. When his son, my grandfather, died, he called my father over to the house and asked how much the funeral cost. When my father told him, he disappeared into the bedroom and emerged with the wallet, from which he paid for the funeral costs in cash.

“If you had all the money I saved and spent from this wallet, you’d never have to work a day in your life,” he told Dad.

He realized quite early that life didn’t owe you anything, so you better make do with what you have and always be aware that it could be taken away from you in a big damned hurry.

In popular parlance, my great-grandfather and my father would be thought of as a wise, forward-thinking man. If his principles were to be applied to the University of Wisconsin System, he would be making Mike Ellis puke in his Cheerios.

The senate president and fellow legislators took their turns screaming at the university system this week, as an audit revealed the UW folks kept cash reserves on hand.

The figure for these reserves ranges from almost $1 billion to $200 million, depending on if you want to stir outrage or if you want to control damages. In recent days, Republicans have centered their focus on the figure of $648 million, which is the $1 billion, minus gifts and grants that have been restricted to specific projects. The system argues that all but $200 million of that money is committed and the rest is spread among its 26 campuses.

If you want a good math lesson on this one, PoliFact did a nice job here.

The general public is up in arms, obviously, because they’re being told that the UW is essentially bleeding them dry and then making a giant pile of money for System President Kevin Reilly to sleep in at night. For his part, Reilly has completely sucked at trying to explain this in a way that anyone who isn’t in academia, or who doesn’t look like a character out of “Deadwood,” wouldn’t understand.

Here are a couple things that might make this easier for people who responded in the same way Robin Vos did: “If you have $450 million in your piggy bank, I can’t see why you need another nickel.”

 

The concept of savings and commitments: The legislators (Republicans mainly, Democrats lamely joining the party) have been screaming about how much money the U has, focusing on the $648 million. More than two-thirds of that money is committed, meaning there are things on the books that require it goes somewhere at some point in the future.

Even though Reilly should have done a much better job of explaining what that means, the lawmakers should also be smart enough to figure out how this works. It’s how all of us buy and own things that go beyond what we can afford on a month-to-month basis.

For example, I get paid my monthly salary on the first of the month. If you looked in my “piggy bank” at that point, you’d probably think, “Damn! Nice! Let’s go have some fun!” OK, but most of that money is committed. About one-fourth of that goes to my mortgage. I have to pay that, since I lacked a six-figure chunk of cash to purchase the home outright. Thus, the bank gave me money and each month, I have to pay back some of it. I also owe about 5 percent of that on my car, which was purchased in much the same way. I owe my kid’s school money and my insurance company as well. That’s committed. So, I’m still doing OK. However, there are expected commitments as well. I know that I’ll owe for water, power, natural gas and so forth. Regardless of how little I use, I know I’ll owe something and based on experience, I know about how much I’ll need. Thus, that takes out another chunk of money.

What’s left goes to food and various other things. These are all variable, but it’s uncommitted money. If we really wanted to save a lot of cash in a given month, we could eat nothing but Ramen. However, we will still have a food cost.

The state’s logic would be: “Hey, you saved up all that money we gave you! Obviously you don’t need it! Gimme!”

Obviously, not exactly what "savers" would hope to hear.

Fund diversity: Let’s say for the sake of argument that we go with the $648 million number and get really ticked off. OK, fine, but WHERE exactly is that money? If it’s all sitting in Reilly’s garage and he goes in there every night, cackling like Scrooge McDuck… well… yeah, that’s a reason to be upset.
However, it’s not sitting in some giant central location, just waiting for someone to open up the vault.

The university system is comprised of 26 campuses that each receives a chunk of money. Each of those universities has a number of colleges and schools that receive a chunk of that chunk. Each college and school has a series of departments that receives a chunk of that chunk. Each department has a series of groups, organizations and commitments that are funded out of that.

Each of these areas squirrels away what ever it can each year, with the understanding that this might be all they have for a while (see more of this in Area 3). The carry-over effect means that they’re saving money instead of spending it all. Thus, you have hundreds and maybe thousands of departments, colleges, schools, groups, organizations and more that are responsible for their own little flake of gold.

What the audit revealed, in the most basic way, is that when you take whatever the system has in its coffers at The Home Office and you add it to all of those little scrapings, you get a giant figure. This, of course, is enough money to get irate about but on a practical level, not enough to really do anything with.

Some universities, organizations and systems I have seen do something called a “zeroing” each year, which would solve this problem and lead to others. They are funded each year with X dollars and expected to make do. If they spend it all, it’s gone. If they don’t spend it all, it disappears at the end of the year. If they spend into debt, they get some nominal punishment and their negative balance goes away. This leads to end-of-the-year weirdness like, “Quick, buy 10 of those dinosaur-bone iPhones! Our budget resets tomorrow and we’re going to lose the money otherwise!”

The “bipolar boss” effect: Let’s say you work for a guy who is a decent guy who pays you a decent wage that you can live on and you kind of have gotten used to that. You also know that you're valued and that the guy has no intention or need to fire you. 

You know each week, you’ll be paid X dollars and you know where that money is going. You have managed to put aside a little, but it’s not the “3-months salary” rule you’re supposed to follow. Chances are, you probably don’t worry all that much about all of that.

Now, instead, let’s say you work for a guy who makes Gary Busey look like a Buddhist monk on Xanax. For seemingly no reason, he tells you, “You need to pay more for your health insurance starting next month.” Or “I’m going to furlough you for two-weeks this year so I can save money.” Or “I know I said I was going to give you more money and more responsibility, but I’m thinking now that I’m not.” From year to year, you’re never sure what your salary is going to be or what is going to piss off this guy at any point in time. He doesn’t really see the value in you or the work you do and would pay you less or fire you if he could. He also set it up so that you and your coworkers can’t join together to complain about this stuff.

Exactly how stable do you feel in this situation? Would it be unreasonable to feel the need to store cash? To squeeze your pennies until Lincoln’s beard popped off? To fight for additional help each step of the way?

Each year over the last five years, the state has dropped some fun new variable into the equation to freak out the university (and many other state workers). One year it was furloughs, another year it was health premiums skyrocketing and another year it was Act 10. Even now, with his “magnanimous gesture” of giving the U $181 million in “taxpayer money,” Gov. Scott Walker is still making out. He cut more than $315 million from the system budget a few years back to balance the budget.

If all you know is that what you have in your hands right at this minute might be all you get, chances are, you’re going to hold on for dear life. You’re stockpiling cash like a squirrel saving nuts for the winter. You’re hanging on to everything you can while you can.

When it came to people in my family, I saw this all my life. My great-grandfather and his garden. My grandmother and her penny jars. My parents and their envelopes. When you aren’t sure, you make sure.

Instead, this concept is abhorred at the university level, mainly because it can be. When Walker himself set up a “rainy day fund,” he was applauded for being prudent. Now, it’s an affront to humanity.
Maybe my great-grandfather was wrong. It isn’t what you make or what you save.

It’s what you can justify.

Winter comes for us all

George Carlin was fond of saying that the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle class in this country. It was something that made them keep showing up at those jobs of theirs.

However, I don’t think that’s the truth anymore.

We’re already scared. We just don’t want to admit it.

I caught the movie “American Winter” last night, a story of eight families living on the razor’s edge of poverty every day. The issues that landed them on that edge ranged from the death of a spouse to the loss of a job. Regardless of how they got there or why they were there, they found themselves afraid to open the mail, fearful of turning on a light switch and crying when they faced the fact they couldn’t care for themselves or their families.

They moved back in with their parents.

They scavenged for scrap metal.

They saved rainwater for their sanitation needs.

The people captured in this film weren’t the drug users or the lazy bastards we’ve been told they are. It wasn’t a blinding flash of the obvious to me, as I’ve known more than a few friends who found themselves on government assistance or heading home to Mom and Dad’s house.

However, it appeared to be a stunning moment for all of them. The easy answers they heard for years had been deflated by hard reality.

“Well, get a job!” people tell them.

I’m trying. No one is hiring.

“You’ll have to settle for less than you’re used to,” people retort.

I’ll do anything, one man said. I’ll scrub toilets for minimum wage, which is far less than the $22 an hour he once earned at Volkswagen.

“You’ll have to tough it out,” people say.

We are, but tough doesn’t pay the bills.

I even heard a sliver of my father’s voice in my head as I looked at these people:

“If they’re so goddamned broke, how can they afford all those tattoos,” he would occasionally remark when something like this came on TV.

Or, “They’ve got a goddamned cell phone/video game/whatever… How bad can they be?”

Worse than they’d ever imagined, I would imagine.

In each case, the families were doing something they’d never done before and never thought they’d ever do. They took food from a food bank. They slept at a shelter. They lived without power. They moved back home. They sought financial assistance.

A 50-year-old man cried as he considered himself pathetic for asking his father for help in paying the light bill.

A 30-something couple fought the fear of losing their children in order to admit the lack of electricity in their home had created a detrimental living condition for the family. They did this because they were told that doing so would force the power company to turn the power back on, only to find out later that this wasn’t true.

A 40-year-old man quietly responded, “I’m an American” when a co-worker accused him of “having some nigger in you.” He was worried he would be fired if he started a problem. He was later fired anyway, being told by the boss he shouldn’t have hired “your kind.”

I thought about that last person a lot and how “your kind” can be an easy answer to every problem.

Many of the kids I grew up with looked at life the way a lot of these kids in this film did: Find a spouse, get married, raise a family and provide a good life for themselves. Somewhere along the way, a lot of folks were felled by something or other.

A good friend of mine was put on a one-week-on, one-week-off schedule to ease his company’s “financial burden.” He got sick, his kid had something wrong with her throat and suddenly, the doctor bills were everywhere. He is getting divorced and has moved back in with his parents.

Another friend was a single parent who had a good job that suddenly meant he would have to travel more than parenting would allow. He lost the job, lost another job and moved into his mom’s basement. He would tend bar and save money to send his kid to a private school, pouring everything he had into hoping his child would have a better shot at life than he did. He turns 40 this year and hasn’t had steady full-time work in years, despite his best efforts.

What always struck me most about these two men was how conservative they were about almost everything. Guns, politics, social programs, whatever. They held firm in the belief that they government assistance was for welfare queens, lazy pricks and people who just didn’t give a shit. Those things aren’t for “my kind,” I could imagine them saying.

They were afraid that by taking part in the system, they had become what they once despised. They couldn’t see that they already were “those people,” people who had hit a rough spot, people who had come up a little short but were willing to do anything to get back to where they were, people who once were protected from these circumstances by rules and laws and unions.

They just couldn’t admit it. Admitting it would make it real.

So instead, they did what most of us do. They built up a wall that somehow separated “us” from “them.” They drew false distinctions between who they are and who those “other people” are, so they could find safety and security in their illusions.

As I get older, I tend to find that the faster I come to grips with reality, the less painful it is to fix the problem. Whether it’s my bad back (“It’s just a twinge, really…”) or my car (“I can change the oil next week…”), the quicker I pony up (“Fuck this, I’m seeing the chiropractor…” or “Piss on it. I’m paying someone to change the oil now.”), the less problematic it becomes later.

If we can only get more people to see that they are but one wrong turn from becoming “those people,” maybe we’ll all be able to help “our kind” before that happens.

Point Blank

In other news, the revised gun safety bill is being debated in the Senate today. The Manchin-Toomey compromise is watered down but still worthwhile. I am not usually one to look favorably on symbolic votes or actions, but not on gun violence related issues. The most important thing is to beat the NRA once even if the measure isn't everything that we were hoping for. It is imperative to break their aura of invincibility; once that happens we can really get to work.

If nothing else, passing any gun control measure will prove those fuckers at Politico wrong yet again. That is another reason I wrote Senator Landrieu urging her to support the bill. They've written off her re-election chances so why not shove this up their ass? I am constantly frustrated with Senator Landrieu but every 6 years, I look around and decide to vote for her again since the alternatives are so unspeakable. She *did* vote for the ACA and may well support the gun compromise. I wish I were more optimistic about her and marriage equality-which she has signalled support for as a human being-but there's no way she can change that position and win in 2014, alas. We have a heavy concentration of hardcore pre-Vatican council Catholics in Southeast Louisiana and Protestant bible bangers in the rest of the state. Being pro-choice and pro-civil union are among the reasons that she's never gotten more than 52% of the vote even when her opponent is a joke. Of course, we re-elected Bitter Vitter, so our voters clearly have a lively sense of humor...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I hope the pressure from the awesome Newtown families continues to help progress towards handing the NRA its first Congressional defeat in nearly 20 years. They have had a powerful impact on the debate as anyone who saw the clip of big, tough Joe Manchin tongue-tied in their presence last week can attest. Perhaps they'll have the same effect in the House. Boner is a weeper, after all. But that will be a much tougher nut house to crack and I say that point blank:

 

"A bye-bye shot." (Abby Part III)

(In case you missed parts I and II, here they are.)

 

The Midget came creeping down the stairs around 6 a.m. It was still dark and the room was quiet.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Peanut?”

“Can I say goodbye to Abby?”

I pulled myself off the fold-out bed and smiled half of a smile at her.

“Sure.”

She went by the cage, only to have the bunny start to flap and flail, sending the Midget streaking back to me.

I petted her head. “It’s OK, honey. Abby’s just scared.”

“Did you stay here all night with her, Daddy?”

“Yes. She wasn’t lonely.”

“Good.”

She went over to the edge of the cage and whispered something to the bunny before running upstairs.

 

“I don’t want her to be alone,” my wife explained to me.

I sighed. Dammit. I knew this was going to happen.

The Missus had been trolling the house rabbit society websites again and found a person looking to place a few lop-ear rabbits. She had decided that if one rabbit was good, two would be better.

My logic was that I’d pretty much ponied up about as far as I was going to go when it came to pets, so this was kind of a shitty thing to do to me.

Still, to keep the peace, we agreed to meet this woman and her rabbits. Instead of going to a home this time, we met at an animal shelter with a “friend pen.” This would allow the rabbits to meet on neutral ground and avoid territorial spats.

The first thing we noticed about these rabbits was that they were giant. They had to be at least twice the size of our mini-rex.

Second, they were dumb as shit.

We placed Abby in the pen with the first one, who just stared at her. It looked like an awkward blind date between two gawky teens.

The second one wasn’t much better. He tried to sit on her before waddling away and peeing in a corner of the pen. Abby grunted her disapproval and tried to hop away, only to have this behemoth shove her toward the piss like it was some sort of gift.

The woman grabbed her rabbit, and tossed some paper towels on  top of the urine. She then added rabbit number three.

“Third time is the charm,” she said with a weak level of humorous optimism.

The third time was, indeed the charm.

Abby was sniffing at the paper towels when the third rabbit, the largest of the group came over and attempted to mount her. She flipped on him and ended up sitting on top of the paper towel.

The other rabbit then got more excited about the pee than the sex and began bullying her. Despite having no interest in the pee, Abby was in no way going to be pushed around by this dink.

She raised her hackles and began to thump loudly. The other rabbit reciprocated.

“Oh, no…” the woman began. “We have to watch out for…”

And they started to go at it. I’ve never seen rabbits fight before. Trust me. You don’t want to see it.

The woman managed to grab her animal away while Abby jumped about thumping as if to say, “Yeah, BITCH! You want some more of this you FUCKER?”

“Well, if they get to know each other a little more,” she began.

“Oh, yeah. Totally.” I added. “We’ll have to discuss it but we’ll get back to you.”

About six seconds later, we were in the car and on the way home. The rabbit continued grunting from the carrier. My wife was silent.

After that, Abby gave us the bunny butt for about a week or two. Eventually, all was forgiven, but the underlying truth remained.

She was the queen of everything and being single was just fine, thank you.

 

The Missus came downstairs next.

“How is she?”

“She’s still alive, but not good.”

Pause.

“The vet opens at 7. I can call in to work and take her.”

“No. that’s OK,” I told her. “I don’t have to be into work today right away. I’ll do it.”

“You hate this stuff.”

“Yeah.” Pause. I looked down at the bunny and then back up at my wife. “Some things are Daddy things.”

“Seriously? Macho shit now?”

Pause.

“Help me get her into the carrier and I’ll do what I have to.”

The Midget came downstairs and said her goodbyes. I couldn’t keep the tears back. What the hell was wrong with me?

“Goodbye, Abby. I’ll miss you.”

My wife and child then left. I was alone with the carrier.

“I’ll miss you too… fucking rodent…”

 ---

The vet was only about two blocks away. It was one of those ridiculously cold mornings, though, and every step across the parking lot felt like a mile.

I walked through the door, placed the carrier on the  desk and began to try to explain that I needed the bunny put to sleep.

Every word caught in my throat. My nose began to run. My chest locked up with a giant knot near my heart.

“My… rabbit… had… a… stroke…” I managed to gasp out to the woman at the desk.

This person was everything a desk worker at an animal shelter shouldn’t be. That’s about the only way I could describe her. She wasn’t cold, but she was daft. She had a complete lack of tact and couldn’t quite wrap her head around some basic human decency. She had to be in her mid 50s, so she must have seen something like this somewhere in her life. At the very least, she didn't have youthful ignorance as an excuse.

“Oh,” she said in a cheery voice, like I just said I was bringing in doughnuts. “We don’t have a vet in for another hour!”

I reached for a tissue as I tried to figure out what was going to happen next.

“Now what is wrong with it?” she asked.

It was a fairly pedestrian question that for some reason galvanized my ire.

“SHE,” I began, emphasizing and differentiating between the use of pronouns, “had a stroke. She needs to be put down.”

The woman had this dazed and confused look on her face. I had to pause and look around. This was a vet’s office, right? I didn’t accidentally wander into a fucking ice cream shop, right?

“Well, hmm…” she said, tapping a fingernail on the desk. “I guess… Hmm…” Tap. Tap. Tap.

And then…

“Do you really have to be here when it gets the procedure?”

“Yes,” I hissed. “I need to be with her.” More tears, more snot and more anger, just building.

“Oh. Mmm. Do you live near by?”

“Yes, just a couple blocks away.”

“You know, you can just leave it.”

That was it. That was the end.

I’m not a pet person. I’m not an animal person. I’m not exactly the world’s most sentimental person. However, anyone with half a brain and an ounce of compassion would have been better than this woman. I get that we’re not all equipped to handle everything we do at a job, but this was ridiculous.

“Her name is Abby,” I started.

“Yes, but-“

“Look, lady, she’s not FUCKING LUGGAGE! I’m not going to leave her here to die alone. She suffered a stroke, she’s in horrible agony and that’s nothing compared to the agony my kid is going through, which is killing me. If you think I’m just dropping her off, you’re out of your fucking mind. Figure this out.”

Stunned and yet still lacking comprehension, the woman walked to the back and talked to her boss. Abby stirred a bit. I could see her one eye through the holes in the carrier.

Please, it said. Don’t leave me.

The woman returned with the same stupid look on her face.

“If you bring… If you come back at 8 a.m., the doctor will get you in right away.”

I picked up my carrier and walked out into the parking lot. The wind whipped through me and blew through the carrier.

“I’m sorry it’s so cold, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

 

“She’s going to freeze. We have to do something.”

The ice storm that had decimated most of Northwest Indiana had knocked the power out to our house. I’d managed to get a kerosene heater and get it working. It was late at night on the second day and I was bone tired.

The Missus, however, was concerned about Abby. If we left her in her room, where temperatures were rapidly approaching 40 degrees, it was not going to be any great shakes for her. However, given the size of the cage she had (I had to build it in the room) we couldn’t just move her. We also had trouble in terms of figuring out what we’d do with her once we got her into the family room.

To solve the latter problem, I built a two-wall cage out of metal wire squares. We’d capture her in the corner of the room and set her up in there with us.

Solving the former problem wasn’t going to be easy.

Armed with nothing but flashlights, we closed all the doors to all the rooms along the way. We propped up the “rabbit gates” in other spots to help create a funnel of sorts that would force her to go where we wanted her to.

We then went into the room opened her cage and let her out.

Immediately, she noticed something was wrong and began to freak out.

We stomped our feet behind her and waved the light nearby. She freaked and ran in every direction before finally darting down the hall toward where we wanted her to go.

Success. Sort of.

Once she was in the room, she didn’t want to go into the corner. I backed her in with the two walls, but she kept getting around them. She hid under the chairs and behind the couch. Unlike dogs, rabbits are rarely enticed by food or gifts, so we couldn’t bribe her.

Finally, I threw a towel at her and managed to cover her. I wrangled her to the ground as The Missus set up the cage. We tossed her in there as she grunted and hopped around.

The thing I remember most about that whole experience was the sound of her hopping around on newspaper we put on the floor in her area. Every morning around 5 a.m., I was woken by the sound of crunching paper.

It’s odd what we remember.

 

After one of the longest hours I’ve had in recent memory, I went back to the vet with Abby in tow.

The idiot was still at the desk.

“The doctor can examine it before he does the procedure,” she said as she pulled up a billing screen. It felt like she was trying to sell me undercoating on my new car.

“Her. He can examine her.”

“Yes, well…”

“Look, I’m not a vet, but she’s not going to make it. We just need to do this. Please.”

She paused.

“What would you like us to do with it?” she asked, apparently suffering from the condition that Guy Pearce had in Momento.

My eyes ached from the tears. My head was pounding. Everything hurt. I didn’t have the strength to tell this woman that she should go to Hell and take a left.

“I… What?”

“Well we have several options for disposal. If you take it with you, that’s free. Or we can cremate it with other animals. You won’t get the ashes back. However, if you want a private service, we can return the ashes to you. That’s a bit more pricy…”

I had always imagined that the end would come with me and a shovel in our expansive backyard. A small marker and that would be it. However, the cold snap after a short warm up and melt had turned the ground to concrete. Add that to the fact we were trying to sell the house and there were too many barriers to a proper burial.

Also, there was no way I was digging up the rabbit and bringing it with us if we sold, despite what I’m sure would be anguished sobs from my child.

“The group ceremony will be fine.”

“Now, we require payment up front. The cost will be..”

I flipped my credit card at her. “Lady, just charge me whatever. Just please stop talking.”

She looked offended and yet somehow not smart enough to fully realize why she was offended.

Finally, the assistant showed up and took us back to the room.

“She had a stroke,” I managed to say.

“Oh, no. I’m so sorry," she said as she looked at the carrier. "It’s OK, little one…”

Finally.

 

Over the past couple years, we could tell Abby was getting older. Her fur began to gray a bit more. She didn’t want to come out of her cage as much. Her hopping was labored, even as she got in and out of the cage.

I could tell the rabbit wasn’t long for this world.

The Midget took notice, but in a much more positive way.

“I can pet Abby more now! She doesn’t run away as fast.”

Aside from that positive, most of what we were seeing was negative. She had trouble getting into the litter box. She didn’t seem to be able to see us as well.

After one of our myriad hermit crab funerals, The Midget asked, “Will Abby die some day?”

“Yes, sweetie. We all die some day.”

“Oh no…” She wept.

This was an odd change from a few years earlier when she wanted a puppy. We explained that we couldn’t get a puppy because for the most part puppies and bunnies don’t get along and Abby was here first.

The Midget had a different tactic.

“Oh. So can we go to the pet shop and trade her in on a dog?”

 

The woman led me into a small room where she pulled Abby out of the carrier. I explained the situation for about the fifth time today, but this time it somehow felt better because I could tell she gave a shit.

She explained to me how this would work, how the shot would be in the abdomen and how it would be over soon. She said the doctor will be in shortly, but she didn’t leave me alone.

“How old is she?” the woman asked.

“Twelve, we think. She was a rescue.”

“Wow…” the woman said quietly. “That’s really a long life for a bunny.”

The doctor arrived and explained what he was going to do. It was all happening in slow motion, but it was still happening really fast. It’s an incongruent explanation that is both accurately descriptive and yet temporally impossible.

I watched as he slowly pressed a needle into her white belly and pushed a full syringe of something blue into her. She didn't even twitch.

He checked her over and over again with a stethoscope. A minute later, she was gone.

“There, there, honey,” he said as he petted her. “No more suffering.”

He placed his hand over her head and tried to close her eyes. The eye wouldn’t close. He tried again with the same result.

Stubborn, little cuss…

“You can have as much time as you need,” the woman told me as she and the doctor retreated from the room.

I stood there for a minute, sobbing and then trying to figure out why I was. After all this time, I guess maybe this was why I hated pets.

The ending.

I did in death what I couldn’t do in life. I petted her. Her fur was soft, but her skin was loose and old. Her bones were easy to feel under the coat.

Goodbye, Abby. I put the towel over her and left everything behind.

The doctor saw me coming down the hall, and said, “We’re sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

The assistant said the same thing as she directed me to a back door. At least I didn’t have to see the idiot at the desk again.

I got in the car, plugged in my iPod and hit play. After some brief fiddling, I found the song.

Ave Maria. It played the whole ride into town.

My phone buzzed. It was my wife.

“How r u?” the text read.

“Fine. Done.” I sent back.

“You OK?” the next note read.

“No.”

 ---

About five hours later, I went to pick the Midget up from school. She looked better than she did in the morning. I’m sure I looked worse.

We got in the car and it wasn’t long until I heard, “Daddy?”

“Yes, Peanut?”

“Did you take Abby to the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Is she all better?” she asked with a child-like optimism in her voice.

“No, honey. The doctor couldn’t fix her.”

Pause. Silence.

“Oh.”

Pause.

“Did he have to give her a bye-bye shot?”

I gripped the wheel harder to prevent myself from driving off the road. The tears were back.

“Yes, honey, but she’s better now. She doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Is she going to see Jesus and Lucky?”

“I’m sure she is.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes. She was a good bunny, honey. I’m sure she’s just fine.”

Pause.

“I’m going to get to see Jesus some day.”

“Yes, peanut, you are.”

“But you’ll see him first because you’re old.”

I laughed. It was probably the first time all day.

The Longest Night (Abby, Part II)

(In case you missed part one, here you go.)

 

The first night with Abby was a long one. She was in a new place for the third time in less than six months. She was in another enclosure, but without other bunnies around her. Before we turned off the lights for the night, I remember looking at her.

She was perfectly still except for her nose, which was twitching at about a million miles a minute.

She was scared.

The Missus and I went to bed, but I was restless.

“I wonder how she’s doing,” I mused aloud after rolling around in bed and tangling myself into the sheets about six ways to Tuesday.

“I thought you didn’t want her or care,” my wife needled back.

“Yeah. Whatever.”

Shortly after The Missus began to snore, I slipped out of bed and walked into the bunny’s room.

“It’s going to be OK,” I whispered. “We’re OK people.”

The next morning, my wife found me asleep on the floor next to the cage with Abby sniffing me.

 

We have to tell her. The words rang in my head. We have to tell her.

My wife was right. I know what it was like to learn the truth much too late in life.

When I was about three, my grandmother had a old poodle that was on his last legs. On some random Friday when we came to visit, I noticed that the dog was missing.

“Where’s Pierre?” I asked.

“He ran away,” my grandmother said without missing a beat.

For the next several months, I’d sit on the porch at her house whenever we visited, hoping to spot him if he came home. Eventually I gave up the ghost when I was about eight or nine, figuring the dog had died somewhere, wandering a strange road.

When I was about 25, we were at some gathering at Grandma’s house when the topic of the dog came up.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s too bad he ran away…”

My younger cousin scoffed. “The hell are you talking about? They put him to sleep.”

I just glared back at him. “The hell do you know? You weren’t even alive when they had the dog.”

The table got quiet. I looked up at my grandmother, who had this guilty-as-hell look on her face.

“We never… We didn’t quite know when to tell you.”

After that, it became a running gag at the house, but the sting never quite went away.

As The Missus went upstairs to pull the kid from the tub, I did my best to clean up the downstairs near the cage and calm the still-flailing rabbit.

When I got upstairs, my child was still sobbing about her hermit crab.

This was not going to be easy.

As my wife explained that something was wrong with the rabbit, The Midget’s eyes grew even bigger and filled with more tears.

“Nooooo! Not Abby...” she wailed.

We took her downstairs and let her pet the rabbit a few times. Our presence seemed to calm the bunny down. Still, it was at least an hour past the kid’s bedtime and she had school in the morning.

“But Abby can’t be alone!” she pleaded. “She’s scared. Please can I stay?”

My wife looked at the clock and looked at me. She started to say something to our child, who had suddenly been surrounded by about ten used and crumpled tissues. I stepped in quickly.

“Honey, you have to go to bed…”

“But I’m scared to be alone! And Abby’s scared…”

“Honey, please listen. Daddy will stay down here tonight with Abby. You can sleep with Mommy and we’ll take care of everything else tomorrow.”

She sniffed back a river of snot. “Oh… kay…”

My wife looked at me with a mix of sympathy and concern.

“You shouldn’t have to do this… I can…”

“It’s OK. Sometimes there are things a Daddy has to do.”

As the rest of the family made its way upstairs, I pulled out the hide-a-bed and nestled in for a long night.

 

After only a few short months, Abby clearly became part of the family. In that, I mean she earned several nicknames and became stubborn.

She was Princess Abby when she was simply being aloof.

She was Thumper when she was loudly thumping her disapproval at something we were doing.

She was The Rodent when I was pissed about something she had done, including chewing on the baseboards, the carpet and the furniture.

She was Princess Consuelo von Fuzzy Butt when she was being the Queen of Everything.

She wouldn’t allow us to touch her, but we didn’t need a bunny dictionary to understand her moods.

When she was happy, she’d run at top speed around the house, spirling her ass into the air in what is known as a binky.

When she was upset, she’d thump her back leg hard against the floor, explaining that she found our work to be dissatisfactory in terms of cage cleaning or food provision.

When she just had enough of us, she’d use a technique that rabbit enthusiasts refer to as “bunny butt,” a form of shunning that would make the most fundamental Amish man proud.

Her attitude and her nicknames converged into one we often used.

“Stubborn little cuss…”

 

It was a long night of brief lapses of consciousness for both the rabbit and me.

She’d be silent for a long time and I’d drift into a dreamless sleep. Then, she’s spasm and I’d jolt awake, offering the only solace I could:

“Shh… Shhh… Shh… Shhhhh…” And she’d settle in once again.

And so it went for seven restless hours.

Around 5 a.m., I had the thought that was part merciful and part selfish.

Just. Let. Go. It’s OK.

It had to hurt like hell. She had to be scared as hell. She was 12 years old, which in rabbit years defies logic.

She flopped and flopped again.

“Honey,” I whispered. “It’s OK. It’s fine. You can let go.”

She went silent. A minute passed. Then five. Then ten.

Maybe…

She flailed about again.

Stubborn little cuss…

 

There’s something not quite right with Abby, my wife told me one afternoon. Can you take her to the vet and see what’s up?

Easier said than done.

The rabbit hated being touched and held. Even worse, she was fast as hell. We’d had her for about two years at this point and had managed to stave off most of the “bunny-care” problems that various books and websites had mentioned.

However, this time, she wasn’t eating and her poop was really clumpy, two signs of an intestinal blockage or constipation.

Neither of these things was good for a rabbit.

After a good game of “Chase the rabbit with a blanket,” I corralled her into a carrier.

The vet, a decent man who might have seen a rabbit once in his life, noted that Abby was likely constipated, based on her symptoms. The solution was to give her a laxative gel via an oral injection once a day for three or four days.

Unfortunately, the man explained, he didn’t have any for rabbits, but he did have some dog laxative, which was essentially a combination of Vaseline and liver paste.

He handed me a plastic syringe and a tube of this stuff and sent me packing.

When I got home, I gave her the stuff. It was easy enough because she was still freaked out from the vet and the car ride.

Of course, the taste of liver appeals to rabbits the way the idea of gay marriage appeals to Scalia, so she spent the rest of the afternoon slapping at her face with her paws and trying to shake this stuff out of her head.

The next day, we had to do it again. I had the benefit of having the Missus help me. Abby had the benefit of experience and mobility.

Upon my attempt to reach her, Abby darted out of the cage and began flying around the room in a serpentine pattern. The Missus held the injection as I tried to snag this bounding bunny.

She dove under the desk in the room. I chased her out. She hid behind some boxes. I tossed them aside.

Finally, I had her in a corner from which she could not escape. I went down on my knees to get her.

Knowing her only way out was through me, Abby darted right in between my legs.

With a goalie-like instinct, I snapped the five-hole shut, trapping her between my thighs, her head poking out near my ass.

According to my wife, it was quite a Kodak moment.

“NOW, GODDAMMIT! NOW!” I yelled.

The Missus dove toward my ass with the injection. Abby whipped her head around and spit and grunted and bunny cussed us. About half of the liver stuff got into or onto the rabbit. The other half was all over my legs and butt.

“DONE!” my assistant yelled as I relaxed my grip.

Abby grunted twice and darted back into her cage, slapping the crud off of her face with her forepaws.

I took of my pants and saw the wreckage my wife and rabbit had wrought. It looked like I had been attacked by a grease gun filled with liverwurst.

“Fuck it,” I said to my wife. “If she isn’t unstopped by now, she’s not gonna be. We’re not doing that again.”

That was the last time she needed to go to the vet.

Until now.

For What It's Worth

TPM ran a swell piece about the cover art of the NRA's house organ (LaPierre is their swinging dick) America's 1st Freedom. They were all pretty inflammatory from a lefty-commie-pinko-hippie-peacenik perspective but this one is my favorite:

The New Black Panthers are coming to mau-mau your ass everyone. Btw, this qualifies as subtle from the NRA's perspective. That black gloved fist is gonna grab your gun and we all know who's wearing it, the Kenyan Marxist dude.

This cover was published right before the election, and before Obama came out of the closet on gun control. He hadn't done much gun grabbing up until then but truth and the NRA aren't on speaking terms. However, paranoia and the gun lobby are old pals. I believe they hang out together at shooting ranges, throw back some brewskis (Coors probably) and fire at pictures of Rachel Maddow, Dianne Feinstein and Eric Holder.

The culture and political wars of the Sixties may be diminishing but they're still being waged as long as LaPierre and his henchmen have any say in it. They haven't noticed that they've lost on cultural issues since they have a stranglehold on Congress gun control-wise or is that a gun pointed at its head? You decide.

The post title is, of course, pinched from the classic Stephen Stills song. It's one of those Sixties songs that has aged very well indeed, and it still applies to our current situation in a way that most hippie dippy anthems do not. Paranoia still strikes deep:

  

The beginning and the end (Abby, Part 1)

HOLDEN: I know this sounds pretentious as hell, but I like to think of us as artists. And I'd like to get back to doing something more personal - like our first book.

ALYSSA: Well when are you going to do that?        

HOLDEN: As soon as we have something personal to say.

 

The term “Spring Break” has been a misnomer around my house for years. Since I stopped taking Easter Vacation trips with my folks somewhere around age 15, the “break” usually meant a chance to catch up on work, take on a part-time job or find some other thing that would suck up what should have been a week of freedom.

At the front of this previous Spring Break, we had one of those family obligations that we hadn’t really looked forward to as much as most people would imagine. My grandfather was turning 90 and Mom’s whole side of the family was heading out to Arizona for a visit. Thus, I packed up The Missus, The Midget and myself and headed out for a four-day break that would at least reassure me that somewhere on this god-forsaken planet, the temperature was above freezing.

The trip was fine, the weather was good and The Midget spent more time in the water than out of it. I loved recalling the days in which all you needed to be happy was a hotel with a pool. Hell, my parents could have taken me to Uzbekistan for a break, for all I cared, as long as the place had a pool.

We landed in Milwaukee, took the two-hour drive home and I prepared for what should have been a decent week, free of most problems. Somewhere along the drive home, The Midget fell asleep in the car and The Missus and I mused about what kinds of fun we’d be having if we could get some time to ourselves. I’d do some writing, she’d do some knitting and we’d probably get some minor satisfaction out of being done with the hard part of break.

When we got inside, The Midget went upstairs to check on her hermit crabs and I went downstairs to water the pets. Archer still had plenty of meal worms and a “Who the fuck are you?” look on his gecko face. Abby’s bowl was full and her water was burbling into the bowl, but I couldn’t see her in the shadowy room. I heard her moving, so I snapped on the light.

Something wasn’t right. Even with that “mercy C” I earned in zoology in college, I knew that much. Her leg was tilting out of her cage. The pet who never needed litter box training had made a massive pile on the floor of her cage and the carpet next to her. She was laying on her side, a small fore-paw trembling.

Oh. No.

I heard a wail from upstairs that I recognized as having come from my child, so I hustled up the stairs. The Midget was wrapped around my wife’s leg sobbing.
“One of her hermit crabs died,” The Missus said in a hushed tone.

“Why don’t you put her in the tub and come downstairs?” I said in that “you need to come with me right now” tone parents have learned to master.

“Oh… OK… but.”

“Get down here. Seriously.”

---

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the past five years (man, that time flew by…), you know two immutable truths about me: I hate pets and I’ve reported on crime long enough to have stronger intestinal fortitude than a billy goat.

How we ended up with Abby the bunny was completely my wife’s doing.

Somewhere around Year One of our marriage, she was lonely for a pet or a kid. I think at the time, both of us kind of viewed a rabbit as a test balloon: If you don’t kill or severely damage this thing, chances are you’ll be OK with a kid.

After studying the greater Indianapolis area for rabbit breeders and other rabbit folks, she found a number for a rabbit rescue foundation. Turns out, a lot of people buy rabbits for little kids around Easter, realize that rabbits aren’t what they thought they were and then dump the bunnies off at shelters, many of which don’t have a “no-kill” policy.

Abby had likely been an Easter bunny for a number of reasons. She was a brown and white mini-Rex, with a brown outer coat and white apron of fuzz down her belly. She was at least a year or two old as she had been fixed.

The ad for her noted that she was “very affectionate” and “demanded constant petting,” two things we later found not to be true at all. She feared being touched or held or petted. She also had a small scar that ran down the back of her spine near her neck, a likely result of being grabbed at by an impatient child or a negligent adult. She was constantly in a mode of dynamic tension, seeming to want to spring in any direction that didn’t pose a specific threat.

Despite my protestations, I agreed to meet with the “bunny mommy” as she called herself. The woman, Amanda, had about three dozen rabbits and a house that smelled like piss and hay. When we got into the room with Abby, our job was to sit quietly and see if she came over to sniff us. Three hours later, she kind of did.

My wife was bound and determined that this would be our pet. I eventually allowed my distaste wane into malaise, so we agreed with Amanda that Abby would be ours.

The process would take a couple weeks. They’d check us out, check out our home and eventually bring us the rabbit. The cost was $40 plus some sort of fees or other that added ten bucks to the bill. The Missus agreed to pay it.

We parted company and I now had to figure out where the hell we were going to put this thing.

 

With the child in the tub, The Missus came down the stairs in a “what is your damage?” kind of trot.

When she saw the cage, she knew.

“Oh no…”

At first I thought Abby had a broken leg. I figured she had gotten it trapped in the cage somehow and snapped it. However, after I pushed the leg back into the cage, it dawned on me something else was wrong.

She couldn’t get up.

She was laying flat on her left side, her right eye wide open to the point where we could see some white around her brown iris. Her right paws flapped as they tried unsuccessfully to pull her onto her haunches.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I began. “I came down and she was like this. She’s still alive but…”

The Missus looked at me with clinical precision and yet a tinge of finality based sadness.

“I think she had a stroke.”

Abby flopped harder as if to say, “No! NO! I’m fine. I’m really… I’m…”

She collapsed. Her nose pulled hard at the air as she tried to breathe.

---

The adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” came to fruition with this rescue rabbit. First, there was the adoption fee. Then there was the food bucket, the water bucket, the litter box and more. Finally, we needed a place to put it.

The Missus pointed out a bi-level “enclosure” that would allow the bunny to poop on one floor of the cage and sleep in the upstairs level. It looked solid. It looked decent.

“How much?” I asked.

“Only $450 plus shipping!” she said as if her excitement could outweigh the cost.

“Fuck that!” I spit out, as she suddenly glared at me. It was instinct more than anything. There was no way in hell I was spending half a house payment on a rabbit condo.

Instead, we found some plans on how to build one of these things. I spent two days in the garage wiring one together with old metal pieces, cloth-covered wood and zip ties. By the time we were done, it looked just as good as the real thing.

“I bet she’ll like it,” The Missus said.

“I know I do,” I said. “It’s not $450.”

She just sighed at me.

 

I have seen some of the most truly horrific things a reporter can imagine, short of spending time in a war zone or in the ghetto. Farming accidents, fatality accidents, kids getting run over by cars… I never once threw up. I never once teared up.

“We need…” I began and there it was.

Tears. Uncontrollable.

I wasn’t even crying. It was like my eyes were just overfilling beyond capacity for some reason. It felt like blood pouring out of two holes in my face.

Abby flopped again, her nails skittering on the plastic part of the flooring in her cage.

I pulled it together.

“We need to find an all-night vet,” I told my wife. “She can’t stay like this. She needs to be put down.”

The Missus began to look online, only to find that one of the downsides of small-town life is that your options are limited.

No dice.

She got a small towel instead and placed it over the bunny’s quivering body, trying to add some warmth and dignity to her.

She then looked at me.

“We have to go upstairs. We have to tell her.”

North Dakota’s Anti-Woman Dystopian Horror Show

Yo, North Dakota. You’ve got a problem. A big one.

You’re a state full of bohunk, testosterone-fueled oil workers desperate for some female companionship. And your state legislature is treating women like slaves. Like objects. So, how's that working for you, North Dakota? Let's discuss.

First of all, two bills banning abortion await the Governor of North Dakota’s signature today [UPDATE: they were signed into law by the governor today]. One bans abortion for all fetal abnormalities....

.... such as anencephaly in which parts of the brain and skull don’t form, or Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative condition that paralyzes babies and typically prevents them from reaching their third birthday ....

Oh, “torture the mother” legislation! Awesome.

Can you imagine being in this situation? Of learning you’re pregnant, maybe you’re really excited about it, maybe you and your husband are picking out the crib, and then you get the devastating news that there’s something horribly, terribly wrong? That the fetus has a neural tube defect that guarantees it will die within hours of its birth -- if it comes to term in the first place? And the state is forcing you to live with this horror for nine months and go through childbirth and all? Because this is the government's business? Not your family's private business?

I would not want to be a woman in North Dakota facing that situation. What a heart-breaker. By the way, this isn’t some hypothetical. The Centers for Disease Control estimates anencephaly affects one out of every 4,859 births a year in the U.S.  

The other bill facing the governor’s desk bans abortion after six weeks, which is well before many women even know they’re pregnant in the first place. So I guess that means all women who don’t want to be mothers need to make an abortion appointment at Planned Parenthood every single time they have sex because, you never know!

Alternately, women in North Dakota could just not have sex. How’d that work for you guys? Apparently not too well: North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom, which has brought thousands of job-hungry men to do manly things like toting that barge and lifting that bale, and the guys are verrrry lonely:  

At work, at housing camps and in bars and restaurants, men have been left to mingle with their own. High heels and skirts are as rare around here as veggie burgers. Some men liken the environment to the military or prison.

“It’s bad, dude,” said Jon Kenworthy, 22, who moved to Williston from Indiana in early December. “I was talking to my buddy here. I told him I was going to import from Indiana because there’s nothing here.”

This would be cute if it weren't so dangerous. Women literally cannot leave the house without being harassed, hounded, and threatened. I'd say if anyone wants to know what it's like for women under the Taliban, take a little trip to North Dakota:

Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

“So many people look at you like you’re a piece of meat,” said Megan Dye, 28, a nearly lifelong Williston resident. “It’s disgusting. It’s gross.”

Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults.

[...]

Some men have forced themselves on women. Jessica Brightbill, a single 24-year-old who moved here from Grand Rapids, Mich., a year and a half ago, said she was walking to work at 3:30 in the afternoon when a car with two men suddenly pulled up behind her. One hopped out and grabbed her by her arms and began dragging her. She let her body go limp so she would be harder to drag. Eventually, a man in a truck pulled up and began yelling at the men and she got away, she said. The episode left her rattled.

Going out alone is now out of the question, and the friend she moved here with no longer has much time to spend with her because she has since found a boyfriend and had a baby. Ms. Brightbill said she has difficulty finding other young single women with the freedom to hang out. And, she said, finding good men does not come easy.

“It’s just people trying to have sex,” she said.

Is anyone surprised? I’m not. This is utterly, completely predictable, actually. You have a state where the residents treat women like meat, like objects, and -- shocker! -- you have state legislation that does likewise. If you don't think these two things aren't connected then you aren't paying attention to how the world works.

Look, it is completely, utterly predictable that the legislative dehumanization of women in North Dakota matches the actual dehumanization women there experience on a daily basis. One would think that when women are highly prized and rare, men would go out of their way to make them feel welcome. But that's not how it works. That's never been how it works. Back in the cave-man days it was a bonk on the head and drag her by the hair into the bushes. Sorta like Steubenville without the roofie.

Some things never change, amiright ladies?

I'd tell women to stay out of North Dakota but of course that isn't an option for everyone. And I'm really scared for women there. This is not a good situation. This stuff only changes when women demand it.

Make some damn noise, ladies. You're going to have to. Because a trip to Walmart shouldn't be seen as an invitation for harassment. Demand that you be treated with respect: legislatively and every other way, too. That's the only way anything changes.

Paragraph of the day

I am occasionally asked why I call the Guardian the best newpaper in the English speaking world. It's a writer's paper and it always has been. They do great and fearless reporting BUT the editors give pundits and reporters alike a lot of freedom to be both funny *and* insightful. Here's the great Simon Hoggart writing about the new pope:

We used to say de mortuis nil nisi bonum (don't speak ill of the dead), but that's all changed with warts-and-all obituaries. Now we are incredibly nice instead about people who've just been promoted. Take the new pope. He seems to be an astonishing man of parts. Questions have been raised about his relationship with the vile Argentinian junta, but at the same time he is a plain-living revolutionary, having come from outside the Vatican curia, bringing a breath of modest fresh air from the new world. Yet nothing will change. He is against contraception, abortion, divorce, gay marriage and female priests. It's as if Lenin arrived at the Finland station in St Petersburg, announcing, "Comrades, I bring thrilling news! Things are going to carry on much as before!"

A Black Hack Heaven?

The minute I saw this story, I knew it was going to be a bad idea, poorly executed that was going to cause a ton of people to go apeshit.

That said, the race thing wasn’t what made me really freaked out. Read this thing and tell me it doesn’t sound Stephen Glass-esque, as in Hack Heaven-like or anything else he wrote.

The use of vague sources.

The black 12-year-old dealing drugs.

The angry Russian chick.

The old guy who lived there his whole life and was all Walt Kowalski about it.

The vivid scenes that perfectly illustrated his key points.

The editor of the story has already ponied up that this was not exactly a perfect piece. I'm imagining they'll find more problems later of a completely different variety.

It would not surprise me in the slightest if this thing started to fall apart somewhere in the next six to eight months. Some smart journalist manages to go out there and isn’t able to find people or places or some such thing that makes this difficult to believe.

I get the sense this guy was trying to make a point and he worried less about how he made it.

Malaka Of The Week: Google

It's institutional malakatude week here at First Draft. This has nothing to do with Google's desire to conquer the cyber world, that's what big ass tech corporations do. I have a more specific lament: they're 86-ing Google Reader effective July 1. I've used it for years and really like it so I'm pissed.

Do any of you lot have any suggestions as to what a poor boy can do to replace this service?

I'll let Split Enz have the finally word. Why? Why the hell not?

The New Pope On Same Sex Marriage

While I'm not surprised that Pope Francis is against marriage equality, I didn't expect him to need a distemper shot on the subject:

Shortly after Pope Benedict XVI announced his retirement, the gay rights activist who was the first to legally marry his partner in Latin America sent out a jubilant tweet. Argentina's Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio "cannot be pope," wrote Alex Freyre, because "he lost his papabile status the instant I married @josedibellow. Same for any other Argentine priest."

On Wednesday, Freyre was proven wrong. When the cardinals elected Bergoglio pope, they made history in two ways: They chose the first Latin American pope, but they also chose the first pope from a country where same-sex marriage became legal on his watch.

Although his focus has often been on social justice issues, Bergoglio is a strong defender of the church's position on the marriage issue. His militancy in the campaign against Argentina's "Equal Marriage Law" in 2010 was so tone-deaf that many observers credit him with helping the law pass. But the mistakes his church made in combatting the law—and the tack it has taken since—may suggest the new Pope Francis will be savvier about guiding the church in opposing marriage in countries headed in that direction.

Bergoglio was Argentina's top bishop during the fight over the marriage law. One of the major turning points in the debate came when a letter he'd written to a group of nuns explaining opposition to the law was made public. The rhetoric seemed so out of touch with Argentina's largely secular population that it marginalized the church even further in the debate.

The law was "sent by the Devil," Bergoglio wrote in July of 2010:

Let's not be naive: This is not a simple political fight; it is a destructive proposal to God's plan. This is not a mere legislative proposal (that's just it's form), but a move by the father of lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God… Let's look to St. Joseph, Mary, and the Child to ask fervently that they defend the Argentine family in this moment… May they support, defend, and accompany us in this war of God."

Yikes. I wonder if Bergoglio confused Argentine President Cristina Kirchner with Flip Wilson's Geraldine character:

I should close with our ritual gay marriage shout-out: Fuck yeah, Argentina.

White Smoke Gets In My Eyes

My advances have been scorned by the Cult of the Red Beanie in favor of a 76 year old Jesuit from Argentina. It looks like the powers that be have the caretaker pontiff of their dreams. There's no cure for the curia, after all.  Charlie Pierce sees this as an extension of the papacies of John Paul and Eggs Benedict:

OK, so he's the first pope from Latin America, and the first Francis, which ties him with Hilarius and a few dozen others for last place in the papal names rankings. He's also a member of The Society — A Jesuit pope, the first one, which means Dan Brown gets five more novels. (Strangely enough, the Jesuits, in their Fourth Vow, take a special vow of obedience to...wait for it...the pope. This is going to make for an interesting internal monologue for the new fella, I'm thinking.) Most important, he's 76-years old which means, quite honestly, that the man's a caretaker, or that there is a real faction within the cardinal-electors arrayed against the idea of very long papacies on the order of that of John Paul II. The last pope, in a conclave that was a bigger fix than the 1919 World Series, was the obvious choice, but he also was 78 upon his election, and he reigned only five years. It's hard to imagine Francis I going much longer than that. It's also hard to imagine that this wasn't some kind of plan all along.

I shoulda known that whole pro-gay marriage thing would kill my candidacy. I do, however, like the name Francis. It brings to mind my favorite mule as well as one of my favorite singers but since I couldn't find a version online of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Francis Albert, we'll make do with the divine Sarah Vaughan:

 

The Ryan Plan, Now With Electrolytes

Paul Ryan released his new budget which, from all I’ve read thus far, is remarkably similar to the one Americans resoundly rejected last year as being mathematically impossible and morally depraved.

The “new” plan includes VoucherCare, screws people under age 54 out of Medicare (as a 51-year-old, let me repeat: FUCK YOU, PAUL RYAN), cuts taxes on the wealthiest and corporations, increases defense spending by $500 billion over the next 10 years, and magically cuts the deficit by such amazing feats as repealing Obamacare. In other words, this isn’t anything close to a serious attempt to deal with "fiscal issues." So remember, kiddos: when Beale tells you nobody gives a fuck about the budget deficit, this is what I mean.

Says Ryan:

"The election didn’t go our way, believe me I know what that feels like," Ryan said Tuesday at a press conference to unveil his proposal. "Does that mean we surrender our principles?" 

Yep, that’s right. The Republican Party will make its last stand on budget ideas already rejected by voters, because even though they’re based on completely fantastical “principles,” by God it’s their principles. And when reality trumps conservative principles, it’s always the reality which must be wrong.

Yesterday Son of Breitbart and the dude with the *sirens* told everyone that Nobel Prize winning economist and anti-austerity crusader Paul Krugman had declared bankruptcy. Har har, what a fail, see what happens when liberals try to do economics! Except, of course, he didn't, it was all a hoax which is precisely what happens when right-wingers try to do journalism. I bring it up because it seems to me that conservatives haven't learned one lesson from the last election. The whole "information bubble" problem still seems in full force, and they seem to be sticking by their unpopular "shred the social safety net" thing.

With Republicans permanently divorced from reality, now would be a good time for Democrats (as usual, gawd I'm so sick of this shit) to be the grown-ups on the budget issue. Is the budget deficit really a "crisis"? Not according to un-bankrupt Krugman, who has talked about this a-plenty (here's a good column for starters). It would be really nice if he weren't the lone voice crying in the wilderness. 

I mean, really. If Republicans can put forward a fairy tale budget which is the plutocrats' wet dream -- tax cuts! Increase defense spending! Kill Obamacare! Privatize Medicare! -- then I say it's long past time Democrats found their spine and called bullshit on the whole pretense. 

On The Road With Cardinal Scola

It's conclave Tuesday, y'all. The gathering of what Charlie Pierce loves to call the "cult of the red beanie." I have no red-hatted dog in this fight but I've gotten a kick out some of the pre-conclave spin. My favorite was this item about Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milano:

To illustrate that life is a journey, one of the Italian cardinals touted as a favorite to be the next pope doesn't just turn to the Scriptures – but also to Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy.

Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, is seen as Italy's best chance at reclaiming the papacy, following back-to-back popes from outside the country that had a lock on the job for centuries.

<snip>

Quoting from Kerouac's iconic Beat Generation novel `'On the Road," Scola invited his audience of students to reflect on whether they `'were going to get somewhere, or just going." And he cited McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-son journey in `'The Road," urging youths to consider the meaning of "destination" – a key theme in McCarthy's work.

`'The destination is a happy life, an accomplished life that doesn't end with death but with eternal life," the archbishop said.

Jack Kerouac? Crazy, daddy-o. The Cardinal actually quoted a notorious bi-sexual alcoholic drug user. Awesome. Does this make him a closet liberal? Unlikely. Perhaps he'll quote Ginsburg or Ferlinghetti next, which inspires me to suggest a possible name: Pope Beatnik I. The hipsters will love it and it shouldn't scare too many old ladies or altar boys. The latter, alas, are always scared and the former mostly admire the Cardinals for their red frocked finery.

I'll let Ian Anderson, of all people, have the last word, with this ode to the Beat Generation:

 

The American Way

There's been a huge case brewing in New Orleans involving the River Birch Landfill. If you're shocked to hear that "waste management" could be a lucrative source of graft for grifters, you haven't watched The Sopranos 97 times like I have. Tony Soprano always told everyone he was in "waste management" and so is local lawyer Fred Heebe who was Malaka Of The Week on 3/15/2012.

The River Birch Landfill case seems to have finally and definitively collapsed today. Charges against two of the primary shitbirds were dismissed with prejudice, which means they cannot be re-filed. These were the alleged bribers but the primary bribee, a former state employee named Henry Mouton who took a cool $463K in bribes, copped a plea some time ago. This is the American Way I alluded to in the post title: the bribees take it in the neck and the big fish swim away. In this instance, it's at least partially due to the "commenting scandal" that I wrote about in the MOW post. While I'm self quoting, here's a self-serving one from a Humid City post on the resignation of then US Attorney Jim Letten:

I haven’t posted here in a while but when someone gets their comeuppance, the old schadenfreude kicks in and I gotta post. It did yesterday: US Attorney Jim Letten packed up his mustache, drum kit, and gynormous ego and resigned from his post. He, of course, held a melodramatic presser, which had all the goo -goos, wingers, and media types weeping and wailing over his departure.

Here’s the deal. Letten did a good job for many years but his office began to display the arrogance and cockiness that comes naturally to lawyers. The whole commenting thing was an enormous ethical blunder, and there are indications that Letten was wearing ethical blinders when it comes to his number 2 and personal friend, Jan Mann.

It is unclear what exactly Letten knew and when he knew it but while he threw Sal Perricone to the wolves, it looks as if he protected Jan Mann until a month ago. Their commenting frenzy damaged the office’s credibility and may have compromised a string of cases including, most ominously, the Danziger Bridge convictions. Mind you, it’s hard to reverse a criminal prosecution but Letten’s ethical laxness has made that a possibility and has already led to a Justice Department investigation. Defense attorneys are dancing in the streets in anticipation of a windfall of business. I hope Buddy Lemann’s toup doesn’t fall off…

Jim Letten’s major failing is that he believes his own press clippings and the fulsome praise he has received over the years. He came to believe that he was indispensable because a sycophantic press corps told him that he was. Nobody is indispensable. To believe otherwise is hubris plain and simple.

If the commenting mishigas played a large part in the case against Heebe failing, it makes me feel vaguely old testamenty and prophety because I predicted that might happen. I'm not a happy prophet because the waste management entrepreneurs probably deserve a stretch in Club Fed but at least it didn't poison the case against former Mayor Nagin. Yet.

Grading the graders (again)

The idea of grade inflation is back in the news around here when a local newspaper decided to put all of those computer-assisted reporting classes to work and investigate the local university. Truth be told, I often enjoy deeper pieces and if anything is going to help newspapers increase their value (both financially and intellectually) it’s going to come in the form of stuff like this.

The core of the story is the same as it always is: Grades are going up, professors are doling out A’s like they’re Halloween candy and dammit, why aren’t you using the Bell Curve to keep this stuff in check? The narrative of spoiled children receiving unjust rewards is an easy sell and when the data appear to support that supposition, it’s an even easier case to make.

The article cites Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke professor and a national scholar who works on the topic of grade inflation. His work has been cited in hundreds of publications over the years in which he often argues that grades continue to rise over time and there is no data to support the idea that students are getting smarter or better to account for these increases in grades. To wit:

“Do you want to tell me that students across the nation are getting smarter and performing better when there's no other data to support it? Professors are grading easier than ever before,” Rojstaczer said.

I’m not going to argue with the data. It’s a pointless exercise in that the work the newspaper did here demonstrates that a lot of people are handing out a lot of A’s and B’s. I’m also not going to argue that kids are inherently smarter or better than their predecessors. I complain about whiny bastards all the time and quite frankly, I’ve dealt with more parents than I wish I had over the more recent years. I will, however, note that kids have much better access to much more powerful learning tools than their predecessors, which might help even out the odds a bit. Even so, it can’t possibly explain the whole phenomenon of seeing the average grades creep up across the country.

That said, I hate pieces like this because they often take the easy route to a predetermined conclusion. Here are a few things that didn’t go discussed in the article that really should be considered:

1. I’m sure Rojstaczer is an expert, from all I’ve read about him. In fact, the only negative thing I can find about him out there is in reference to the Duke 88, who took an unpopular (and eventually erroneous) stand in the Duke lacrosse case.
   
   That said, he’s made his bones as the “grade inflation guy” and that can lead to the idea that grades continue to inflate for no good reason. If you spend enough time researching anything, using any theory, applying any method or approaching any topic, you can pretty easily find what you’re looking for that supports your claim. In addition, I’m sure this is a pretty good gig to have in an era where writers, bloggers, radio hosts and the chicken dinner circuit are looking for people to talk about this topic.
   
   When you are a guy who makes his money selling fire places, every house looks like it could use a fire place.
   
   Am I impugning his integrity? No. Am I questioning whether he takes the “people are doling out A’s like candy” as a reflex action? Yes.
   
   
2. Research has indicated in a number of other fields, including psychology and sociology, that there isn’t reflexive quid-pro-quo approach to grades and faculty approval. In most cases, faculty who satisfy the students needs for learning and growth, teach courses that students feel are directly attached to their needs/major and who provide adaptive and strengthening learning environment tend to get higher course evaluations regardless of grades. In fact, research I’ve done has shown that grades are not predictive of positive course evaluations, but rather can be an outcome of positive classroom learning environments. In other words, “professors give too many good grades to kids who don’t deserve them because they don’t want to be disliked” is reductive at best and disingenuous at worst.
   
   
3. The Bell Curve. This is perhaps one of the biggest sticking points between the “ass kicker” faculty members and the more “new wave” faculty. In the Bell Curve way of thinking, only a few can get A’s. Thus, we push students to participate in an academic version of the Hunger Games to strive for that grade, by hook or by crook. I can understand the idea in the most basic concept: if something is to be valuable, it needs to have meaning and rarity. That’s why a T206 Honus Wagner is worth millions of dollars while a 1984 Ron Kittle card is worth a couple cents.
   
   The anti-Bell Curve thinking goes like this: If you have a class that has 20 students and only two can get A’s, what happens when you get a class that has five or six amazingly talented people? Or, conversely, what happens when you have a class of people who couldn’t find their ass with a searchlight and a posse? Instead, why not establish standards that are based on what a student must do in order to get a grade and then measure the students against the standards?
   
   The curve is one of the more troubling parts of my academic life. I can’t think of a lot of other aspects of life in which this would apply when you want to properly measure people. (“I’m sorry sir, but your credit score can’t be 680 or higher because we already have three people in that area. You are now downgraded to 650.”) Then again, there are a number of “winner take all” approaches in competition (World Series, Super Bowl) or in life (You can’t marry my wife. We’re already married.)
   
   That said, I was impacted at a really early stage of my career in this regard. As a graduate instructor, I found that most of my grades tended to fit a “few A’s, few F’s, lots of Cs” model. Then one year, word got around that I was worth having as a teacher, so I had about four or five really good kids from the two student newspapers taking my class. They had advanced training, were really smart and they really wanted to out do each other. When I did the math at the end of the year, my tradition of “just two A’s” wasn’t coming to fruition. I had four kids who had done A work all the way through, so I naturally panicked.
   
   I met with the person who had hired me and discussed my dilemma, asking if I needed to drop a kid or two out of the A range for fear of “inflating grades.” She asked if all four kids actually earned A’s. I said they did. She asked if I treated them any different than anyone else. I said I didn’t.
   “Well, then,” she said. “Why should they be penalized for just happening to be great kids in a class with other great kids? I’m sure you wouldn’t want to hear that you earned an A, but the professor only had so many to give out for some bullshit arbitrary reason. If they earned the grade, they earned it. Give it to them.”
   
   From that point on, I stopped worrying if I gave out A’s or not. Some years, I gave out many. Other years, I didn’t give out one.
   
   
4. Do we want kids engaging in Thunderdome for grades? This is the thing that kills me about this whole “grades are getting out of control” argument. I teach a required class that has a lot of work and a ton of what I call “punishment” in it. It’s a writing class, so I make kids write. It’s a journalism class, so I make them write journalistically. I have standards for both, so when kids start slathering on adjectives and adverbs willy nilly or lacing their prose with fact errors, they get a kick directly in the grading groin. Guess what? It really hurts them.
   
   Here’s the rub, though. I’ve spent almost my entire academic life arguing AGAINST the idea of grades. I HATE grades. If the only goal is to get the A, kids will do whatever they have to in order to get that grade. This will include things like not helping others during peer editing, because someone else’s failure will improve their own likelihood of success. This will include cheating, because if the grade is all that matters, you do what you have to if you want that grade, ethics be damned. This will include decreasing their desire to learn and increasing their desire to memorize. If the test matters most, they have to cram their heads full of crap to get the grade, dump it out on the Blue Book and then start over again for the next test.
   
   None of these things indicates that learning matters. Sure, grades count for stuff, but I’ve always found them to be bullshit demarcations of talent and skill. Some of my best kids have failed my classes. Some of the kids I wouldn’t trust to write a story on the Greater Oswego Valley Cat Fashion Show have earned B’s or A’s.
   
   I don’t want them trying to get A’s and B’s. I want them to get better.
   
   Thus, in my writing classes, I pound the kids. I make them write something. We go over it as a class. We rip it to shit. We argue about it. I send it back to the kids for another draft. We do it again at that point for a grade. In other words, they get a couple bites at the apple so they can improve once they see what was wrong the first time. This is something those of us who are in education call “learning” and it should be the outcome we are seeking.

 

I could really feed my ego if I wanted by being at total dick. Set up the class so that Woodward and Bernstein are crying about how tough it is. Give kids one shot at an assignment and grade it as harshly as possible. Fail kids for the entire class who make a fact error (several colleagues I’ve had do something like this).

However, what in the hell is the point of that? When I punish you for something, it’s because I want it to hurt badly enough that you’ll remember to never do that thing again but not so much that you’ll never be able to recover from it.

Some classes (and even some disciplines) have much more of a hardline because they have to. I don’t want my doctor to go to “Self Esteem University” where she got A’s in everything just for showing up. However, I did like the explanation the faculty member in nursing gave, which was, “Look, we can’t turn out shitty grads, because they will become shitty nurses and likely kill people. So, we have to do everything we can to make sure they’re not shitty. In doing that, yes, they earn grades that aren’t shit.” (rough translation)

The things I took with me from college weren’t grades. I remember my first journalism teacher telling me when I was panicking about perfection that, “Journalism is never done. It’s just due.” I use that at least once a month on my kids.

The students who return to me rarely remember what their grades were, unless they got a particularly horrible grade. In most cases, they remember it like a badge-of-honor scar: “Hey, remember when you almost flunked me out of school? You ever think I’d be your editor one day?” In most cases, they remember the lessons I pounded into them like I was Shaq in his prime, banging into the defenders in the post:

Noun-verb-object.

If your mother says she loves you, go check it out.

Get the hell out there and report.

Just tell me what happened and save the soap opera for your grandma.

Design in modular format.

Fucking up is normal, but learn something from it.

Don’t let someone bullshit you about something being an “isolated incident.” When it happens more than twice, it’s probably a trend.

Just because a source isn’t happy, it doesn’t mean you did your job poorly.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

This isn’t Burger King. You don’t get it your way.

Attributions go noun-verb, unless you want to sound like Yoda.

And, of course, write in one-sentence paragraphs.

At the end of the day, most of my kids get good jobs, live good lives and remember what I taught them. That’s probably what we should be shooting for.

A life worthy of an A.

Deep Open Casket Thought

I don't know about you but I find open casket funerals to be creepy. The deceased never looks, uh, natural and life-like, not even the ones on Six Feet Under done by Rico the embalming artiste. 

This morbid post was inspired by idolatry down south Venezuela way:

Venezuela’s acting president says Hugo Chavez’s embalmed body will be permanently displayed in a glass casket so that “his people will always have him.”

Vice President Nicolas Maduro says the remains will be put on permanent display at the Museum of the Revolution, close to the presidential palace where Chavez ruled for 14 years. Maduro says the president will lie in state first for at least another seven days.

A state funeral for Chavez attended by some 33 heads of government is scheduled to begin Friday morning. Tens of thousands have already filed past his glass-topped casket at a military academy following a seven-hour procession on Tuesday which took his body from the hospital where he died.

I guess Maduro has given up on investigating that whole "someone gave Chavez cancer" thing....

The Beehive (Mind) State

I have an admission to make. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and lived there until my parents packed up and moved to California when I was 5 years old. Life can be merciful, folks. I still have family there and it's actually a physically gorgeous place but when it comes to politics, oy vey. Yeah, Louisiana politics are reactionary but our assorted rogues and rascals make it highly entertaining. Here's the latest example of Beehive state wingnuttery:

A state senator voted against a bill Monday that would make cockfighting a felony in Utah because abortion is legal.

"In a state where we can still allow people to kill their babies, we want to make it a felony to let chickens fight for the purpose of which they were raised," said Sen. Allen Christensen, R-North Ogden.

Christensen said cockfighting is not "beautiful" or "wonderful." But the birds "naturally want to do this thing in their lives and we're going to send their owners to prison for this, yet we allow people to go ahead and murder their unborn babies."

SB52 would make it a third-degree felony to own or train game fowl for fighting, and attending a cockfight would be a class B misdemeanor.

Utah is the only state in the West in which cockfighting is a misdemeanor, said Sen. Gene Davis, D-Salt Lake, the bill's sponsor. The proposed law would mirror the state's dog fighting statute.

"This is horrendous activity that goes on. It's blood sport," Davis said.

Cockfights typically bring gambling as well as illegal drug and alcohol use, he said.

Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Wood Cross, said because cockfighting is a misdemeanor in Utah, it attracts people involved in it from outside the state.

"This is a problem," he said. "Utah is running the risk of becoming an underground gambling circuit for this horrendous activity."

The Senate preliminarily approved the bill 17-11. It will be up for a final vote later this week.

The only thing surprising about this episode is that this bozo's argument didn't carry the day. I suspect he hoped to activate the beehive mind and get everyone thinking about fetuses instead of roosters. Louisiana only made cockfighting illegal in 2007 but this argument was never made in our lege. Instead, we heard a great deal about how blood sports were an essential part of Cajun culture, which had worked for many years but was undermined by then Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's support of the bill. It doesn't get much more Cajun than a name ending in eaux.

I'm surprised that State Senator Christensen didn't use the google to try and find a picture of Louisiana wingnut Woody Jenkins waving a plastic fetus doll about on the floor of the State House of Representatives in 1991.The emphasis is on the word *try* I wasn't able to find a snap of the Woodman waving the doll but it was not for wont of trying. It actually happened, and every time I curse Mary Landrieu for doing something shitty, I remind myself that she voted for the ACA and that Woody Jenkins lost to her by a mere 5,788 votes in 1996.

That brings to an end this week's edition of specious argument theatre.

The Bolivarian Kingfish

I had mixed feelings about Hugo Chavez. On the one hand, it was hard not to enjoy his flamboyant persona and Bush mockery. On the other hand, he was an elected autocrat whose human rights and economic records defined the term mixed bag. In the context of current dictators, he was near the bottom of the list when it came to repression, his methods tended more to bribery than murder:

And unlike Castro and many other autocrats, Chávez didn’t fear elections; He embraced them. Most opposition leaders will tell you that Venezuelan elections are relatively clean. The problem isn’t Election Day—It’s the other 364 days. Rather than stuffing ballot boxes, Chávez understood that he could tilt the playing field enough to make it nearly impossible to defeat him. Thus, the regime’s electoral wizards engineered gerrymandering schemes that made anything attempted in the American South look like child’s play. Chávez’s campaign coffers were fed by opaque slush funds holding billions in oil revenue. The government’s media dominance drowned out the opposition. Politicians who appeared formidable were simply banned from running for office. And the ruling party became expert in using fear and selective intimidation to tamp down the vote. Chávez took a populist message and married it to an autocratic scheme that allowed him to consolidate power. The net effect over Chávez’s years was a paradoxical one: With each election Venezuela lost more of its democracy.

There is an Amercian politician that Chavez reminds me of. That's right, Louisiana's very own Governor/Senator Huey P. Long. Long stuck it to what he liked to call the "fat boys" while doing good things for poor and middle class folks including the Charity Hospital system and lavishing funding on the LSU system and during the Great Depression to boot. That was the good side. The Kingfish, like Chavez, was an elected autocrat who used fear and intimidation when it suited his purposes and bribery when that would do the trick.

And like Chavez and Hugo's hero Fidel Castro, Huey had an outsized personality and loved to talk for hours upon end. I shudder at the mere thought of Long's having access to state owned television, he would have surely used it in much the same way as Chavez.In his time in the Senate, Huey loved to filliblather in the days when cloture was much harder to invoke than it is now. Unlike Chinless Mitch and his ilk, Long was entertaining, often holding forth on his favorite dishes.

The Kingfish also named his own successor. In his case, it was the meek little man he installed in the Governor's chair a few years before his assasination, Oscar K. Allen. No, I did not name my cat after OK Allen, y'all. Allen was a stooge and sycophant who did as he was told. Chavez's Veep Nicolas Maduro seems to be cut from the same cloth but he may have more talent for demagoguery than the bland Allen ever dreamed of having:

Maduro’s statement informing Venezuelans of Chávez’s death wasted no time in engaging in bizarre, politically charged scapegoating. “We have no doubt, the time will come in history when we can create a scientific commission to show that Comandante Chávez was attacked with this disease,” said Maduro on Tuesday. “We already have plenty of clues about this, it’s a very serious matter that will have to be investigated by a special committee of scientists."

Some nefarious force gave the Commandante cancer? Those boys at the CIA are even more gifted in the dark arts than we imagined. Following this conspiracy theory should be very interesting to watch in the weeks leading up to the election called for by the Venezuelan constitution. The very existence of such a clause shows that Chavez was a populist autocrat who believed in elections of a sort, which given the history of South America made him a democrat with a small d and not your basic old school Caudillo.

There's a lot of interesting articles about Chavez on the interwb today. Some I agree with and others I do not but like the Bolivarian Kingfish himself, none of them are dull:

John Lee Anderson in the New Yorker.

David Sirota at Salon.

Rory Calhoun in the Guardian.

The late Christopher Hitchens at Slate.

Hippie Punching

I know this is childish of me, and probably beneath the standards of this estimable establishment, but in case you haven't heard, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has died. And while unlike my fellow liberals I was never one to fawn over Chavez, actually knowing some Venezuelans who suffered under his regime, I find the right-wing's opportunistic hippie-punching a little too much to bear:

Seriously? That's the best you can do? Take a pot shot at Sean Penn and Oliver Stone? Conservatives never cease to amaze me in their pettiness.

 

Dirty Deeds

Tucker Carlson's Internet Kavalcade of Krayzeee seems poised to take over Breitbart’s Propaganda & Donut Den for this year’s Crimes Against Journalism Award. But really, there are so many nominees this year, how can one choose?

The conservative media’s latest liberal-smearing scoop that ended up being an exploding cigar was the Daily Caller’s career-killing revelation -- with video! -- that Sen. Robert Menendez had sex with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Sadly for Tucker Carlson, it all appears to be a big, fat lie:

An escort who appeared on a video claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

The woman identified a lawyer who approached her and a friend to make the videotape, according to affidavits obtained by the Post. That man has in turn identified another lawyer who gave him a script for the tape and paid him to find women to fabricate the claims, the affidavits say.

The escort was one of two women who taped videos that seems to support a tipster’s allegations that Menendez had patronized prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic.

This is some serious ratfucking here, like, criminal ratfucking. Slander and libel-lawsuit-generating ratfucking. Now who would do such a thing? Why Bob Menendez? Is it the Latino surname? Is this some kind of New Jersey politics thing? WTF? Who are the anonymous "Republican operatives" ABC names? As they say, more shall be revealed.

I must say, conservatives appear to have that touch of merde these days; all of their attempts to smear figures on the left seem to be backfiring worse than a 1970s gas guzzler. 

There was the Tennessee Republican Party's attempt to smear Memphis-area Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen over his Tweets to his daughter, followed by the infamous Chuck Hagel "Friends Of Hamas" smear, and Bob Woodward's "the White House threatened me" lie. 

What a difference a few failed hot scoops make. The right-wing is notorious for fabricating scandals (let's not forget Breitbart's Shirley Sherrod/ACORN/Muslim NPR crap). Seems like not too long ago the mainstream media would have jumped all over stuff like Menendez's prostie-gate. At least this time when the WaPo was finally pulled into covering the story they didn't parrot the conservative talking point but did their own investigative work.

Looks like some lessons have been learned.

Wormplomacy?

Photo via USA Today.

There are some things so weird that even I cannot make up. One of them is Dennis Rodman's trip to North Korea and his hanging out with its 3rd generation dictator with a bad haircut, Kim Jong Un. It turns out that the tiny tyrant and President Obama have one thing in common: basketball.

The Rodman trip and his surreal appearance on ABC's This Week With My Diminutive Countryman have given the term March Madness a whole new meaning. It does, however, conjure up images of the "ping pong diplomacy" that preceded Tricky Dick's re-election campaign appearances in China, The main difference, of course, is that China is a major country that offered a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

North Korea, on the other hand, is a mosquito of a country that we only notice when it's biting the hell out of us. Chomp. Everyone wishes they would go away, including the rulers of South Korea who probably awaken in a cold sweat when they contemplate re-unification with the North. It was hard enough to meld the two Germanys together and East Germany was, by Warsaw Pact standards, an "advanced country." North Korea is the asshole of the planet, a place that makes the Stans look prosperous...

Do I think Obama will pick up the phone and chat up Mr. 3rd Generator Tyrant (he's one up on Assad) as the Worm suggests? Hell no, but the whole episode has been more entertaining than listening to Speaker Boner lie about the sequester.

One thing I wonder about the Worm's trip to North Korea: did he suggest that Kim get any tattoos? Rodman may not know anything about diplomacy but he knows from tattoos.

I was originally going to call this post The Worm meets the Dictator, which in turn gave me an earworm before the worm turned and the post was renamed Wormplomacy. Anyhoo, here's the aforementioned earworm, which is from Quadrophenia. Why this tune? The Worm has always reminded me of Keith Moon and he's always been a punk albeit a live one. That's why.

  

NOLA Notes: Water Boiling Edition

The power of the Tweeter Tube re-asserted itself today. One minute the water was running, the next it was not. The NOLA twitter squad was on the job and I quickly learned that it was an East Bank (of the river) outage. It took City Hall quite some time to comment and NOLA.com was too busy being cutting edge hipster douchebags to notice for 40-45 minutes. Way to, uh, cover the waterfront, y'all.

I've decided to do a bit more NOLA-centric blogging here. A has encouraged me to do so in the past and pandering to my editrix is always a good idea. I love typing and saying editrix. Besides, today's water fuck up is your future America. Ignore your infrastructure at your own peril. Jeez, I sound like Rachel Maddow, which is good as long as I don't find myself rooting for Tom Brady...

One more thing. One of my twitter pals posted a link from the Beeb gushing over NOLA becoming a "boutique city." Guess that means we sell overpriced frocks and $75 dog collars...

You say gentrification, I say hipster takeover

There's a swell article about gentrification in New Orleans by Tulane Perfesser Richard Campanella online at New geography.com. There's been a lot of it post-Katrina and it's a mixed bag. I have no issue with people renovating houses, opening galleries and such, but *some* of the new arrivals are hipster douchebags who want the locals to be grateful that they deigned to move here. I'm a transplant myself but I chose to *become* a local instead of hectoring them about how life is better with trend hopping Trustafarians pricing old hippies, black folks, and working class whites out of the Bywater neighborhood.

I may have officially become an old fart this evening. Frankly, I cannot decide who has been worse for New Orleans in the post-K era, hipsters, planners or NIMBYs. Let's call the whole thing off:

 

The Columbia Journalism Review On The Pillage Of The Picayune

There's an excellent piece in the CJR by Ryan Chittum about how Advance Media is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's a must, albeit depressing, read story. It makes the Newhouses sound like practitioners of vulture capitalism.  It's an excellent image but they're also latter day carpetbaggers decimating New Orleans' paper of record in favor of the badly designed, user hostile web site that is NOLA.com.

Morrissey ducks Duck Dynasty

Image courtesy of the Clicker.

I've only seen Duck Dynasty a few times but I know it involves dudes from Monroe, LA will long ZZ Top-style beards. I'm not sure if their fellow Monrovian and frequent FD commenter, Mass, is proud of them but Morrissey clearly is not:

The TV series "Duck Dynasty" is coming between Morrissey and Jimmy Kimmel.

The singer and animal rights activist says he canceled his appearance Tuesday on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" because "Duck Dynasty" cast members will be on the talk show.

Morrissey says he can't perform on a show with what he called people who "amount to animal serial killers."

A&E's "Duck Dynasty" reality show follows a Louisiana family with a business selling duck calls and decoys.

A&E did not immediately respond to requests for comment from it and the Robertson family.

A person familiar with the Kimmel show's plans confirmed that Morrissey was to appear. The person lacked authority to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person says Morrissey's performance will be rescheduled.

ABC says the Churchill band will perform Tuesday on Kimmel's show but declined comment on the switch.

Morrissey is not known for his sense of humor but he is famous for the tune below so I'll let the humorlessness slide. He may be pompous but he *is* principled:

 

 Hmm, I wonder if his estranged ex-bandmate Johnny Marr will chime in. Probably not, he's too busy slagging off on Prime Minister David (Posh Boy) Cameron.

Wrestling With The Freak Parade

New Orleans is so overly dependent on tourism, and so eager to whore itself out to the highest bidder that our Mayor held a news conference to brag about luring-get ready-Wrestlemania to our fair city in 2014. That's right, the WWE is getting the keys to the city. Now that Carnival parade season is over, it's time for the tourism freak parade to resume,alas.

My friend Jeffrey summed up my disgust with this state of affairs quite nicely at his blog, Library Chronicles, so here's some quotemania in response to wrestlemania:

This morning Mayor Landrieu hosted a press conference celebrating the coming of Wrestlemania 30 to New Orleans in 2014. This event is owned and presented by Vince and Linda McMahon. Linda is a recently failed ultra-conservative Senate candidate from Connecticut who opposes raising the minimum wage and even suggested we consider lowering it.  Someone should ask Mayor Landrieu if it's in our best interest as a city to expend our time, money, and energy hosting these kinds of people.  No one will ask that, though.

Actually, you just did, Jeffrey. Not that he'd answer, he's too busy pretending that we benefit from bringing a series of freak shows to town. I, for one, prefer our home grown freak shows to imported ones such as Wrestlefuckingmania.That's something to brag about? Really?

I'll give Todd Rundgren the last word since the Mayor's bringing another Freak Parade to town:

 

Irony is not dead, it's just shipwrecked

The name of the disabled Carnival cruise ship that set out from NOLA and just returned to the Port of Mobile is, ahem, the Triumph. The story is about to take over our local media, which is looking for a bright shiny object now that the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras are over. Hell, it's ironic that it belongs to the Carnival line since it crapped out during, well, Carnival.

This gives me a swell excuse to post this sea chanty version of Shenandoah featuring Tom Waits and Keith Richards:

 

Via my friend Dave Doremus' Facebook page. Thanks, dude.

Regarding the Goddamn Pope

 

I'll let Tim Minchin sum up what I think of the entire rotten institution and person:

I can't add anything to that.

You probably shouldn't watch this at work. 

NBC cockblocks EveryBlock

When we bought a Dyson vacuum a number of years ago, it came with a user’s manual as well as a brief history lesson on how Dysons came to be. One of the things that stuck with me was that James Dyson had pitched his design to several major players in the vacuum world, only to be rejected.

When he finally broke through on his own, one of the vacuum executives noted that his company should have just bought the patented design and dismantled the damned thing. In other words, something that worked well had become a headache because it would force other people in the business to think differently.

Journalism and vacuums have very little in common, other than the fact that they both suck. However, when it comes to this bit of news, it’s clear the owners of these businesses have a lot more in common than that.

NBC, which purchased EveryBlock.com, a hyperlocal/microlocal/nanolocal site that was once hailed as being the next phase of digital journalism, has decided to shutter the project.

EveryBlock, the brainchild of a journalism grad named Adrian Holovaty, grew from an idea of layering data into a searchable, map-based mash-up. Holovaty’s earlier project, chicagocrime.org, used police and crime data to show people how certain areas stacked up in terms of police calls, fire calls and more.  The upgraded approach that earned EveryBlock a $1.1million Knight grant took this a step further, augmenting the site with links that showed people news stories associated with their neighborhood, issues pertaining to their area and so forth.

The merits of EveryBlock are, as everything is, up for debate. I had heard from people I knew in the company that the data wasn’t always as perfect as it could be or that some of the details tended to get glossed over in the rush to keep growing the product. However, whatever shortcomings were attached to the project, Holovaty clearly tapped a nerve that needed tapping. As giant metro newspapers had struggled, often outstripping their usefulness, Holovaty went small, believing there was value in each flake of gold and that if he piled enough of them together, a richness would emerge. Whether it was going to be the “next big thing” or not, we’ll never know.

That said, the most depressing commentary on the issue, and the most telling as well, comes from this piece on Poynter, which quotes Senior VP Vivian Schiller: 

I asked Schiller about the questions many are raising online — why not turn over EveryBlock to another operator or give supporters a chance to keep it going? She answered: “I understand that the Everyblock community is disappointed. So are we. We looked at various options to keep this going, but none of them were viable. It was a tough call to make.”

The answer underlying this is pretty easy to see: we couldn’t make money on the deal using our traditional media model/lizard brain approach to money making, so we’re killing this thing. Sure, we could hand it over or sell it or something, but if we did that and someone ELSE figured out a way to make money, we’d look like the bunch of idiots we probably are.

Could Holovaty (or someone like him) have pulled off a Steve-Jobs-Rides-Back-To-Apple-And-Saves-Its-Ass move with EveryBlock? I don’t know, but it was probably worth the try.

Could NBC have tried to think outside of its “MUST CAN HAZ IMMEEEDEEATE CASH” model and tried to learn something? Probably not without a lobotomy and a few high colonics in the ol’ C-Suite.

Might this thing have died on its own somewhere along the way anyway? Anything is possible. Even the best, most perfectly, bulletproof products for a time (read: NetScape) make a sharp, ugly turn and die.

The point is we’re never going to know the answer to these things because when a major entity is faced with something that might be good and that forces them to think, their first and only answer seems to be: “buy it and dismantle the damned thing.”

And that’s a big loss for all of us.

My Kingdom For A Tomb

Call me an oddball, but my favorite current weird news story is the whole Richard III skeleton found in a Leicester car park (Britspeak for parking lot) saga. It's got it all: death, royals, and DNA. The pro-Plantagenet press corps is busy bashing the Tudor-ites who, in turn, are dissing the Windsors. I made that last bit up.

It's always fun when historical myth turns out to be true as it has in this case. Of course, it has also brought on a bit of revisionism as well: was poor Richard as bad as Shakespeare made him out to be? Probably not, the Bard was sucking up to the Tudors and it would have been hard for *anyone* to be as big a monster as Henry VIII.

My interest in Richard III stems from a very good high school English teacher, Miss Jackson, who had a way of teaching Shakespeare that held the interest of a group of hormonally crazed California teenagers. Not an easy feat.

The Guardian has been all over the story. Here's the master link. The latest story is about the re-creation of Richard's face. I prefer to think of the face of the great actor who played him in the modernized version of Shakespeare's Richard III that hit stage and screen in the 1990's, Ian McKellen. He is, alas, better known for wearing a ZZ Top-style beard whilst playing Gandalf but here he is playing the King as Fascist dictator:

Second Term

I sort of feel like Joey the Shark and Barack Me Amadeus should switch places for Term Two, like Obama should get to be like on two weeks' notice, where you get to leave early and wear a Grateful Dead t-shirt to work and crack open a beer at your desk because what are they going to do, fire you? 

I don't mean actually blow off work, I just mean have a fucking cigarette and stub it out on Boehner's car if you want, man.  

A. 

Three "rude and impertinent" questions about the Manti Te'o saga

Once Deadspin cracked open the case of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s fake dead girlfriend, the Internet and MSM were aflutter with discussions as they scrambled to keep up.

Perhaps the biggest bit of dickheadery came from the Boston Globe where Jim McBride, commenting on getting his ass kicked on the story, scoffed at Deadspin as not being a paragon of journalistic virtue.

My own take on Deadspace has been one of high-risk, high-reward. In explaining this site to a group of young J-students from Wisconsin, I said Deadspace was akin to former Milwaukee Brewer Russell Branyan. He’d go 1-for-13 and those 12 outs were a horrific affront to the sport. However, when he connected, it was like Paul Bunyan hit the ball with a giant redwood.

In the case of the Te’o story, Deadspace has hit the ball so hard, it hasn’t landed yet.

The questions they are now asking point to the giant holes in Te’o’s story: A year-long relationship with a girl he never met, conflicting reports as to a car wreck she was or wasn’t in, the lack of an obituary for her once she died, the lack of registration records at Stanford and more. The media outlets that have drawn giant red circles around these inconsistencies, having never once thought to look for them on their own.

This post could go in a number of directions. We could start with our hero-worshiping approach to athletes that has gone on for generations. We could look into the way that we are once again seeing sports journalists shown as "inveterate jock sniffers," to quote the late Hunter S. Thompson, buying whatever athletes are selling for the most part. We could ask those “baffling” and “obvious” questions that only became “baffling” and “obvious” once Deadspin pointed out the logical lapses in Te’o’s tales. We could even look at the idea of humanity, in that most of us have been taught it is rude and impertinent to say, “So, this dead chick… You got a body you can show us?”

Instead, I’ll do my best to follow Deadspin’s lead and ask three rude and impertinent questions about this. I doubt they’ll hit the mainstream, but I think they’re areas people have yet to actually dig into, but probably should.

 

1) Did the reputation of Notre Dame and its status as both an elite school (always) and an elite football program (historically and once and again occasionally) play a role in everyone buying the bullshit? Even more, does it allow us to continue to buy the “Te’o was duped” line instead of the “Te’o made it all up” line?

I have had this conversation on a number of levels in a variety of ways recently. In talking to my class about their resumes, one of the kids asked if he should put education above experience when applying for journalism jobs. I told him, no, you need to let people know what you can do and have done. The education is secondary. Some of the kids gave me the “that’s because we go to a shitty school, right?” look, so I explained to them my experiences with “good” and “shitty” schools.

The dumbest kid I ever had at Mizzou was not better than the best kid I ever had here or anywhere else I taught. Being from the “Jesus H. Christ School of Fucking Journalism” didn’t make a dumb kid godlike. The degree, however, does have a bit of a “shiny” factor that some people like to use as a metric. To that end, if you are good at what you do, the degree and the “name program” won’t matter as much.

I’m not sure how much they believed me.

A student here also applied for the Politics in Journalism internship in D.C. this summer. When I talked to a guy who was helping facilitate the process, he told me  (not for attribution) that they tended to rely on “strong programs” and “geographical concerns” as part of their factors in determining. In other words, if we pick a kid from a “name program” and the kid goes to shit, at least we can say, “Hey, how were we to know? I mean, he goes to NORTHWESTERN!” (The secondary element is “If we can get a local kid and it will only cost him bus fare to cover the White House, we’re fine too.”)

When I wrote the letter for my kid, I made a strong push against that notion, arguing that easy and safe tend to be bullshit factors. Take the risk on the kid from a branch school who would run into traffic for a story. She got the gig.

In the case of Te’o and Notre Dame, I’m wondering if this “name program” idea applies. Kids from UNLV? Hey, they’re the “Running Felons!” When they were winning the national championship in basketball, they had gone from “Tumbleweed Tech” to these “thugs and hoodlums” with gold teeth and ghetto swagger. During the HBO documentary on the Runnin’ Rebels, several people made a point that the NCAA investigated coach Jerry Tarkanian and found as many rule violations as possible. Meanwhile, UCLA’s “paragon of virtue” team and coach John Wooden were unmarred at the time by their relationship with notorious booster Sam Gilbert.

In the ESPN documentary “Pony Exce$$,” the NCAA began finding rule violations once Southern Methodist University became important on the national scene. These included things like dinners for athletes on recruiting trips and an assistant coach playing racquetball with a kid on a trip. The self-serving response from SMU was that this was selective enforcement. However, outside observers also noted that SMU became the new “fastest gun in the West” but lacked friends in the NCAA to help keep the dogs away. Meanwhile, other programs, such as Texas, often went unscathed.

Notre Dame is a double “name school” whammy: It’s the program everyone knows about and it’s also one that has built a reputation for itself as being a “cut above” in terms of student athletes. Hall of Famer and Notre Dame grad Paul Hornung got in trouble on a radio show when he suggested Notre Dame needed to lower its standards to get more black athletes. Part of the rage, obviously, was the issue of race, but an equal number of people pushed back on the issue of virtue.

I would argue that Notre Dame’s status not only kept people from digging into Te’o’s story, but is still keeping some of the more reticent vultures at bay in challenging his “I was duped story.”

 

2) Speaking of race, to what degree did Te’o’s status as a minority impact the way people poked at this story and continue to poke at it?

This one is always a lot more delicate, as this country still hasn’t come to terms with the majority of its bugaboos in regard to race. As a prominent figure of Samoan descent, Te’o wasn’t exactly the Jackie Robinson of Polynesians, but there were more than a few people in the Poly community looking up to him. Many of them now are expressing outrage.

For years, the issue of how a predominantly white media looked at players of color has long dogged journalism. The stories Hank Aaron told of being quoted in his limited grammar and southern dialect are heartbreaking. So are the stories in which the Pittsburgh media quoted the late Roberto Clemente phonetically, allowing him to explain how he “heet bol gud.” Historians reviewing these topics were quick to note that the Southern Boys of Dixie likely didn’t speak in the King’s English, but got the benefit of the doubt when it came to reporters fixing quotes.

Today, the issue of race and sport isn’t as brutal, but wound is just as sensitive and the backlash capabilities of pundits is far greater than it ever was. Had a Wright Thompson, a Dan Shaughnessy or a Mike Lopresti started asking the “Hey, wait a minute…” columns on the kid, the Screaming A. Smiths of the world would be on them like a starving dog on a pork chop. And again, based on the shameful history of sports coverage and race, it wouldn’t be that hard to say, “Hey, if this were Johnny Manziel saying his girlfriend died, you’d believe his ass, you racist cracker.”

If you can say one thing about Deadspin, it’s that the publication really benefits from its status as an outsider and a shit-stirrer. The folks there go after everything all the time and don’t mind getting messy for any reason at all. It reminds me once of something I heard about a cranky old guy, spewing disparaging terms about a minority group at a bar: “He’s not racist. He hates everyone equally.”

 

3) Faith and religion are inextricably linked to both Te’o’s own story (a devout Mormon) and the school’s storyline (a Catholic university guided by a spiritual tradition, to quote the school’s own website). Were people snowed (and are they continuing to be snowed) because of the religion issue?

People of faith are given a pass. They are given the benefit of the doubt. Their mistakes are seen as honest ones, not malicious ones. They are shielded by the cloak of the “all-mighty” and their servitude to that being shows they are better, stronger, more decent and more trustworthy people than anyone else. The more they profess their faith, the more people tend to ascribe these characteristics to them.

In the case of a tie, the tie doesn’t go to the sinner. 

That is why when they fall, they fall hard. And when they do fall, many of us tend to not want to believe their fallibility.

When I was a kid, the priest of our parish would call our house on some random Sunday night and ask my folks if he could take me out for dinner. Mom said, at the time, she never blinked an eye. When she was a kid, the priest would come over for dinner, plop her on his lap and tell stories all night.

The idea that these folks might be doing something unseemly with kids? C’mon… That’s ridiculous!

Now those swishy guys who moved in up the block? Hey, you’d better keep your kids away from that house!

When the abuse scandal finally cracked open, people didn’t want to see it until wave after wave of evidence drown their ability to ignore what had happened. Even now, people are clinging to their illusions, like they’re holding fast to a piece of driftwood in the wake of a shipwreck.

People of faith can be just as full of shit as the rest of us. Some of the most mean-spirited, vindictive and angry people I know are the people who pray the rosary once a day, go to church on every holy day and are unyielding in their support of religious doctrine.

The televangelists of the 1980s were the most outspoken in terms of their hatred of greed and lust, all the while they were building waterslides and porking chicks on the side.

Ted Haggard railed against drugs and gays, all the while he was more than sampling the goods.

Closer to home, when the Rev. Reggie White played for the Packers, he asked for help in rebuilding a church in Tennessee that was destroyed in an arson fire. The good folks of Wisconsin chipped in raised more than six-figures. The church was never rebuilt and no one knows where the money went.

Even Notre Dame seems to have been founded on faith and built out of Teflon. When the University of Miami played Notre Dame in the mid-1980s, fans of ND wore “Catholics vs. Convicts” T-shirts. Bernie Kosar, a Miami alumnus, noted more than once that he is a Catholic and that Notre Dame, at least in terms of football, is the least Christian environment in the world.

And yet, we can’t get around this idea that the narrative of faith is that of a better person and thus someone for whom the scrutiny of reality does not apply.

He was a nice kid who spoke openly about being a devout Mormon in a time in which a) Mormons carried with them the stank of Mitt Romney and b) people still aren’t buying what the Mormons are aggressively selling. He told us stories that made him even more sympathetic, one of which was even true (his dying grandmother). To quote Shattered Glass, “He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact just because we found him entertaining.”

Even now, as the jackals in the MSM pick over the carcass of Deadspin’s kill and find more holes in obvious places, few writers are willing to say the linebacker has no clothes. Te’o is still getting the benefit of the doubt that he “might” have been duped by this random internet pseudo-chick he never met or only met once or he talked to every night or who he only discussed things with via Twitter and who died and was buried but never had an obituary…

Sorry. I have to stop. This kid is full of shit.

The fact I couldn’t hack it in his religion because I drink enough Diet Coke every day to drown a classroom full of third-graders and I like my Jack Daniel’s in a Mason Jar doesn’t force me to give him a pass. God might be infallible, but his followers here on Earth have more than their share of flaws.

If I end up being wrong on this one, I’ll do the decent thing and apologize.

In the mean time, I keep thinking that we’d be far less likely to trust Larry Johnson, Allen Iverson or any other angry, ugly “sinner” than we trust Te’o.

 

Answer these questions as you see fit.

Post away.

Clarence Thomas Meets John Entwistle

The beltway political press is wetting themselves today about porn lovin' Supreme Clarence Thomas. He spoke in court for the first time in 7 years. Big Fucking Deal. Me, I wish he'd retire but they'll have to carry him out of there as long as the Democrats control the White House.

According to Slate's ghoulishly delightful Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator, there is only a 10.17% chance that Thomas will kick the bucket by 2017, so he'll probably wait another 7 years til opening his yap/bazoo/piehole again.

You're probably asking yourself how the late, great-and stolid even while alive-Who bassist John Entwistle fits into this scenario. Here's how: he was not only called the Ox, he was also The Quiet One:

 

Bernie Kosar and the Long Road Back

The first time I really remember seeing him, Bernie Kosar was about to be on the wrong side of history. As a kid, I had watched the 1984 Orange Bowl, but I didn’t really know who the QB was. It seemed to be more team on team than man on man.

When I saw the lithe 6-foot-5 man taking on the 5-foot-9 elf from Boston College on the day after Thanksgiving, the midget in me pulled for Doug Flutie.

I watched practically weeping as they showed Kosar on the sideline smiling and accepting congratulations from guys with bad mustaches and Jheri Curls.

“I want the short guy to win,” I wailed to my father. “Not this Bernie guy.”

My father tried to explain reality to me and how six seconds wasn’t enough time to do anything and so forth and so on…

You know how that one played out.

For the next 30 years of my life, I pulled for that short guy but also for the tall one. Kosar found a way to finagle his passage to his hometown Cleveland Browns. I had loved the team for years, for reasons that still escape my family, and I watched him grow the team from weak roots to playoff promise.

I remember that cold-as-shit weekend in 1987 where he whipped the ball through an icy wind on the banks of Lake Erie for 489 yards, bringing his team back against the Jets for a 23-20 double OT win. He was down 10 with less than three minutes to go and he managed to make it happen for the Browns.

I also remember suffering with him as John Elway made the Browns his personal bitch. The Drive. The Drive II. The Fumble. Every year, Kosar would pull them to within an inch of the Super Bowl. Every year Elway would keep them an inch away.

It also seemed like every year, Kosar arrived in the playoffs made of nothing but duct tape and glue. He would be beaten, battered and nearly crippled.

He had the mobility of your average Greek statue and the escape ability of the passengers on the Titanic. In the days of Mark Gastineau, Lawrence Taylor, Mike Singletary and other rabid defenders, Kosar essentially wore a “Sack Me” sign every Sunday. Over 16 weeks, they would crush him repeatedly and mercilessly.

During one playoff game, I remember seeing a sideline report on Kosar’s hand. Turns out he had torn a tendon or something in the index finger of his throwing hand. To make sure he could play, the trainer built this thing out of a rubber band and epoxy.

They lost anyway.

Finally, I remember that one horrible fall in 1993 when Bill Belichick (before he was “Miracle Bill” of the Patriots), called a press conference and cut Kosar in mid-season without a viable backup to injured Vinny Testaverde. Belichick muttered the line “diminishing skills” and with that, he was gone.

The only good thing about that was seeing Kosar getting scooped up by the Cowboys, who were en route to a Super Bowl. When Troy Aikman got one of his patented concussions, Kosar stepped in and helped push the team into the Big Show.

(Over the years, I seemed to have remembered Bernie throwing a ridiculously good pass to Alvin Harper for a touchdown. Found it in that link. It's like finding a memory of your first kiss.)

The last snap of that Super Bowl win? All Kosar, who knelt to the ground to run out the clock.

I only got to see him play live once. It was in 1994 or 1995 when the Dolphins (his last stop) played the Packers in the pre-season Shrine Game at County Stadium. He led the Dolphins’ second unit down the field with ridiculous precision. Of course, he wasn’t going to supplant Hall of Famer to be Dan Marino, but I could dream.

Eventually he retired and became one of the few success stories in post-game life. He had a business degree and a good mind for running things. He invested in real estate, restaurants and greeting card businesses. He was doing exceptionally well.

Then, everything broke again.

The market turned, his wife left, his health began deteriorating. His fortune turned to dust and his fans started to wonder about him.

The Browns brought him back to do color on their broadcasts, only to find that fans believed him to be drunk or drugged up on TV. The slurred speech and the lapses in thought had them thinking the worst of the man who gave them his very best.

As it turns out, Kosar was dealing with serious post-concussion syndrome, much like many of his other mid-1980s NFL brethren. No one knew to ask for a while and when they did, Kosar wasn’t willing to share.

As of this writing, Kosar has finally come to grips with some of these issues. He’s still trying to rebuild his life. He’s speaking out on issues of finance, as witnessed in Billy Corben’s classic “30 for 30” film “Broke.” He also appears to be getting healthier.

Kosar recently spoke out in favor of an experimental treatment he’s been receiving for concussions. He said the pain has subsided, the ringing in his head has stopped and he feels healthier than he has since his 20s.

My only concern is in the minor details of the story (shown here) that refer to his doctor as a “pioneer”  and the treatment as “groundbreaking.” In both cases, the quotes are directly from the source material, leaving me curious as to why the writer chose that path. My hope is that this isn’t some sort of snake oil salesman, glomming onto a downtrodden player in hopes of a fast buck. My cynicism leads me to think this to be the case, in spite of hoping against it.

Still, I’ll be keeping an eye on ol’ Number 19, watching him get back off the turf one more time.

If anyone deserves a winning outcome, it’s Kosar.

A really funny gang rape

Here’s a great joke:

How do you know a 16-year-old girl is likely dead?

“You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole!”

Wait, here’s a better one!

How dead is a 16-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a group of high school classmates and repeatedly raped?

“She’s deader than O.J.’s wife!”

Have you stopped laughing yet? Then you'll love this one:

How hard did a group of high school football players, one by one, rape a girl after they had to physically carry her unconscious body from one party into their “rape crew” party?

“They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. And they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl…”

Do you need to catch your breath? Laughing so hard? Yeah, here’s another one that will have you just crying:

How pointless is it to try to help a 16-year-old girl who, after being raped while unconscious (possibly because some asshole roofied her), was peed on and still didn’t wake up?

“That’s like trying to help wood turn into stone. That’s like trying to help the Padres to a .500 season. That’s like trying to help Tim Tebow be a good quarterback. That’s like trying to help Natty Light become a refreshing beer.”

Wait… You’re not laughing?

I guess you’re not from Steubenville, Ohio’s proud high school. If you were, you’d probably think this stuff was hysterical. At least, that’s what the video evidence that was leaked earlier this week reveals.

An anonymous hacker posted a 12-minute clip of a young man, identified as former Steubenville High School baseball player Michael Nodianos, detailing how “raped” a young woman was at the party. Those one-line zingers above? Nothing but his comedic genius at work.

Not satisfied to simply take his one-idiot improv act to video, Nodianos is said to have also tweeted about the incident, so his brilliance could be enjoyed by those without the inclination to sit through a fifth of an hour of pure dickheadery.

The rape was said to have occurred in August, but the prosecution of the football players who were said to be responsible for these acts failed to gain traction until the blogosphere took hold of the story. Allegations that police had brushed the incident under the rug in this 18,000-person football-crazed town were refuted by prosecutors, who said almost no one came forward to offer any information about this vile act.

Now, it seems that everyone’s eyes are on this hamlet best known for its dying industrial base and as the birthplace of famed gambler Jimmy the Greek.

Prior to this national shaming, it seemed as if nothing could bring down the “Big Red” spirit. To wit, here’s the opening line from the “investigative” piece from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

It’s Monday, and ominous-looking clouds are pushing over Harding Stadium as dozens of football players in practice jerseys prepare to take on Cleveland’s Benedictine Bengals.

But this day two key players are missing from the field.

Right. Because that’s the news. We’re missing two key players from this “Championship-Bound” group of extraordinary young gentlemen. Never mind that the story also notes that several players linked to this shameful act were still PLAYING ON THE TEAM at the time this was written.

Talk about a joke…

If you want to spend 12 of the creepiest minutes of your life, watch the video. Usually, when someone tells me something is “extremely disturbing” they’re trying to warn me off about a blood-soaked scene, an obscenity laced tirade or a speech Mitt Romney is giving. In any of those cases, I can eat a ham sandwich and watch it no problem.

This one? No way. I saw it twice and that was three times too many.

The worst part was that this kid and most of his friends were in no way empathetic. They laughed. They cracked jokes. They sipped beverages out of Styrofoam cups while musing about how little this girl's life mattered.

When a friend asked, “What if it was your daughter?” Nodianos replied, “It’s not.”

Well, I have a daughter.

She’s seven.

I worry every day about what’s going to happen to her.

When I see assholes like these strutting around like roosters, proclaiming the awesomeness of someone else’s daughter being brutalized, every ounce of fear and rage I have heightens in my desperation to protect her.

The kid recording all this said he planned to watch this video every day.

I hope he does. I hope it eventually sinks in what actually happened to this girl.

I don’t know if that kid or Nodianos or any of the other vidiots can be charged with a crime. At the very least, I wish they would be forced to stand in front of their peers, the school administrators, the parents and the loved ones of everyone in their school at some giant assembly.

Then, I want someone to play this whole video on a projection screen as they stand there and watch how people stare at them in horror and disgust.

I want every college recruiter and every employer who Googles these pecker-heads to have that video pop up front and center so they can see exactly what they had to say about how “raped” this poor child was.

I hope they do have families and then have to explain to their kids why Daddy was laughing in that video about the hurt girl. I also want them to simply have to worry about people like them being out there, all too ready to take advantage of an incapacitated child.

I’ll bet all of that would just be downright hilarious.

Happy Blue Year

It’s mourning in America, peeps! Last night we went over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” actually more like a bungee jump because apparently the House is going to vote on the Senate’s bill this morning and (hopefully) pull us back. Oh, goodie.

I’m sitting here enjoying my first cup of coffee of the day and haven’t yet read up on all the details, but it sounds like it’s what they were talking about yesterday: raising taxes on incomes over $400,000 for single filers, $450,000 for families. On hearing the news that $400,000 is now “middle class,” Mr. Beale enthusiastically quipped, “Great! I can’t wait to be upper middle class.” Dude.

Nobody likes this deal but everyone on my TeeVee is telling me that is a sign of “bipartisanship” and good negotiating. Um, bullshit. I’m trying to remember the last time I haggled over the price of something, say a car, and both parties walked away pissed off and angry and called it a win. That would be never. The essence of a good compromise is that all the negotiating parties have something to be happy about. People do not walk away from a successful negotiation pissed off.

Sigh.

Yesterday during the media circus over this deal I saw Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York tell us,

I've always believed that $250,000 may make you rich in some parts of the country, but not in places like New York. A higher threshold, I think, is a good compromise.

... to which I say, Fuck you. Don’t live in New York, then. I mean, seriously? This is the Democratic position? Since when do we craft national tax policy to cater to the most privileged extreme? (Don’t answer that.)  

I know Rep. Israel was just speaking out on behalf of his constituents, but that attitude really pisses me off. There are very few places in this country where the cost of living is so high that $250,000 is not enough to get by, where people will really suffer if their marginal tax rate goes up a few percent. In fact, please show me the New Yorker who will really, really be hurt by a tax increase at the $250,000+ level. And I mean seriously hurt, not just whining, but will not be able to make it. Where is the person who will have to put off sending their kids to college or put off the knee operation another year or take a second or third job to make up that extra $2,000 or so in taxes? Yes, Rep. Israel, find me that person. Good luck.

It pisses me off that there are Democrats who don't understand the razor's edge on which so many people live these days. Meanwhile, we have the Republicans for whom this is all one giant game. Let's look no further than my own Senator Bob Corker, offering this astonishing butthurt after Obama’s remarks yesterday:

"I know the president has fun heckling Congress. I think he lost probably numbers of votes with what he did."

Guess what, the Senate bill passed 89-8, so that would be a big, fat wrong-o, buckaroo. And oh, did some Republicans get their widdew fee-fees hurt? Awww! Let’s make the entire country pay higher taxes because some pampered millionaires in Congress don’t like getting scolded by the black POTUS. Grow the fuck up.

I realize this is all theater, it's all pandering to the cameras, which is just further proof of our massive institutional failure. Our government simply no longer functions. At this point I’m just throwing up my hands. I honestly don’t know what to do. I despair, people, I really do. The solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. Somewhere along the way, some forces came into play to cause this institutional failure. We need to find those forces and, like a skilled surgeon, excise them. Remove the tumor, be it the media, lobbyists, corporate personhood, whatever. 

Last night Mr. Beale and I saw the excellent documentary Chasing Ice. It’s about climate change, and it’s gorgeous, scary and frustrating. It reminded me that we’ve got some really big issues facing us, globally-speaking. So grow up, already. We all need to stop being such big fat babies about everything because there are some massive problems coming down the pike that make tax cuts for millionaires look so petty. We can't have our government run by a bunch of thumb-suckers -- of either party. The zombie apocalypse is upon us, people, and we simply don't have that luxury. We can't afford posturing and butthurt and ego-stroking.

I didn't intend to be such a downer today. Sorry. And maybe there's a silver lining here. Since we obviously can’t get our own house in order, my advice to the world is: better solve the big stuff without us. Clearly other nations are more rational and intelligent about things like climate change and world hunger and the like; they don’t have the crackpot “end times” yokels dragging their policy machinery back two centuries. The past few years have shown that America does not want to be the grown-up in the room. So please, carry on without us.

Brave

Five years ago, a former student of mine teetered on the edge of ending her own life.

I never knew it at the time, as she had slipped through the cracks of life like so many other kids who sit in my classes and stare back at me as I pontificate about something or other. She was a great student, a funny kid and an amazing journalist. She had that weird “quirk” about her that predisposed her to a life spent with coffee and cigarettes and off-color jokes. She oscillated between self-deprecating humor and claims of being a Golden God of design. She just had that odd newsroom sense of being annoyed with herself and being proud of herself all at the same time.

Turns out, some of that was the doing of a mental illness.

In a column she wrote a few years back, she did the scariest and bravest thing I could imagine: She told people she was broken.

(The DM didn't keep the full version on its site. She added this note to her Facebook page that was the "uncut" edition. Read it if you get a chance.)

She explained the nature of her bipolar disorder and how the pills weren’t helping and how she had neatly arranged the bottles and pondered how best to end her own life. She explained that this wasn’t a mental snap, a one-shot deal where she “had a bad day” but rather a slow build that had taken half of her life from her. She provided details of life as a kid, a young woman and an adult who was forced to live a silent struggle against a societal shaming.

You break a leg? Ouch! There’s a doctor for that.

You contract an illness? Oh, you poor thing! There’s a cure for that.

You have a mental “issue?” Snap out of it. Jesus… Quit being such a crybaby.

I hadn’t thought about her for a while until I read the story of Officer Jen Sebena and her husband, Ben, who is now charged with her murder.

We were watching TV on Christmas Eve when the news of her death came across the screen. She was found dead while on duty, having been shot multiple times outside a Wauwatosa fire station. Two days later, her husband sat in a courtroom, while the details of his disturbing behavior had been revealed.

Ben Sebena was a highly decorated Marine, who was part of the invasion force at the start of the 2003 Iraq War. He received a Purple Heart after surviving a mortar attack that left him with scars all over his body.

In a YouTube video, he talks of seeing friends killed all around him, of having to kill a child, of learning that “death is OK.”

Over the past month, Jen Sebena had told fellow officers her husband had become more erratic.

He abused her, held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her.

He claimed to be jealous of “other men” although no evidence has come to light suggesting any other men in his wife’s life.

He punched holes in the walls of their home.

In the days leading up to the murder, Ben stalked his wife, following her in the couple’s 2012 Prius. He then emerged from the shadows on Christmas Eve around 4:30 a.m.

He shot her twice in the back of the head before removing her service weapon from its holster and pumping three more bullets into her face. He later told police he wanted to make sure she was dead and that she didn’t suffer.

Ben Sebena has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and although no one has made mention of it yet, I would be willing to bet every dollar I have that his “mental condition” will come into play at some point.

Chances are, those events he spoke of during that video and many more he couldn’t bring himself to discuss hurt him in a way far deeper than that mortar attack ever could. He told people that he had been “into the dark places,” and it’s unclear if he ever truly recovered from that. Even more, he might have had issues before he entered Iraq or before he entered the Corps or before he entered high school.

In the end, this hulking man who had been trained to kill couldn’t or wouldn’t come to grips with the idea that he probably needed mental help.

In reflecting on her decision to publish her story, Nicole talked about how mental illness is one of the last giant stigmas in our country. In fact, it was the death of a police officer prior to her column that inspired her to come out about this issue:

Last year, a man with bipolar disorder shot and killed a state trooper. In the interviews with his family afterward, they said they had been trying to get him help, but the public response seemed to be “crazy people shoot cops.” I’m not saying I’m crazy, but I do believe if the man had gotten the help he needed, he could have managed the disease.

In the five years since she was able to crawl back off that ledge, Nicole has been climbing the ladder at a prestigious newspaper, spending time with her boyfriend and advocating for the mentally ill. This year, she also donated a kidney to her father.

She touched many lives and made so many people so much better because she figured out she needed help and she got it.

Ben Sebena probably needed help and he had access to it. The VA in Milwaukee is renowned for being one of the best in the Midwest in terms of providing services to veterans. Those who have served have access to counseling, medicine and health care professionals.

In many cases, though, the vets don’t take advantage of these opportunities due to a distain for bureaucracy. In other cases, I would imagine, the societal equation of mental issues with weakness would be another reason.

I’ve spent more than enough time with “guy’s guys” to know what gets said over beer when the subject of someone seeing “a shrink” comes up:

“Does his husband go with him to see the shrink?”

“Hey, did the doctor give him a box of tampons too?”

“I just figured he was tougher than that…”

In other words “mental illness equals pussy.”

And yet it was this diminutive kid with a pixie haircut who was stronger than all of them, a woman who laid bare her fears and shared a story that most of those manly men can’t tell. She was tougher than people who earned a chest full of medals by being willing to stand up in the face of death but are unwilling to sit down with “a shrink.”

It was probably the bravest thing I ever saw.

Stupid Centrist Tricks

There's a group of people inside the Beltway who are in favor of removing politics from the political process. Talk about a mission so impossible that neither Peter Graves nor Tom Cruise is up for the job. But these centrist fethishists have a crush on "moderate" Republicans like Jon Huntsman. I'm not sure what's moderate about him but Norm Ornstein thinks he should replace Boner as Speaker. I am not making this up, y'all:

What if Boehner doesn’t survive? Go to Article I, Section 2: The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House. In fact, the House can choose anybody a majority wants to fill the post. Every speaker has been a representative from the majority party. But these days, the old pattern clearly is not working.

Even in a multi-ballot marathon, there is no way 17 or more Republicans in the new House would opt for Nancy Pelosi, or any other Democrat. The danger is that a fatigued GOP will settle for a take-no-prisoners firebrand or find another candidate willing to pledge fealty to the radical minority within the majority, turning the current, really bad situation into something worse.

The best way out of this mess would be to find someone from outside the House to transcend the differences and alter the dysfunctional dynamic we are all enduring. Ideally, that individual would transcend politics and party — but after David Petraeus’s stumble, we don’t have many such candidates. It would have to be a partisan Republican.

One option would be Jon Huntsman. By any reasonable standard, he is a conservative Republican: As governor of Utah, he supported smaller government, lower taxes and balanced budgets, and he opted consistently for market-based solutions. As a presidential candidate, he supported positions that were in the wheelhouse of Ronald Reagan. But a Speaker Huntsman would look beyond party and provide a different kind of leadership. He would drive a hard bargain with the president but would aim for a broad majority from the center out, not from the right fringe in. He could not force legislation onto the floor, but he would have immense moral suasion.

I wonder which state Ornstein got his potent legal weed from: Colorado or Washington? All I know is that I want some since it's super hallucinatory and gives you delusions of grandeur to boot.

The whole thing is totally bizarre since Ornstein is a noted Congressional scholar and the House has never and will never elect a non-member as Speaker. Besides, Jon Huntsman? Really? Jon Fucking Huntsman? The dude who won the 2012 media primary and was a total disaster as a Presidential candidate. He was a centrist's dreamboat then and apparently Ole' Norm has been pining for him ever since but all this suggestion does is make Normy look like a barmy idiot.

I guess Ornstein will get points in some quarters for thinking "outside the box" a phrase that should be buried forthwith. It's only a matter of time until centrist fuckwits like Bloomberg and Tom Friedman will take up the cudgel and support Stormin' Norman. Me, I'd rather watch Cheers:

  

Going New York Postal

I didn't see this until today but I had to share. The NRA actually got bad pub from the Murdoch Press. All I can add is, Holy Shit:

Reading, 'Riting and Rifles

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, a good friend of the family had her home robbed in the middle of the night. While she and her husband lay in bed, feigning sleep, two or more men rifled through their closets, drawers and jewelry.

Unbeknownst to these thieves, they had entered a home with multiple guns. The husband was an avid hunter and fisherman and had several rifles throughout the home and a shotgun placed right under the bed.

The only problem? For some reason, the gun was on the wrong side of the bed, resting under her side, not his. Neither of them decided that a daring attempt to protect their home was worth it. In the end, the thieves left with clothing, jewelry, electronics and cash. They were never caught.

The husband died a number of years ago, and I was too young to ask any questions about that night before he did. Still, I found myself wondering what would have happened if the gun had been in the right spot that night.

Would he have reached for it?

Would he have confronted the men?

Would he have been forced to kill them?

Perhaps even more importantly, had all of those things happened, how would that have impacted him?

I thought about this today as memorials to the victims of Sandy Hook took place throughout the country and gun nuts started worming out of their STFU bunkers.

The NRA folks managed to hold their tongues for almost a whole week before Wayne LaPierre took to the stage today and told the world he wanted armed police in every school. It is a miracle, but LaPierre’s take on this wasn’t the stupidest thing I heard this week.

That honor goes to the brain trust suggesting that TEACHERS be armed at the schools.

Exhibit A:

If the people supporting this position could say anything more idiotic, it would have to be in “Nell” style grunts, because this is the dumbest thing the English language will allow.

In each of the last several major public shootings, the shooters involved were carrying assault weapons. Adam Lanza had a Bushmaster .223, a civilian model of a military-grade assault weapon. James Holmes used a similar weapon (a .223 Smith and Wesson M&P 15) while also carrying a shotgun and two semi-automatic handguns. Klebold and Harris multiple shotguns and assault rifles in Columbine and the two kids who enacted the Jonesboro massacre had 10 guns, three of which were automatic weapons.

In addition, Lanza and Holmes were wearing full body armor.

What, exactly, are we going to be arming our teachers with? A cannon? The Iron Man suit?

Even more, possessing a gun is far more likely to get you killed than NOT possessing a gun. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that on average, guns did not protect people who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Even more, the study found people WITH guns were 4.5 times MORE LIKELY to be shot than those NOT possessing guns.

(The cynic in me believes that maybe the “arm our teachers” folks know this and figure if the shooter is trying to take out the teacher with the gun, the kids can run for cover.)

This doesn’t even account for people who own guns and have them turned against them. The idea of someone without a gun overpowering someone with a gun and then using that gun against them is not that farfetched.

My mother and many of the women she teaches with are about 5-foot-3 and weigh about a buck 20. Some of the eighth grade GIRLS are almost a foot taller and outweigh those teachers by 70 pounds, to say nothing of the boys. A teacher’s gun being taken away and used for less-protective means isn’t a pipe dream.  I’m interested to see what happens when a student absconds with a teacher’s gun and does something horrible.

And then there is the most counterintuitive portion of this: The idea of parents being OK with armed teachers in the school. These are the same parents who piss and moan about teachers who a) overstep their boundaries in pushing an “agenda” with their kids, b) don’t see how brilliant their kids are and fail to give them all A’s for simply breathing, c) should be brought up on charges for “assault” for breathing near their kids in an aggressive manner and d) are completely worthy of scrutiny for EVERY, SINGLE DECISION they make.

Talk to an elementary school teacher or a high school teacher and that educator can regale you with tale after tale after tale of how parents were on them for any perceived slight levied upon their kid. The teachers I know can tell me hours of stories in which parents questioned pretty much every aspect of their competence.

I can’t imagine that these would be the same parents who would say, “Y’know, I’m fine Mrs. Smith locking and loading in the classroom. I’m sure NOTHING bad will happen and she has my complete faith and confidence!”

(And of course, there’s the fear that one of the kids in the classroom decides to pull a gun or a knife and force a teacher to make a lethal decision. Let’s see how much support we get for the “Tech-9’s for Teachers” program.)

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there’s this: If a teacher was presented with a gun, trained in its use, given the green light to “castle doctrine” anyone with a weapon and then presented with a rampaging Lenza-style asshole, then what?

When the time came and the chips were down, could that teacher pull the trigger on a person and take the life of another human being?

This part of the equation is never discussed. It really should be.

So should the concept of “OK, then what?”

Police officers go to work each day, knowing it is likely that a “kill or be killed” scenario will take place. They train for it. They ready themselves for it. They fear it.

When the time comes and they do fire that fatal shot, it often takes months or years for an officer involved in a “righteous shoot” to pull it back together.

Some never do.

What happens when a teacher has to do it? Do they ever recover?

When it happens for a teacher, how will the kids react? Will they ever look at that teacher the same way?

It may be true that we never see a school shooting like Sandy Hook coming until it’s too late. In many cases, it’s a one-in-a-million event.

But if we start placing guns in the schools like this, we will be living under the constant specter of death and mayhem.

At that point, we risk everything .

Fuck The NRA

Okay, I spent an hour composing a nice thoughtful post with a much more polite title and fucking TypePad ate it and it’s nowhere to be found, so that’s an hour of my day gone and I’m now inclined to be crabby and brief. Here goes:

1 - TypePad sucks.

2- Fuck the NRA. Let’s just stop pretending they’re anything other than a political lobbying arm of the Republican Party operating on behalf of gun manufacturers. Whatever they started out as, they are no longer that. They do not represent gun owners or sportsmen. They are not a grassroots organization. Their leadership is almost entirely Republican Party political figures and gun manufacturers, with a few militia extremists thrown in for extra nutty flavor. If you have paid dues to the NRA you are the chump paying for Larry “wide stance” Craig, Ken Blackwell, Grover Norquist, Oliver North and John Bolton to swill Scotch and play a few rounds at some fancy golf resort. I do not think there is any equivalent in the Democratic Party.

3- Fox News executives evidently instructed their producers to not discuss gun control on the network. I highly doubt this was an independent decision. We have a “Guns Industrial Complex” operating in this country and it’s time we expose this fraud for what it is. The last thing the  GOP and gun manufacturers want is a discussion of gun violence and gun control, and while they’ve been enormously successful in shutting down debate in the past, it’s not working this time. I imagine GOP leaders, Roger Ailes and the top gun guys are regrouping on messaging as I write this. Expect to see Fox News come out full-bore on the "more guns could have stopped this" front. Also, who's gonna be the first nutter to blame Obama for this tragedy -- you know, so he could take everyone's guns -- just as they always knew he would?! My money's on Jim "Dim" Hoft.

4- I swear to God if another liberal clutches their pearls and wonders “where’s the outrage” for all the dead children in the Middle East I’m gonna kick a puppy (not really. I couldn’t do that.) Yes, it’s horrible that we care more about our kids than those in other nations. It’s horrible that we’ve killed thousands and thousands of innocents with our warmongering. I get that. But fuckitall, what war hasn’t killed innocents? What war isn’t awful? Isn’t that the fucking point? 

We care about what happened in Connecticut because these are our kids. And we failed them. Let’s deal with our failure as Americans to protect our children from violence in their own classrooms before we start attempting to deal with humanity’s collective failure to end war for all time. If we can’t turn our swords into plowshares at home we sure as hell won’t be doing it anywhere else.

5- Nashville is set to host the NRA's 2015 annual convention. There is a petition asking Mayor Karl Dean to stop it. Success if doubtful, but I pass the link on anyway.

6- Consider asking your local police deparment to schedule a "gun amnesty day." These are days when illegal/unwanted guns and ammo can be dropped off anonymously at local police precincts. Most communities have them. The guns are usually destroyed, though I'm told some PD's resell them, so maybe check into that too. It's important to get guns off the streets.

7- Did I mention TypePad sucks? It really does.

The Idiocy

Courtesy of friend of the blog Hobbes.

She's a great artist. I may have helped with the text on this one.

Making America Safer

American Moloch. Image via.

First, of all read this. 

I own a handgun. It's a simple Ruger P95 9x19mm pistol. I bought it years and years ago when I lived in a terrible, terrible apartment in a shitty, crime-ridden neighborhood. It cost me a couple of hundred dollars.

I bought this weapon for one reason--I might need to point it at another human, discharge rounds, and murder him (if the anticipated scenario had come to pass, the target would almost certainly have been a "him"). I had no illusions what it was for. I kept it by my bed for the year I lived there; magazine in, no round chambered. I bought a weapon with no external safety because I knew exactly what I was getting it for. I wasn't "defending freedom" or "resisting tyranny" or "being a responsible gun owner." I bought it because I might have to murder someone who came into my bedroom. They could've taken the TV and VCR; I wouldn't have given a fuck. But there was the distinct possibility that I would need to end another human's life because mine was in jeopardy.

That scenario never came to pass. But I held on to the weapon, and would occasionally go to a range to keep my skills sharp. Then I stopped doing that. Now, for the last five years, it's just sat in a case in my closet. I take it out once a month, clean it, oil it, and put it back. I never got rid of it because I thought I wouldn't make my initial investment back, and I knew that at least it wasn't endangering anyone locked away in my closet.

Today, I shattered the stock, spiked the barrel, snipped the springs, tossed the firing pin into a sewer grate, and otherwise destroyed it.

You see, my reasons for not getting rid of it were bullshit.  I've never bought anything else and not ditched it because I would have lost money in the deal.  And I know the statistics that say that households in which there are guns are far less safe than those without guns.  I pride myself on having an empirical approach to life; I like to go where the data lead me.  But I wasn't doing that here.  The data say: get rid of it.  And I didn't.  I held onto it because we're trained to have an irrational adoration of firearms; in a way, we're told that it's our duty to own them.

Well, fuck that.  I don't need this anymore. I have come to realize that there are no "bad guys" who exist outside of us.  The people who use firearms to hurt other people aren't monsters from another dimension.  They are us.  We are all good and bad, and some of us just have bad days--maybe you're at the end of yoru rope financially, or maybe you're inconsolably heartbroken, or maybe you're dealing with an improperly treated illness, or maybe you're dealing with any one of the other thousand ways the world can collapse on you.  When this happens, some of us might see reckless use of a firearm as an answer to what's bothering us.  That means that, if you have access to a firearm, your very bad day may give other people unimaginably bad days.  That's never an answer, and I'm removing that possibility from my life and the lives of people who enter my house.

I've seen estimates that there are 270,000,000 privately-owned firearms in the United States. Getting rid of one of them isn't going to make a huge dent in that. But 269,999,999 is still less than 270,000,000, and I'll sleep more soundly at night knowing that this tool that I bought with the express purpose of harming other people (yes, they may have intended me harm, but that was still why I bought it) will never ever have the chance to harm anyone.

I used to own a handgun.  I don't anymore.  Consider this my sacrifice to defeat Moloch.