Who's Running For President?

I don't give a flying fuck. All of the Republicans are demonstrably batshit crazy, in a willfully evil way. All of the Democrat have a vanishingly tiny chance of affecting my life in anything but the most infinitesimal way. And are not meaningfully less willfully evil, if that. The amount of noise generated by this would drive me bugfuck, if I allowed it to. Some beloveds have already allowed they to become bugfuck. This is a sad. They should take drugs for it. I should take drugs because they're big grownup beloveds and I have no control over what they do, or any ensuing sad.

Will I vote for Her? Not in the winnowing, no. In the Big One? I don't give a flying fuck. You, personally, I give a flying fuck, beloved. All the beloveds, even the ones who can't read. They don't give a flying fuck either.

By the way, they're not typos. And that was a pome, maybe. Shorts. Yum. Landru out.

Put Alternatively

Look, I don't fucking care any more whether you vote. You've convinced yourself, you've made your choice. There's no need for me to link to TBogg's recycled evergreen; you're certain that the entirety of the math is Obama equals drones (no, no--if you're going to be that fucking reductionist--and you have, again and again--I get to be so, too). What the fuck ever. For my part, I'm convinced enough that you're probably not stupid enough to actually vote for Romney, and for that reason, I cannot convince myself that you truly believe that Romney's election would be a better case. But it's close, and you may be fucking stupider than I think you are.

And it probably doesn't matter. It's increasingly obvious that a Romney win would involve some unprecedented combination of weirdness and heinous fuckery. Do I think Romney's people incapable of that level of heinous fuckery? Of course not. That'd be even stupider than I think I am. But it'd be a serious shitload of heinous fuckery.

There's been a lot of what appears to me to be concern trollery as the election season has heated up. But again, I could be wrong about that characterization, and here and there, I've tried to address it calmly and without pointing too dramatically at the underlying stupid. Obviously, that's difficult for me; it's an emotionally charged thing, and I'm as self-righteous as you are. Further, I think I've just plain done a crappy job of it.

I often say that I dislike Loomis. It's true that I think he's a dirty fucking treehugging hippie, and that's where I most often find myself at odds with him. But decency demands that I concede that he is a very good writer on labor history, and he's a very sharp political scientist and political historian--the former puts me to sleep, and the latter holds my interest until someone hands me a novel about Russian tanks facing off against the Nazis at Prokhorovka, or a link to a moderately pornographic Webcomic. Which is why I respect the very sharp part.

I think Loomis gets it right here, in a piece summarizing his disappointment over some elements' behavior during this election cycle. If you're serious about wanting to understand, you should read the whole post. But he summarizes better than I ever could:

To summarize:

1. Change happens outside the election cycles–elections are for institutionalizing the changes you have attempted to make in the past 4 years.

2. Every single U.S. president has blood on his hands. Voting in a presidential election is always a choice between two evils.

3. We need to think less about our own personal moral position in voting. It’s not about you. It’s about the community where you live. Even if you vote for Jill Stein, the blood of Pakistani babies killed in drone strikes is on your hands. You cannot wash off that blood without changing the system–something that 3rd parties have never done. You want clean hands–organize the American public around the issues you care about. It will take the rest of your life. That is the timeline of real change.

4. There actually are lessons from the past on these issues. There are lessons in how to organize. And there are lessons about what third parties do and do not do. When someone can tell me what value a third party has had to pushing the agenda to the left in the last 80 years, I’ll be real interested in hearing it.

5. We need a tougher and smarter left. The self-described left punditry and journalists in 2012 has been individualistic, holier than thou, disorganized, and narcissistic. The real story of the left this year is smart and tough–the Chicago Teachers Union. That’s how you demand and make change. Writing editorials obscuring the differences between Obama and Romney and encouraging well-meaning people to protest vote is worse than worthless–it’s mendacious and serves as a tool for conservatives to continue pushing this nation back to the Gilded Age.

If you read the Loomis, and the most important thing is still that Obama hurt your fee-fees...well, I guess there's not a lot more to say. Do what you will, and do your best to enjoy the spectacle.

Oh, and if you think you are one person, or a particular person, don't. Seriously. Deadeye totally fucking seriously.

But to echo the one guy who probably most thinks it's about him, if you're a Marylander: yes on 4 and 6, please. Especially 6. Maryland needs to lead the way on this simple and fundamental matter of human fucking decency.

Not to echo that same guy, because I'm not, but also yes on 5, please, because I'm a partisan political hack; no on 3, because it derives from some asshole pissed off because some PG County Council member didn't get slushed out of office fast enough; and yes on 7, because it's a war between competing casino interests, which isn't compelling, but yes keeps the money in Maryland rather than shipping it to Delaware and West Virginia. 

And in MoCo, please, please, please, vote no on B. Both parties and the fucking County Council, and the fucking County Executive want you to validate their clear and sordid violation of a negotiated union contract. Fuck them.

Burn This Motherfucker Down

I wish she was my grandma, except for the part about my grandmas being dead and all:



From MoveOn, h/t to friend Zombie.

Special cockpunch to anyone who sees this and thinks, "Oh, both sides try to steal the election."

I'm getting real tired of the season, but there have been some gems, to be sure.

Oh. I was probably supposed to tell you earlier in the post that it's NSFW, huh? Well, whatever. If you're looking at this blog at work, you're a fucking dumbass anyway.

A Three-Way Dead Heat for Asshole of the Day

In chronological order (of when I saw each story):

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky and Mars) was not allowed to board his flight at the Nashville airport this morning after he declined a patdown (known in TSA parlance as "secondary screening") to resolve a scanning anomaly. He (and his father) characterized the incident as "detention" and set about making as much noise as they could about it. The noise continued through the day, with nutters claiming he was being illegally arrested en route to Congress (he was heading to a Roe v. Wade anniversary anti-abortion rally in DC), the Pauls repeating the word "detained" to anyone who would listen, and a statement from the Senator implying that white people shouldn't be screened (that wacky, not-at-all racist Paul family!). The capper comes from Sasha, who sent this lovely demonstration of what a total fucking wackjob Senator Paul is: he thinks that TSA has rigged the machines to trigger random false positives to give TSA an excuse to pat people down. Holy fuck, this man is a United States Senator?  Fuck you, Rand Paul.

Next up is Boston Bruins' goalie Tim Thomas. Full disclosure: I make no bones about seriously despising the Bruins. That river runs real deep. However, Thomas declined to join his Stanley Cup champion team in a visit to the White House today, because he hates Obama. Puck Daddy Greg Wyshynski gets it as wrong as it can be gotten, claiming that Thomas shouldn't be demonized because this is a free speech issue. Holy fucking crap, Wyshynski. No one's passing a law restraining Thomas' freedom of speech. They're correctly noting that he's an unAmerican asshole, a shitty team player, and a graceless twat. Of course he's entitled to be all of those things, each of which has the consequence of making him look like a fucking jerk. Wyshynski is an idiot (and a unabashed Devils fanboy); Thomas is, in essence, a fucking traitor--by his own side's standards. Fuck you, Tim Thomas.


Finally, the NHL's uberreichsfuhrer of discipline, Brendan Shanahan. In the Capitals' overtime loss to the Penguins yesterday, Alex Ovechkin crushed the shit out of Pens defenseman Zbynek Michalek, leaving the ice by a few inches to do so. No penalty call (it probably should've been called as boarding, and it's stunning that it wasn't, given that midget bitch referee Kelly Sutherland demonstrably despises the Capitals). About 5 minutes later, Michalek crushed the shit out of Matt Hendricks, not quite leaving the ice to do so, but elbowing Hendricks in the head. Two minutes, elbowing. After the game, Michalek admitted that the penalty call was correct and that his state of mind was such that the infraction was related to the uncalled offense of a few minutes earlier. Ovechkin and Michalek had disciplinary hearings today, with Shanahan the deciderer. Guess who got a three-game suspension and who got no supplementary discipline? Fucking Shanahan even admitted that Ovechkin got slammed because he's a repeat offender--even though, under the NHL's rules for administering supplementary discipline, Ovechkin had accumulated enough good behavior time to be outside of the window for increased supplementary discipline. Fuck you, Brendan Shanahan.

It's Like This

Lazy stream-of-consciousness blogging on a few issues of the day:

Work: I've mentioned my work before, and I won't do so with any level of specificity right now, but here's the essence: I am a mid-level tyrant for a government contractor, holding sway over several petty fiefdoms, one of which is concerned with making a Federal agency's Web site go. Once upon a time, in the course of discussing something else, I wrote this about part of what I do:

One of my adorable little gifts--or not, depending on your perspective and the given value of "adorable" and "gifts"--is that I speak fluent Web, understand how things should work, know something about the place of the Web in communications strategies, sort through hours of technical blahrg from actual Webheads, and then distill the whole mess into something that actual Webheads can run with, rather than getting endlessly trapped inside their engineer-like minds.

The other part of that is that I'm really very good--and I sincerely don't mean to be immodest here--at helping nontechnical peeps to understand what technology can and can't do.

This is why it's pretty fucking galling when the buttheads don't even fucking bother to ask. Or worse, when they try to tell me what technology should do. Y'know what? I don't fucking tell you how to cure cancer or prevent heart attacks or whatever the fuck it is you do or research. Don't fucking tell me how to do with the Web what you just told me you wanted the fucking Web to do for you.

#Occupy: I'm terribly sorry you got arrested. I'm really, really glad that BFF didn't. In return for this overwhelming show of empathy, don't fucking tell me you weren't trying to get arrested when you did a fucking barn-raising in McPherson Square. For my part, I won't piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.

Tino: Santino Quaranta retires. Aiyee. Well, I've certainly had plenty to say about old Tino over the years, much of it unkind. To his eternal credit, Tino hasn't sought me out in 232 and beat the shit out of me. Hell, he even had a chance to finish me off in a Popeyes on I-95 one night, and didn't do it. That's gotta be worth something.

It's unfortunate that the competitive fires in Tino didn't drive more than anger, tightness, and 100-mph shots into the mezzanine. He managed moments of beauty during his time here, and I certainly wasn't unhappy to see him on the field this season, especially given the sheer loathsomeness of the options, but I don't want to damn him now with that kind of faint praise. Since his return to the team, he's been as black and red as anyone, and we will miss his energy.

Some selected Tino quotes:

(4/25/2011): Santino Quaranta I already dealt with. He's just a big sack of testosterone and anger. Heart is no longer a problem for him, but he doesn't seem to have any remaining talent to go with it, or at least the intelligence to harness his talent (and experience--it's incredible how long he's been in the league, for his age) in a useful direction. Props to him for getting his ass back on defense, and congratulations to him for being no worse than my fourth or fifth most hated player on my own fucking club.

No one loves like I do.

(3/17/2011) I myself am excited about Tino Quaranta, now that management has seen fit to pick up and retain players equally or more loathsome.

I do love a deathmask retrospective, don't you?

(8/15/2010) Here's what Goff doesn't tell you in his hack: about 90 seconds earlier, Dallas broke free on exactly the same play. They failed to score because Santino Quaranta--hailed as a hero by many in the commenting community, though I'm not sure why--grabbed the ball carrier's (I think it was Ferreira) jersey, dragging him back to prevent the 2-on-1 breakaway. It was a straight red-card professional foul that very clearly and very obviously prevented a goal. Abbey Okulaja ignored it (bless him).

I vividly remember this game and this sequence, which is unusual for me. It's a perfect example of why I'm loathe to kick Tino's slumped body. Well, that and the shabby treatment he got from the team on his way out.

(4/11/2010) The other item: you should never listen to me again, because it's true. I was 10 fucking feet from the unforgiven, but no longer discommodated, Santino Quaranta, and all I did was thank him for a nice goal and speak pleasantly, and briefly. No ranting. No attempt to disembowel him with my greasy Popeye's spork. Just politeness and smiles and thank yous. And that, beloved minions, is the only kind of self-complicity one should waste time whining about.

The aforementioned Popeyes incident, also covered recently by BFF.

(6/14/2008) Tino's discommodation is, of course reversed, with apologies (but not with forgiveness, because Minions has a pretty definite policy on that, too).

I mean, it took his courageous admission of a Vicodin addiction to spur that, but whatever, I manned up.

And the best for last:

(5/24/2008) You see, tonight's Man of the Match, in my book, would be none other than Tino. It was Tino who, through the glory of embellishment that he could only have learned while lapping hungrily at Landon Donovan's pussy, turned a very nice run into a well-earned penalty (in truth, there were two earlier occasions when DCU could easily have been awarded penalties; in this case, there was contact, and Tino was definitely going down, he just made it look better than it was). Minutes later, his run into space with the ball, coupled with a very nice feed to someone (I forgot who), set up the one moment this season when the ball has richocheted onto The New Mister Em's foot in the six-box.

And that last? That's your third problem. Things just haven't been falling for the offense. It doesn't much matter why Emilio isn't the same guy he was last season. Part of it is that some nontrivial number of his goals last season were poached, and he's been so innately lazy about getting into the box this season that his poaching opportunities have dwindled.

So, Tino for MOTM? Sure enough. Apparently Moreno won the text message voting, because he was the guy they flashed on the board at the end of the game. And Peralta had a really fun equalizer, stretching himself out to head a ball two feet off the ground into the net (bDr correctly noted that Peralta might could have just foot-tapped it, but it was a lot more fun the way it happened). Fred moved reasonably well off-ball, and Gallardo's touch and control (as long as he's not kicking a set piece) are a marvel. But Tino ran his ass off and earned it.

No, he did not earn my forgiveness. bDr's brother asked me a pertinent question when he wondered if, should Tino break Jay Heaps in half, spit on the body, and wipe his ass on a Duke t-shirt in front of 25,000 fans, I'd get around to forgiving. Actually, he phrased the question a lot less violently and my answer wasn't terribly affirming. Only when I embellished the violence and emphasis could I get to a place where the possibility of any sort of Tino-warmth could be forthcoming.

Emphasis added.

It's pretty clear that I've had a real complex relationship with Santino Quaranta, at least in my head, for a real long time now. Tino's name and number will never be up on the wall (though he could hardly shame it any worse than fucking Harkes does), but it'll be an oddly painful and incredibly strange thing to see a number 25 on someone else's United kit someday.

Best wishes for a happy and successful retirement, Tino.

Feel Good Story of the Year

YFWP brings us an offbeat story that intrigued me when I saw the headline in an actual paper copy of the rag that I was reading while waiting for a bacon-and-egg sammich yesterday morning.

The Supremes' 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson was one that staid historians like to call a landmark, and that judgmentarian history geeks like me prefer to call a travesty. Homer Plessy, who was what was once called an octaroon back when people tracked such metrics, and what we would now just call a brown person, was arrested in Louisiana for refusing to leave a whites-only rail car. Louisiana law defined octaroons as brown people and limited them to their own damn rail cars. Hilarity did not ensue, as a state judge named Ferguson held that the state could so prohibit brown persons from occupying the same rail cars as those with less melanin. The case advanced to the Supremes, who held on a 7-1 vote that treating brown persons differently did not demean them. The original Mr. Justice Harlan was the lone dissenter, correctly labelling the decision as every bit as ridiculous as the Dred Scott case. The separate but equal doctrine that followed the decision (doctrinally--of course, in reality conditions were far from equal) held for 58 years, until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

Fast forward to Plessy and Ferguson's descendants. Phoebe Ferguson, the judge's great-great-granddaughter, and Keith Plessy, one generation closer to Homer Plessy (his great-grandfather was Homer's cousin; you figure it out) organized a foundation to teach the history of civil rights through education, preservation, and outreach. It's a tremendous example of how we should all just shut the fuck up and get along.

So do that. Uhm, please.

Updated prior to publication: Jeebus, is Anthony Weiner ever a dumbfuck. On behalf of everyone who continues to believe that there is some difference, thanks for the cockpunch, asshole. Thanks for putting such an incredible, no, impossible fucking strain on the good feelings associated with this post (which I wrote about 4 hours ahead of Weiner's admission that no, never mind, he really did twittertwat pictures of his stuffed boyshorts to random babes, scheduled for publication some hours hence--now in the past with the post unpublished, for reasons I don't bloogergrok). Fucking dipshit.

Hump A Teacher

So I accompanied Ilse yesterday to a grade-in at my not-quite local mall (my local mall is busy dying, though brave teachers were grading there, too).

"What the fuck," you might quite rightly ask, "is a grade-in?" 

Well, here's the thing. You probably remember last autumn, when I went briefly insane, currying favor and disfavor (probably, though they're both kind enough not to admit it) with local political figures like Nancy Floreen and Hans Riemer, both of whom have been far more gracious than I have deserved. We're no longer in election mode, and chickens are roosting and suchlike, especially when it comes to money.

Money is coming home to roost in a big way here in MoCo. There isn't enough of it, mostly because shameless huckster fucktard panderer Robin Ficker (whose name, my German-speaking friends assure me, is hilarious) spurred county voters into passing an idiotic charter amendment in 2008 to limit property tax increases to the rate of inflation without a unanimous vote of the County Council. There are competing proposals on raising property taxes within the charter limit--the one I support isn't Phil Andrews', which is a blowjob for the rich fucks in his district (of which I am, technically, one). An attaboy to Hans for publicly trashing The Blowdried Green's gratuitous sex act for his North Potomac and Actual Potomac money. Yeah, Phil. We're onto what green really means for you. Bitch.

First unanswerable question for my friends Nancy and Hans: who's blocking a higher tax increase? Bonus points, of course, for blaming Phil Andrews, though I'd also reward a thorough pummelling of Valerie Ervin.

So, the apostrophe¹. As you found out in the original Val-bashing post, Ilse was surplused at the school at which she's nearly completed her second year of teaching. It's a sad thing, because it's an awesome school and she fits in well there. I'm not telling you which school--if you know me, you already know, and if you don't know me, it would be too much information, and if you know me and you've forgotten, you know how to find me. Lots of teachers were surplused this year because of a dramatic increase in average class size, despite the county's meretricious assurance that that increase equals "one." I'll save you a trip to the Landru English Dictionary: "meretricious" means "lying sacks of fetid shit." The increase was about 16 percent, from an average class size of 29 to an average of 34. A lot of teachers, especially in big academic departments, are moving to other schools involuntarily, and it's not yet clear whether they've all got places to go. I don't have any firm figures on how many--there are 11,000 teachers in the county--but my best educated guess is that something like 5 percent of teachers were involuntarily transferred, and I have no education from which to guess on how many will end up unemployed. Corrections from people with actual data are welcome.

It will cheer you--and, I'm guessing Hans, who can now have lunch with me without fearing my righteous holy overeducated, overcaffeineated (hi, Nancy) MoCo wrath--that Ilse landed at another school, and that the aforementioned possibilities of her remaining at her current school (it's the preference) are not entirely exhausted. So it's slightly less personal now.

But I'm a man of the people, hence the grade-in. Let's talk briefly about MoCo teachers, remembering that Maryland has some of the best schools in the country, and MoCo's are the best in the state, by far:

-MCPS has gone through three years of budget cuts. The BoE has delivered a budget request that cuts per-student spending by about $1K from last year's levels, despite the state's maintenance-of-effort law (which the county has now, it appears, decided to completely ignore--and again, I'll cheerfully accept a cogent and apolitical explanation of how that makes sense, because it's hard for me to understand how the cost of the fines is going to be less than the costs of keeping up with the MOE requirement).

-The county has, for at least two years running, violated its contract with the teachers union.

-Starting teachers in MoCo now make less than starting teachers in DC, an educational cesspool.

-While the Council and the BoE seem to want to pin more sacrifices on teachers by increasing (again) their share of health insurance costs (again breaking the contract), and claim teachers need to sacrifice along with other county employees, the teachers' plan costs the county less per capita than its other union health plans.

-The County is using portions of a $65-million increase in state funding for public education for other purposes.

-Finally, if you dare to speak to me about how teachers are babysitters who get the summer off, I'll punch you in the fucking gob. Ilse busts her ass outside of the school duty day, to her family's detriment, to grade schoolwork and plan lessons for her students. Now, she's a fucking freak, but that's a personal issue and it's mostly between her and me. Almost all teachers work evenings and weekends to keep up, and many (including Ilse) work on professional development in the summer.

People don't get this stuff. So yesterday, the teachers put on a little demonstration of what they do on the weekends. They gathered innocently at local mall food courts, and sat down and graded papers or did planning work. It was actually pretty awesome:

Monkey Mall Food Court, 11:40 AM

 

Monkey Mall Food Court, 11:46 AM--Note Predominantly Purple Overtones

Two Random Teachers Who I've Never Seen Before In My Life, Hard At Work

You might think it's kind of a cheesy stunt, but reality is like this: these are the same kind of people that Scott Walker wants you to believe are union thugs. These people, easily over a hundred of them at one venue for the grade-in, are the people who keep our longstanding covenant to have the best fucking school system in the state. And the county wants to break its covenants with them? Again and again?

Keep pushing. The last school strike was devastating. I believe that the next one will occur during Ilse's career, and sooner rather than later, given the political and budget climate. These are the people behind the Apple Ballot. Duchy Trachtenburg found out what happens when you try to break it off in their asses.

Second unanswerable question for my friends Nancy and Hans: Whatcha gonna do?

¹ I really don't understand how anyone can not get that lyric. But this probably goes back to my whole Hamiltonian democracy thing².
² By which I mean we should find a way to disenfranchise fucktards without other fucktards using that as an excuse to disenfranchise people who've had limited opportunities. But then, that's the apostrophe³, isn't it?  
³ Uh-oh. Recursive loop.

On His Knees, Eager To Please

There are those who question the President's motivation in releasing his archived long-form Hawaii birth certificate, who cannot take him at face value. I'm not one of them. I think it's good that he did it, because anyone who continues to focus on the birth certificate as an issue crawls further out the Limb of Discernable Looniness. This includes those who ask why he didn't do it sooner; the answer to that is simply that he already released his fucking birth certificate, under the law of the state of his birth. No further answer to that fucktarded question is necessary.

It's unfortunate that The Trump has chosen to pursue that line of inquiry, because it just exposes him as dumber and dumber, and I really want that Trump/Palin (or Palin/Trump) ticket for 2012. Yes, I maintain that Obama is better than any (labelled) Republican, and better than anarchy or revolution or civil war or whatever the fuck it is that sophists want, if they even know or can agree. But que sera squared, and all that.

So why is it so easy for me to take Obama at face value on this, to believe that he really thinks he was going to put the issue to rest (or, to indulge WaPo gossips, that he got so pissed at George Stephanopoulos that he paid the twenty bucks to pursue a Hawaii state FOIA request)?

Please. Because he's a fucking dumbass, one of the stupidest theoretically smart people who's ever lived. And because he is one of the most pathetically insecure motherfuckers ever to politic. And the worst poker player ever. He really still thinks that Republicans can be his friends, he really thinks that logic plays some role in their machinations, in their disjointed and clannish and lower-Maslovian thought processes.

In short, he's a Jeffersonian. He'll fuck the slaves, oh yes he will, but he can't bear the thought of them figuring out that it's his cock plundering their holes. He doesn't understand why they can't just relax and be happy, and why the only people who can make them relax and be happy are the guys who not only want to rape the slaves, but break it off in their asses and then rape and gutshoot their sisters in front of them.

Wow. Sorry, Rude Pundit moment there. What I meant to say is this:

He's a Jeffersonian. He genuinely believes in the innate goodness of people. Well, fuck that, and God Bless Hobbes and Hamilton. As long as he wants these inbred, insular, xenophobic mongoloids to like him, he'll continue to be an ineffectual and irrelevant piece of lint in the bellybutton of history. What a fucking waste.

Avenge the Patriotic Gore

RIP Willie Don

We've been gifted with some awesome governors in this state--some only from an entertainment perspective, some from a leadership perspective, and some from a WTF? perspective. Only one combined the best of all three, and that man, William Donald Schaefer, died yesterday.  Melonhead was undisputably the very finest public servant in Maryland history, a four-term mayor of Baltimore (and while we Mocomofos can breed as much as we'd care to, Maryland politics still begin and end in Charm City, and always will), a two-term governor, and a two-term state comptroller (after his terms as governor). For 40 years, he dominated politics in the state, and while many hated him (even those of us who loved him hated him briefly at one time or another), even the haters could not deny that he was a man who moved the state forward after years of moribundity.

I can haz attention?

Thanks to BFF for inspiring my image search with his posted pic of the quintessential Schaefer memory (and for saving me the effort of actually searching for the newspaper link). I chose the pic above, but BFF's black-and-white version would've been the one on the front page of the Sun--and let's not pretend that the Post is relevant to this discussion. He was mayor of Charm City then, and the occasion was the opening of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, one of the centerpieces of the Inner Harbor development, probably the consensus starting point of Baltimore's renaissance (non-yuppie Marylanders prefer other neighborhoods, but money is what money is).

I am the very model of a Maryland major general. Or admiral. Whatever.

The background of the above photo says it all. It's Admiral Willie Don's last day as mayor, his first day as governor. Baltimore's building. Think about all of it¹--the harbor complex, Camden Yards, the revitalization of downtown, the light rail, the righteous ferocity of Melonhead's hatred for the Irsays and fucking twats like Parris Glendening--and then reflect on the words of our current governor (who only serves to boost the enormity of Willie Don:

"I think the legacy he would like the most is that people know that he cared, and there are hundreds of thousands of people all across our state who are remembering today their encounters with Mayor Schaefer or Governor Schaefer when they were looking for a job, when they needed to get a son or daughter into drug treatment, when nobody would come to address the problem of the illegal dumping in their alley or their broken swing sets in the park. And Governor Schaefer cared and he did something about it and he made sure government acted now for the people, government is meant to serve. And I think that is his most enduring legacy, really. I think that will live long after some of the memories of the built environment."

(Emphasis mine.)

Two greats, a convict, a prospective convict, and a twat.

The men who preceded and followed Willie Don, (Harry Hughes, at right above, excepted), only clarified how much the man shone. The exception, who hailed from a part of the state that Melonhead famously (and correctly) called "an outhouse," came on the heels of a pair of convicts, and while Harry is a wonderful man who restored respect for the statehouse, he just didn't have the luster of his successor, and really, I cannot emphasize this enough, his predecessor, immediately to his right above, actually spent time in a Federal prison for crimes committed while governor. It could equally be said that Schaefer benefitted from following a quiet, dignified guy like Harry Hughes, but the fact is that Willie Don had a pretty serious track record for flamboyance even before Harry showed up in Annapolis.

In retirement at Jimmy's

I wouldn't live in any other state in the Union. With Melonhead's passing, a big bit of what makes Marylanders better than you² dies. The man exemplified our state and the notions of leadership and public service and citizen service, notions that politicians of all stripes have left by the wayside in the years since he stepped down as governor. I much prefer to think that, like Louie Goldstein, Willie Don is immortal, and for my own mental health, deep down, I don't really believe he's dead. But I have to nod to the news; rest in peace, Melonhead.

(Pic credit for the two flamboyant Williedon pics.)
¹ Unless you're from Pittsburgh or Kissing Suzy Kolber, in which case you can, at this time, think about going and fucking yourself rather roughly.
² No, I'm not fucking kidding, especially if you're from Pittsburgh or Kissing Suzy Kolber, in which case you can, at this time, think about going and fucking yourself rather roughly.

Crap Blogging

I am slowly recovering from the plague to which I referred in my last post. I'm loathe to say I'm recovered, though I am feeling considerably better and my body is not disrupting my life nearly as much as it was when I whined about all the disease vectors in my life uniting to liquefy my digestive tract.

Life advice: the way to rid yourself of an intestinal-tract bug is most emphatically not to get on an airplane two days after onset and take a 500-mile business trip. Just thought I'd let you know I did that science for you. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

I know that you are very happy to read this news, and I'm pleased to report that I'm not even tempted to simply leave this post at a single graf on the state of my bowels. Things happen even while I'm moaning, and many of them cry out for acknowledgment and validation:

-Awesome evening last night at the Plex, where United and the Phunions (TM) played a reserve game that also passed for a US Open Cup match. United won on penalties, having failed to assert a lingering lead after getting the high-school officiating crew to toss a Philly player (he deserved it, as did three Phunions who weren't tossed; we pass no judgment on whether Saint Piotr Nowak deserved to be shown red after Philly scored a tying goal as extra time waned, because we were on the other side of the field and don't know what magic words Saint Piotr said--presumably in pidgin English, as is his wont--to the incompetent boob of a ginger referee who very clearly had a short-man complex).

The Sons of Ben who showed up were fun--I shared smoke breaks with a few of them, a rare pleasure at the Plex, where stormtrooper poe-leece are not usually given to looking the other way over minor infractions--and they were sane, for a limited range of sanity that includes MLS partisans. It was touching that, in defeat, miles from home, they serenaded us with a few bars of "We All Hate Red Bull." It wasn't as much fun as when they were taunting us with "You're Moving To Baltimore" and I replied with "You live in Chester," but still and all, another unifying fan experience that demonstrates that we needn't all be lime-green retard barista-humpers.

Yeah, the game itself pretty much sucked--it looked mostly like an English Sunday pub league, and that may be an insult to pub leagues. But the weather was fantastic (Ilse will tell you her toes froze) and the company was magnificent--Himself, the Hamster, the much-beloved and too-long-unseen Planet, along with Ilse and Databoy, who actually spent long stretches of the game shutting the fuck up.

-On the topic of Planet, I don't recall mentioning this, but she made the right choice and will attend a small liberal arts college that I once half dropped out of (and half got tossed from). I applaud her good sense, good taste, and general sanity. I thought it might be the night that I'd finally start peeling off twenties to reward the kid for a public display of pottymouth, but no such love. I will not abandon my quest, though I suspect that I'll suspend it for our likely next encounter (her high school graduation), out of respect for her mother and her grandparents.

-I may or may not have a week off approaching, depending on how this week's round of congressional taunting and hyperbolizing and blame-shifting and other masturbatory activity turns out. The whole thing is appalling, though a good thing has emerged: Representative Paul Ryan's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. You wonder why it's a good thing? They finally came out of the closet, for reals. There is no backing away for the Republicans now. Ryan's outlandish rapestand proposal, embraced by certain completely retarded alleged moderates as "courageous," makes it clear that the Republicans are angling for no less than the repeal of all domestic support programs and the total subjugation of the poor to the idea that greater wealth disparity is not only nonproblematic but desirable. The math is clear, and there's no further argument about this. If you support Ryan's proposal and refuse to admit that it's about making the poor more so, you're a lying motherfucker, full stop. And if you can read about Ryan's proposal and continue to believe, for real, that there's no difference in the flavors, then you're a whole lot of things I won't go into, because I have a feeling my BFF is one of those deluded Tinkerbell-lovers, and honestly? I can't even begin to fathom their reasoning here, after months of committed attempts to decipher the sophistry.

-On the shutdown itself, it's more of the same. A minority is asserting itself as the true rulers and insisting that anything short of their way is unacceptable disrespect to a fantasy mandate. Fuck 'em. The appropriate way for this to be handled is thus: punch them in the nose. When they whine, punch them in the nose and tell them that it's their fault that God made you punch them. Repeat as necessary.

What? It's how they're treating you.

Rock the Constitution

Yeah, just go ahead and use crosshairs on a map to delineate your political opponents, former Governor Qutter. Everyone believes that you're not inciting anybody. Instaputz nails the logic.

My hero for today: Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous."

That's one righteously pissed off lawman, there. 


It's pretty clear that the guy who shot Gabrielle Giffords was sick beyond measure, in ways well beyond politics (I got a look at the guy's YouTube stuff before they pulled it down--he's a rambling, delusional, incoherent paranoid, and if any of my usual commenters want to pretend I have a sense of humor about this, try me.). Dumbasses like Sarah Palin, who lied about her "sincere condolences" in the wake of her now-successful incitement to criminal acts against lawfully elected politicians, need to understand that being a public figure doesn't grant the right to hate speech, the right to incite criminally insane persons to violent acts that transcend decent peoples' ability to comprehend. 

Fuck you, Sarah Palin, you ignorant piece of snowbilly trash, you fetid pile of diseased moose shit. Go to the fucking fiery Hell you deserve, and claim to believe in.

What TBogg Said

Please vote yes on Question A here in MoCo.

If you're too pissed at The Man and his Mens and Womens to vote, TBogg has a little story for you:

Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.

You don’t live there.

Grow the fuck up.

TBogg, who has his ups and downs, originally wrote that in response to some moron Naderite. It's wonderful how the very best things stay current.

The very best thing about this day, win or lose, is that we can be fucking done with this, and Commies and anarchists and fucking hippie rage junkies and white middle class pussies (love to BFF) can get back to hating curbstompers, while they amp up their hatred of us.

Update: BFF and I had our words yesterday in private, and it was funny (or so I thought) and it was closure. The above gun wasn't pointed at him. But it's not unreasonable that he felt smugged at, and I apologize. To him and him alone.

If you're not voting for some sophist reasons related to class struggle, fuck you. If you're not voting because you think there's some value in letting curbstompers be elected to teach Democrats a lesson, fuck you. If you're not voting because you're an anarchist, you're too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on. If you think that The Kind will win over curbstompers, you're not only too fucking stupid for me to waste my time on, you should go line up at the nearest House O' Curbstomping for your turn.

The man can speak for himself, but I think that BFF is apathetic (yes, it's a disease). He's disillusioned. He's feeling burned. All fair. He's responding to it differently than I do. He responds differently to a lot of things than I do. There's nothing wrong with any of that. Disagreement does not equal disenchantment. He's the creative one, I'm the dickhead realist. It's thrived for quite some time--as long as it's been since we settled into those spaces. It will continue to do so.

However: he had every reason to read the above this morning and think I was being a dick. For being less than cognizant of that, I was. And explanatory snorffle aside, I apologize. 

Also, and independently: I Remember (via BFF's dynamic bloggy links).

Fine. Politics, Then.

I'm not giving to fondling my blog's navel like some of my beloveds, but I have given some thought, after my late summer outburst of rage on local politics, to what national stories might make me passionate enough to write. We have not one, but two winners.

Let's start easy: Joe Miller (Batshit Crazy-AK), Teatard candidate for Senate in the utterly insignificant¹ great state of Alaska, had some utterly insignificant² blogger/journalist handcuffed and illegally detained (one link of gajillions) by private security goons after the guy tried to ask Miller questions at a public forum. Seriously, Alaska? You might really elect this? What the fuck ever.

What's worse, people actually want to argue about this fucking nonsense. It was a public event. The guy was surrounded by security goons after he tried to ask questions. He shoved one of them. There's no assault here (Anchorage PD didn't arrest anyone, but referred the case to the local prosecutionary)--at worst, there is an assault with a far more serious countercharge of kidnapping against the goons. Let's stipulate to the worst, even. You think, in that worst case, only one's guilty? You're a partisan hack, shut the fuck up a whole lot.

Miller, a candidate for national office, refuses to answer questions about his background (which includes behavior antithetical to his professed beliefs). Blogger Dude pursued him. Shit ensued. Miller is a hypocrite running for public office. Case closed.

In other news of Teatards versus Reality (it's an ancient literary conflict device, they taught it to you in 11th grade, look it up, fool), Rand Paul (Seriously Certifiably Insane-KY) doesn't like that his opponent, Jack Conway (Smug Fratboy-KY) called him out on some alleged hypocrisy (other links ad infinitum), though he wasn't smart enough to deny the alleged hypocrisy that started it all. Paul is a racist creep, and a remarkably stupid one to boot. Conway is the elected nominally Democratic Attorney General of a state that couldn't be more in love with the Bible. Without party labels, I'd probably think he was a jackass. Because he's the only thing standing between me and having Rand Paul as my neighbor, I think he's the precious baby Jesus.

Oddly, enough, neither of them is the biggest loser moron in this whole affair. No, those were waved in by Senator Claire McCaskill (Prissy Pseudoprincipled Losercrat-MO), who called the ad "very dangerous" for reasons that escape me, as they might anyone with a sense of perspective, but then had the decency to say nice things about Conway. Senator McCaskill was the tip of an iceberg well-characterized by Jon Chait, who deliberately ignored every bit of context about the ad and Conway's tactic to try to appear to be reasonable, twisting Conway's attack on Paul's hypocrisy into a perception of religious bigotry in some tortured unintentional parody of trollish concern about means and ends. Except he wasn't smart enough to finish the equation. In a state like Kentucky, if you want to get elected statewide, you need to be a fucking Christian. That's not an appealing reality to those of us who aren't. But it is reality. Shorter Chait: An asshat racist Christian like Rand Paul is better than a mean Christian like Jack Conway, now watch me twist and flail to avoid looking like I just wrote that.

Fail. Politics are dirty, and Teatards have made them dirtier. It's time to pull out whatever can be pulled out (and shut up, multiparty Obamapostates, shut the fuck up a whole lot, stand on your dumbass "it's better to not vote for 0.00000006% better because they need to learn a lesson" horseshit and watch fuckwits like Rand Paul show you how hypocritical they really are). Jack Conway's a bit of a dick running as a Dem in a state where dicks get elected. He called Rand Paul on some hypocrisy. Case closed.

Is it? Of course not. I've reflected on this notion of hypocrisy quite a bit. We're all guilty of it, the kind of complicity that makes the aforemocked beloved throw up in his mouth a little when he looks in the mirror or stares at the fuzzy space in his blog's midsection. There's a valid question here: How bad is hypocrisy, compared to, say, beliefs underpinned by a black hole of moral values?

As it happens, I've got my answer (to a question that I admittedly framed to my advantage). It's not original; I stole it from one of my very favorite novels ever, Neal Stephenson's³ The Diamond Age:

"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
...
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices...Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy."
...
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
...
"It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human..."

Oops. I lied. I don't have an answer at all, I just really like that passage as an examination of the issues threading through the stories I've linked tonight. It doesn't work as my answer, because I'm almost certainly a moral relativist (and I say that as an observation of objective reality, not as the insult that some moral absolutists would pose). It works as my answer because I don't believe that Joe Miller or Rand Paul are bound to some strict code of moral conduct (or even, for that matter, to the Constitution, except as a thing of convenience--the very sort of hypocrisy that Lord Finkle-McGraw dismisses as uncommon in the prophesied New Atlantean society). They think their beliefs are underpinned by morals, but they're the same morals Thomas Jefferson had when he wrote the Declaration of Independence while banging Sally Hemmings like a screen door in a hurricane, and the same me-first horseshit that they espouse while accepting government benefits and decrying governmental solutions for brown people and rights for anyone not Uhmuhrukin. Their hypocrisy is repugnant, but their values are worse.

It sure lays it all out, though. Are Joe Miller and Rand Paul hypocritical pieces of shit? Yeppers. Is that the worst of their crimes? Fuck no, and both their values and their hypocrisy render them unfit to hold office. But hypocrisy is the crime that resonates, with two weeks left in an election cycle. Bang the gong, Blogger Dood and Precious Baby Jesus.


<sup>1 Fuck. It's the Senate.
2 Fuck. Every sperm is sacred.
3 And favorite book ever or not, Neal, fuck you to death with a splintered broomstick for The Baroque Cycle, one thousand pages of shriekingly bad navel-chewing wrapped around about forty nonconsecutive pages of interesting prose. Forgiven, of course, given what preceded it. But really, dood. Fuck you.

(Passages quoted from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age utterly without permission, without commercial intent, and only for critical purposes. I'll hope that's pure enough of heart to be legal.)

(Edited ten minutes after initial post to correct typos, complete a thought, and make the ending a tad more coherent, which is not to suggest that any of this post should be taken as coherent.)</sup>

You Can't Disappear the Intertubez

I know I promised to STFU about local politics, but this is effing hilarious. Y'all were probably sick of both my ranting and my constant links to Maryland Politics Watch during the runup to the recent Democratic primaries. MPW is a pretty good site, chock full of local political color, operated by Adam Pagnucco and David Lublin, both of whom seem to be okay guys.

Of course, it was a hotly contested primary season here in MoCo, and there were a lot losers. Some of them whine a lot, others don't (Credit where due: Councilwoman Duchy Trachtenberg, object of Minions' maximum revulsion during this election, popped off an exceedingly gracious and inoffensive thank-you note to her supporters; thanks, Councilwoman Trachtenberg, for bowing out without snivelling, and Minions wishes you all the best for the future, as long as you're not running for office in the state of Maryland.).

So yesterday, Pagnucco posted on MPW about the campaign manager for the aforelinked Dr. Dana Beyer, a candidate for Delegate in District 18. What? You say that link doesn't work? Hmm.

Maybe he took it down. But it's not like the post was offensive. It seems that Jena Grosser, the aforementioned campaign manager, was an unhappy soul while she was working for Dr. Beyer. How do we know? Well, she (or, it must be reckoned possible, someone purporting to be her) tweeted pretty incessantly during the campaign season about how miserable she was. Is there anything special or damning about it? Not really. It's the usual tweetie-twaddle about the frequency of one's bowel movements. I mean, she was pretty miserable, and it doesn't appear that her employer was giving her much in the way of logistics support for, say, living in the DC area (Ms. Grosser is a native of Indiana). Certainly her judgment is pretty suspect, putting that much personal stuff on the Intertubez. I wouldn't want her as my campaign manager. But then again, I'm not running for office, so WTF do I know?

But back to our friends at MPW. Taking stuff down, that's a pretty serious allegation, there. And utterly unsubstantiated, just like you'd expect from a potty-mouthed anonymous blooger like me, right?

Oops. And if that doesn't do it for you, Google-search "Maryland Politics Watch Jena Beyer" and you should be able to find your own cached version. Lookee:

So why, oh why, would MPW pull such a wonderful bit of political reporting? Well, I can tell you that there was a bit of a comments battle over this post, though if someone wanted to be snarky and vicious they could deny it, because it doesn't appear in the cached version, at least the one I found. There were, as of noonish today (about 22 hours after the post), 12 comments, about half attacking Pagnucco and the blog for being such meanies as to attack this Jena person so viciously over the private information she spread all over the freaking Web (and most of those were from someone who spends a lot of time scolding Pagnucco and other commenters over some pretty insignificant stuff). Most of the rest were by Pagnucco and Lublin, defending the post. One was by a blog supporter pointing out that what Pagnucco did is called "reporting." To be clear, my position is mostly in line with that last comment. None of the comments I saw really explained MPW pulling the post. Except maybe the last one I saw.

Now, I got only suspicions here. That last comment chided Pagnucco, advancing the theory that the post made his team (the winning District 18 Democratic team) look bad for trashing his team's opponent Beyer. There are a number of possibilities stemming from that. Did Beyer threaten some sort of action? Did Pagnucco's D18 team rip into him for the post? Did Pagnucco decide he couldn't afford for the post to be out there? Did the scold's taunt about the MoCo Dems' Kiss and Make Up Party (sadly, unattended by Dr. Beyer, according to Pagnucco's reporting) cause a little tiny tear to fall from Adam Pagnucco's eye?

Beats me. The previous paragraph, except for the factual statement about the last comment (that I saw), is all speculative. And for now, it'll remain so, because MPW pulled the post without explanation (at least up to this moment--I will update if that changes).

So, seriously, Adam, WTF?

In other political news, BFF bDr implicitly outs me as an agent of the global Takoma Park conspiracy. I have to say that, while this accusation staggers me, the prosecution has sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. No lo contendere.

That's right. Suck on Spiro Agnew, bitchez.

Mostly Woot

So you've been forced, at gunpoint, to read a boatload of crap from me of late, all of it about local politics, and I've promised you an end to it, but it's the morning after and I wanted to gloat share the results of the races I've been yammering about. Okay, fine, I wanted to gloat.

I hear tell that Saqib Ali conceded his District 39 Senate race to Nancy King. If it's true...well, good on you, Saqib. It's about time you did something classy in that race. I want to hope that Saqib learned something from his missteps in this filthy campaign. In fact, I'm sure he probably did. On the other hand, I suspect that, while he's young, he's also well enough set in his ways that the legacy of this race, and his term in the General Assembly, will haunt him. Saqib is a tendentious motherfucker. I'm not going to say that's always a bad thing; in fact, if I did say that, I should immediately be struck by lightning. But there's a time and a place for that, and those places are fewer and farther between when you're representing a constituency. I really do hope that Saqib has figured that out.

In the MoCo at-large County Council races, it appears that three of my four candidates won (the top four advance to the General Election and, most likely, to the Council), though if there are a lot of absentee ballots (I don't think so) and none of them voted for George Leventhal, he might be in trouble. Mancrush Hans Riemer (*sniff*...the post that started it all) appears to have finished second, and Nancy Floreen appears to have finished third. Much-reviled Duchy Trachtenberg (it's "Dutchy," by the way) appears to be done, at least for this cycle. Apple Ballot candidate Becky Wagner appears to have finished sixth, and Marc Elrich, for whom I didn't vote, but whom I no longer characterize intemperately, was the top vote-getter.

What does this say? As usual in MoCo, it says we're schizophrenic, both in the actual sense of meaning dissociated from reality, and in the common usage of meaning we have split personalities. The top vote-getter has a green streak the size of a cornfield in July; Hans is a tad green for my taste, but an okay guy; and Floreen and Leventhal are relatively moderate (compared to green folk, and compared to a number of the district-based probable electees, especially the one for my district).

As a science experiment, it says that Minions' intemperance has a mixed effect. So it's really not much of a science experiment.

Minions' intemperance paid off big-time in the BoE races, though the magnitude of the whomping taken by the Parents' Coalition candidates, and the margin of victory for the Apple candidates--every one of them--suggests that it's still a crappy science experiment. Every Apple candidate won, big; every Coalition candidate finished last.

This is especially pleasurable today, because I reported to you the other day on the increase in MCPS SAT scores. Scroll down to the comments for Sasha's prophecy, which was, of course, fulfilled, because she's often pretty smart that way. The whinging is that fewer Hispanic and African-American students took the SAT in 2010 than did so in 2009. If you go back to 2006 (the MCPS report covered 2006-2010), you'll find that more Hispanic and African-American students took the test in 2010 than did so in 2006. Fewer white kids did so. Hmm. There's some effect of the ACT here; a lot of students took it as an alternative.

So, how does the Parents' Coalition view this? With a jaundiced, paranoid, and wackaloon eye, of course. Oh, and let's not forget the cherry-picking. In a post authored by a BoE candidate recently called out by Minions (actually, he begged for attention and I responded), the Coalition's blog cites to a few critical lines in a story in a notoriously right-leaning newspaper, claiming that MCPS (according to anonymous sources) is "not telling the truth." The only numbers cited in the story are those for 2009 and 2010, and much is made over some guy from some "National Center" for whatever its special interest is wanking on about the need for an investigation and speculating about the sources of cherry-picked numbers from a study he may or may not have read. And yet the Coalition, as it does, highlights this nonsense approvingly as if it's the focus of the story.

Awesome. Break out the tinfoil hats for the Parents' Coalition of Montgomery County. While their BoE candidates were, quite rightly, soundly embarrassed at the polls, these people remain noisy, meddlesome, ignorant, misfocused, and potentially dangerous. I'll keep an eye on their ravings and entertain you with the best of it.

But not any time soon, I hope. It's time to get back to doing what this blog does best* (I hope); self-indulgent snarking about football, futbol, entropy, and life. And, of course, about you.

*There are those who claim that what this blog does best is shut up, for weeks at a time. I will not dispute that contention.

Broken Promises

Uhm...sadly, they're mine. I'll take the karma hit, because lookee here, it's an interesting little news item about my local locality's school system!

SAT scores up, you say? Outpaced other Maryland school systems by 150 points? Cool. Here's what I say to that, and what someone who helped your kids achieve that way says: Vote the Apple for BoE.

Oh yeah, and vote for Hans. And Nancy. Please.

And stay away from strangers in the Alps.

More on the MoCo BoE Races

I've spent an awful lot of time and energy on politics of late, and frankly, it's making me pretty tired. And yet, I've still got more to say. I spent many vertical pixels yesterday on one BoE candidate, and it sucked my day away. I'm going to keep this post more brief. I hope.

In the District BoE 5 race, I endorsed Mike Durso, an incumbent Board member and a former teacher and principal. Mr. Durso also won a spot on the Apple Ballot and an impassioned endorsement from Laura Berthiaume, another Board incumbent (who represents my district). I have likewise endorsed incumbents in the BoE races in Districts 1 (Judy Docca) and 3 (Patricia O'Neill), and in the at-large race (Shirley Brandman).

I spent a lot of thought on what to write about today. I thought about working on the two candidates in District 5 that I haven't discussed, but as I started to research another issue I found that I was in serious danger of breaching my promise of brevity (I won't bullshit you; I'm going to breach it, though I'll try to limit the damage). So today I'm going to talk about the Parents Coalition.

Then, I'm absolutely done with politics in this blog for a while. Unless I see a shiny butterfly. The primaries are Tuesday, and that's going to settle everything but the BoE races, because the Democratic candidates will win in the general election, Robin Ficker's rich and no-doubt detailed fantasy life aside, and the BoE races are nonpartisan, at least in a party sense. I may re-engage on the BoE races later in the process, but that'll be easy, because the choices are pretty stark and unambiguous. So I'm about done with this.

Also: I want to get back to irresponsible, foul-mouthed comedy.

The Parents Coalition is an advocacy organization here in the County that has advanced a candidates' slate. A quick word about the Parents Coalition candidates in general: I'm opposed to them. That's partly because I'm a teacher's spouse. It's true that parents are a pain in the ass. That doesn't give MCPS license to ignore them; it also doesn't mean that activist parents know best. They certainly know best for their own children, whether or not they do, and that's right and proper. Their pretense that they know best for mine, for anyone elses', or for everyone's, is nonsense. It's well-known that, when your child doesn't fit a mold, you sometimes have to fight MCPS for your child. You don't do that by getting elected to the BoE. Caring about a narrow spectrum of issues doesn't make you any smarter, and the experience of fighting MCPS for your kids doesn't qualify you to administer the school system for the rest of us.

There's another thing to say here; there's a very close link between parental involvement and childrens' success. That means understanding what's going on in your child's daily school life, helping with challenges (including homework and social challenges), and simply knowing what your child is supposed to be doing. That's parental involvement. Yeah, sometimes you have to go fight the power for the benefit of your kid. But parental involvement does not require turning over MCPS to parents. That's what the Coalition wants, and the tenor of their rhetoric makes clear that they're not going to settle for anything less.

Transparency is a complex issue; of course, citizens have the right to visibility into government proceedings and processes. What citizens do with that information has a tendency to slow down necessary government actions. You can't debate every decision endlessly, and that's exactly what happens in a place like Montgomery County. No one here thinks there's any such thing as losing, no one thinks they have to take "no" for an answer. And that renders government pretty dysfunctional. There is a balance between transparency and responsiveness, and striking it requires understanding that there's an inverse relationship between the two. The Coalition's mission statement articulates this group's utter lack of understanding of that relationship.

The Coalition's blather about Promethean Boards sort of epitomizes how far their heads are buried in an unfortunate place. I've talked about this before, including yesterday; these devices are the greatest thing since sliced bread. They're not just interactive whiteboards; they're a revolution in teachers' ability to engage students in classroom activities. The Coalition has repeatedly suggested that an equivalent product can be fashioned with less than $100 in readily available parts. This is utter bullshit. It doesn't include the tools required for each student in the room to interact, and the Coalition's feeble nonsense doesn't say anything about who should install this product. Teachers? Yeah, right. That's the way to ensure a comparable experience for each and every student. The Mimio product that the Coalition touts doesn't match the Prometheans' functionality. These people simply don't have any idea what they're talking about. They claim to want to improve education, and they haven't the slightest clue how a modern classroom can or should work.

The Coalition approvingly cites a story that claims that Prometheans "add to excessive screen time." Let's fisk this a bit. The story comes from Churchill High School's student newspaper. OMFG, these people are actually justifying their bullshit position on this with an opinion piece by a high school student? Let's look at that byline: the student in question is named Spencer Easterbrook. Why, oh why, does that name sound familiar?

Really? The Coalition is evidencing its position on Promethean Boards with a high school newspaper editorial, from one of the richest and best-off schools in the county, written by the son of one of the most notoriously batshit crazy writers in America? A global warming denialist and creationist? A man who has written exactly the same plug-in-the-blanks football column every week of the NFL season for the last 12 or 14 years?

Y'know, I'm just about done with this, because these people are over the top. First off, the suggestion that Promethean screen time is somehow equivalent to other screen time (home computers, video games, television, etc.) is utterly fucking insane, irresponsibly so. Next, let's look at a statement by Wackaloon, Jr. in his editorial that the Coalition seems to especially approve of (they highlighted in their block quote):

"A good teacher, however, can keep their students interested and engaged without technology. The excitement of a teacher who is passionate about their subject will never be replaced by a piece of new technology."

You jest. A good teacher doesn't need technology? A teacher who can't keep every student interested and engaged is a bad teacher, because there's nothing wrong with the fucking precious little darlings who inhabit MoCo's classrooms? A Promethean Board "stands between the students and the teacher as a third party in the room"? Holy shit, this is nuts.

Honestly, I don't even know why I'm writing about this. These people are insane. The throwback reactionary approach to education (they seriously want the MCPS to be less focused on college prep and more on vocational education), their incessant carping about audit reports and an accompanying focus on pennies, their complete failure to recognize that the county isn't homogenous, their bitching about every single thing the BoE and Superintendent and school administrators do, coupled with the expectation that parents could or would do better...these are the people you walk away from at PTSA meetings, friends. And they hate teachers. 

Yes, they do. Lookee here: a link from the Coalition's blog to this screed in YFWP over MCEA endorsements. Coalition candidates didn't earn places on the Apple Ballot for a reason, and as candidates, they have to do what they can to campaign; on the other hand, it's clear that Coalition electees would bring a substantial anti-MCEA element to the BoE. Several Coalition candidates try to pay lip service to their support for teachers; their other answers show the lip service for what it is. Teachers make this county's school system. Screw them over at your peril.

This isn't going to get any nicer. I'm done. Don't vote for these people. Vote for the incumbents, listed and linked below:

At-Large: Shirley Brandman

District 1: Judy Docca

District 5: Mike Durso

A Deep, Heaving Sigh

A commenter who is, it appears, who he says he is (and it's only fair to admit and remind that my suspicion about another commenter on this topic was, in that case, unjustified) seems to lament that I didn't discuss the MoCo BoE races in my epic rant on the upcoming MoCo primaries. Sadly, the commenter does not appear to be the most effective of readers:

The other important primaries are for the Board of Education; there's no reason for me (or, by extension, any right-thinking MoCovian) not to obey the Apple on the BoE races.

Okay, BoE candidate Louis Wilen, I answered this briefly with a comment of my own, but let's discuss the District 5 BoE race, where I endorsed (by extension) one of your opponents, Mike Durso (to be fair and get everyone in the first sentence of the paragraph, the other candidate is Lou August, who's getting no attention in this post other than a mention of his name). Perhaps I'm being presumptuous when I suspect that this is the race that you'd prefer that I discuss (while there are districted seats on the BoE, everyone votes for the candidates in all districts, as well as for the at-large candidates, which I seem to recall is an artifact of some long-ago legal matter), but I'm thinking it's probably a good guess. And you begged for it.

Let's start with the obvious: Durso was endorsed by MCEA. I admitted my bias toward MCEA-endorsed candidates in the original endorsement post, and from a quick perusal of items linked to Mr. Wilen's Blogger profile, it appears that he has a little problem with the MCEA and the Apple Ballot. By the way, thanks, Mr. Wilen, for giving me the means to track down additional reasons why I didn't and won't support your candidacy. Ever.

The blog linked above is a treasure trove. Mr. Wilen whines on his blog that MCEA produces the Apple Ballot before the candidate registration process closes. He misleadingly states here that "...most of the Apple Ballot candidates paid a $6000 fee to the MCEA to appear on their ballot." Uhm, hold up, there, sir. MCEA asks endorsed candidates to pay $6000 to help cover publishing costs for the ballots. They ask after they give their endorsement. MCEA doesn't withdraw the endorsement if the candidate doesn't pay. As you pretty obviously know, since you do say "most." (Update: Mr. Wilen has removed the quoted statement from his blog. Kudos to him.)

That post alone is worth two strikes against Mr. Wilen. He also says there that "The Apple Ballot folks even paid Google to display a diversionary link to the Apple Ballot when the search words "Louis Wilen" are entered." Wow. Y'know, Mr. Wilen, I understand that you're running for public office, and that you have a need to bend the truth a bit, but that's really kind of outrageous for a self-described "computer guy."¹

Here are the front-page results of a Google search for "Louis Wilen." (click to enlarge):

The MCEA link is clearly highlighted as a sponsored link. There's nothing diversionary about it. It's Google's practice. It's not targeting Mr. Wilen personally; while it is a paid link, it comes up whenever a search string is entered that's related to the MoCo BoE races. Nice job of trying to make it look like they're out to get you, Mr. Wilen. Maybe if you gave a fig about the union, or about teachers, you'd have actually done something to try to obtain MCEA's endorsement, instead of making up paranoid shit when you didn't get it.

What's that? Three strikes on the same blog post? Uhm, yeah: "My name may be the last on the ballot, but no candidate in Board of Education District 5 is more supportive of teachers or more committed to the success of all students."

That's a flat-out lie. I'll concede the possibility that Mr. Wilen doesn't hate teachers--the reason we have one of the best school systems in the country--as much as his opponent Lou August, but to claim that he's more supportive of teachers than Mike Durso, a former teacher and principal, is pretty outlandish. Especially when Wilen is on record as saying--apparently in response to his endorsement questionnaire for the Municipal & County Goverment Employees Organization, a public employee union that would (probably rightly) sell its own children to avoid budget cuts affecting its employees--that he "would have supported MCPS employee furloughs as a way to reduce costs." Mr. Wilen lamely protests that he would want the furloughs to occur on professional days, of which he claims that, "According to teachers, many of the professional days are little more than Weast indoctrination sessions, and many teachers would appreciate a break from those sessions."

Not the one I'm married to, Mr. Wilen. For her, they're days when she does the administrative work required because there's not enough time in a teacher's day to plan (my wife has to prepare for three different curriculae scattered over 5 of the 7 class periods in her work day), grade, and record for the 150 students that our growing class sizes require her to teach. Honestly, it would be in our self-interest for her not to work the professional days--we have to get child care for those days, for our middle school son and our special-needs child (an issue to which Mr. Wilen has zero apparent sensitivity, since he doesn't mention it in his Gazette responses or his issues page on his Web site). Oh yeah. Except for that she gets paid for those days. And would have to do the work even if she got furloughed on professional days. Could you possibly talk out your ass a little more, sir?

Had enough, yet, Mr. Wilen? I haven't.

Mr. Wilen sure wants to spend money on a lot of stuff; improved maintenance, capital construction, supplementary curricular materials (more on this in a bit), more teachers and support staff. He spends a lot of time and effort whinging about stuff like gift cards for teachers (they're given as rewards or as tokens of appreciation for efforts above and beyond, Mr. I Support Teachers), and even more time whinging about taxes (Mr. Wilen claims to be a Democrat, though in fairness his claim is irrelevant, since BoE elections are nonpartisan--but if you're a Democrat, shut the fuck up about taxes, sir; I pay mine, and thanks to busybodies with too much time on their hands, like you, I pay even more, while much larger-scale, intentional offenders go unchallenged by "unassuming" people like you¹). Mr. Wilen seems to think that we can spend money on all this stuff without spending more. We can't. That's why class sizes are too big, facilities are dilapidated, textbooks are old and scarce, and teachers have to spend money out of their pockets for classroom supplies and materials.

Is there waste through insufficient financial controls? Yeah. Does it exceed the amount spent auditing it? Beats the hell out of me. I'm guessing Louis Wilen couldn't tell you either (and, Mr. Wilen, if my guess is wrong--and I'll be perfectly happy and impressed if it is, though not enough to vote for you--and you can provide some sort of comparative aggregate figures on this, I'd be delighted and grateful, though again--not much point to you doing that, since I didn't vote for you in the primary and I doubt that I'll vote for you in the general election).

Mr. Wilen also flatly and explicitly hates MCEA. In fact, he hates unions in general, as he details here. He bitches about MCPS being a closed shop; of course it is. All teachers are paid under the union contract, and they should all pay union dues. He snidely uses "ostensibly" to describe the union's representation of teachers. He proudly cites to a union-bashing editorial in Your Fucking Washington Post (thank God for the liberal media, eh?). "The Apple Ballot has -- unfortunately -- proven to be an effective way for the union bosses to control the outcome of elections," snarks Mr. Wilen. Yeah, they're out there holding a gun to everyone's head to make them vote the Apple, right Mr. Wilen? Sure, it's a strong endorsement, and for good reasons (among them that Robin Ficker hates the Apple, as you'll see if you scroll to the comments on that last link). But union bosses controlling the outcome of elections? Are you positive you're a Democrat, Mr. Wilen?

Mr. Wilen is also a Weast-hater. That's all well and good. There are a lot of us, from many walks of life. Superintendent Weast has made a lot of enemies, with a lot of different axes to grind. On the other hand, Superintendent Weast announced well before the closing of the Apple Ballot process (nudge, nudge) that he wasn't seeking a contract extension or a new contract, and subsequently (well after the closing of the Apple Ballot process, nudge nudge) announced his retirement. Why are we bothering to run against Jerry Weast, Mr. Wilen?

Mr. Wilen also has a stance on curricular fees. To be fair, he's technically right. They're illegal, and there are enough economically disadvantaged students in this county that such fees should not be mandatory. There are also enough comparatively well-off students in this county that they shouldn't be illegal. Mr. Wilen is not responsible for state law, and he's not wrong to observe that MCPS should comply with the law. The issue is more nuanced than he or a group for which he blogs is willing to admit. This comes from the same place as Mr. Wilen's stance on taxes: they're not fair to him.

Hey, guess who makes up the difference between what's not allowed and what's needed? My wife, that's who. She gets an allowance of $150 annually for classroom supplies (I'm sure Mr. Wilen needs to see the fucking receipts). To his credit, Mr. Wilen wants to double that allowance (or more). Y'know, from one dollar per student to two dollars (or even three, woo-hoo!). Let's perspectivize here, huh?

Hey, guess what else Louis Wilen and his NIMBY parents group hate? Promethean Boards (sorry, you have to scroll down through a hockey rant to get to the relevance)! Yay! We love teachers!

Here's a fucking clue: every single teacher in MCPS will tell you that they'd love to have a Promethean Board. You know the real problem with Promethean Boards here in MoCo? There's not one in every single classroom in the county. I'll say this for Louis Wilen's diamond-shitting over gift cards; if he's right, and the savings resulting from audits far exceed the amount spent, maybe the BoE can spend more on Prometheans.

Louis Wilen! He's a Democrat who hates unions and taxes, he hates teachers, he hates spending except where he thinks it should be spent (his views on parent input are nuts--he essentially wants the BoE to be controlled by parent input, which is just an utterly wackaloon concept in a county of overcaffeinated, overeducated² lawyers and tendentious pricks), he hates paying teachers, he hates that the BoE threatened to sue the County Council when the County Council threatened to break the law, he hates that MCPS spent money on the best classroom teaching technology in existence, he's a computer guy who doesn't understand how Google's search algorithm works (friendly advice, sir: learn to optimize, there's no reason your campaign site shouldn't be listed first after the paid links), he's an unassuming guy who thinks it's more lucrative to punish me for a county tax records error than to go after real money (yes, I'm bitching about it--no, the amount wasn't all that great for me, like in the $800 range), he hates a superintendent who's retiring (the relevance is searing), and he loves Your Fucking Washington Post. Yeah, what's that, like strike 19?

Now, let me say this: I have no reason to believe that Louis Wilen is a bad person. I clearly disagree with him on many levels, to a degree where I actively disrespect a number of his points of view. He's certainly not trying to nanny-state me (as far as I can tell), and I certainly don't have any dirt on the man. It's abundantly possible that Louis Wilen and I could be in the same room without exploding. I think that much of what I have complained about in this post is purely political behavior, and I understand it as such. I bear him no particular malice as a human being. However.

To reiterate, I endorse the Apple Ballot in all MoCo BoE primary races. I support Mike Durso in District 5. And I recommend that you do not, ever, under any circumstances, vote for Louis Wilen.

And I apologize, because I really should have said this bit earlier: thank you, Mr. Wilen, for reading and commenting on this utterly insignificant blog, regardless of my opinion on your comment. Which I think I've articulated pretty thoroughly.

¹ Hey, speaking of that article, thanks a lot for the escrow hit on my properly licensed and reported rental property a few years back, Mr. Wilen. See what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?

²With a respectful tip of the hat to MoCo Council President Nancy Floreen...