Daily Dolt: Jill Stanek
ArchPundit
Ben Smith points out one I missed–she’s raised money for anti-condom ads in Africa.
I mean, look at what just Say No did for meth…..
August 2008
The Dumbing Down of America
Our discourse is stupid for many reasons, but one thing you might notice is that most of my criticism of the press is directed towards the national press. I don’t think the Illinois press is perfect, but it is excellent on average. There is less he said – she said reporting and a surprising openness I’ve found to readers and even us bloggers. They also are the sharpest critics of what I often write pointing out when I’ve blown it and I truly appreciate that.
First, the Trib had Steve Franklin and Maurice Possley (who both resigned). Then the Trib layed off a whole host of great reporters who are too numerous to name here, but the Miner has the list over there. Franklin is one of the few good labor beat reporters in the country and one of the few reporters for whom I sought out his articles that weren’t just on Illinois. Possley is one of the best investigative reporters in the country and led the fantastic work the Tribune did on the Death Penalty and Prosecutorial abuse.
The news last night that I didn’t see until today is truly shocking. The Rockford Register Star shut down its Statehouse Bureau and laid off several people including Aaron Chambers who I consider one of the best statehouse reporters in Illinois. This is truly awful news even if Aaron gets picked up by another paper–it means less coverage and even if he gets picked up, someone else won’t fill that slot. The fewer Aaron Chambers, the fewer checks there are on state government and the excesses of Springfield leaders. No one will report when the State Senate President keeps making fun of Rockford by asking where it is–no one will be talking to Chuck Jefferson and Dave Syverson getting their angle on state stories–Jefferson being at the center of the Amendatory Veto controversy lately.
Fewer people will have institutional memory of past decisions and how they affect Rockford and the entire state. And even if Aaron is picked up, that’s one fewer slots for someone to learn along the way and become the new Aaron.
Anyone who Google Alerts Aaron’s stories recognize he was covering more non-political stories over the last year or so with regular dispatches on the Alan Beaman court proceedings and other downstate news. Beaman was from Rockford so it had a local angle even.
The problem is that newspapers are gutting the very thing that keeps readers. Writers like Chambers and others are who build a relationship with readers and that keeps the paper going. The notion of cutting costs and going after some of the most experienced journalists is self-defeating to long term readership and profits.
The public companies who own most newspapers now are worried about quarterly profits which is sending long term business down the drain. Newspapers aren’t losing money for the most part–they are just not earning as much as shareholders would like.
When Eric Zorn started blogging at the Tribune I pointed out that it was this kind of effort that would help newspapers transition to a dual existence on-line and in the paper. The blog creates a greater conversation with readers and that relationship is central to the long term interests of the newspapers. However, all of them are destroying that relationship by laying off the reporters with the most experience and the best relationship with their readers.
The long term way to stay in news now appears to be held privately and create a joint on-line/off-line operation that interacts with readers/viewers/etc, but few are pursuing the strategy. The worst part of this is that the beat reporting and experience from being on the job is lost.
Instead, what we are likely to see are more efforts like Progress Illinois (and this is no criticism of it–I love the site)–that are funded by interests or parties or unions which is similar to the news models of the 19th century when papers were extensions of political parties. I think bloggers, Progress Illinois, and others are great additions, but the basic reporting has to be done as well and that aspect of news is crumbling.
So if you want to start a new news organization, just drop me a whole lot of cash and my first hire would be Aaron Chambers.
News To Ibendahl: Kjellander The Least Gay GOP Member Ever
Somehow, Kjellander and McKenna are responsible for a pub crawl to gay bars supporting McCain:
I didn’t go this year. Like most Republicans, I saw all I needed to see at our State GOP Convention two months ago in Decatur. It’s clear that our Illinois GOP is going nowhere until we clean house of the likes of State Party Chairman Andy McKenna, Jr. and Chairman of the County Chairmen’s Association Randy Pollard.
You simply can’t run a rigged-up mess like that Decatur disaster in June and then honestly ever expect decent Republicans to follow you in the future. That’s just not how it works. We need new leaders, competent leaders who understand even the simplest basics of Management 101.
Let’s face it, if any Republican really felt the need to get sodomized (politically speaking) once again, they might just as well join that other McKenna backed organization on a Chicago gay-bar-hopping tour.
Please, please tell us about the integrity of marriage Doug. That is after you explain why you are not married, but living in sin.
Look, I would agree that McCain needs every vote he can get, and we as Republicans can’t reject the votes of gay folks or anyone else. But is it credible that anyone is going to have a serious discussion about McCain’s qualifications over the throbbing blare of dance music in some gay pick-up bar? (That’s exactly what most of the bars on the itinerary above are, and anyone who lives in Chicago knows it.) This just looks to the casual observer like an excuse to go drinking in some gay hot spots.
Because if the Family Taxpayers clan are about anything, they are about serious discussions…
I’m Running out of Good Names to Call These People
GINGRICH: Well, I got a very funny e-mail from a retired military officer in Tampa who pointed out that most tire inflation is done at service stations and you pay for it. And it’s actually a higher profit margin than selling gasoline. So Sen. Obama was urging you to go out and enrich Big Oil by inflating your tires instead of buying gas.
Errr…I go down to the QuikTrip and they don’t charge me for air. Neither do the other places locally. I’m sure somewhere they do, but Think Progress is over analyzing the whole thing. Newt Gingrich doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And when the do the safety checks here in Missouri, the put the air in as part of the check.
Discourse getting stupider….
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVZKbjfAGu4[/youtube]
Today’s Tosser: Shimkus
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RSJkd4llLA[/youtube]
You know, if drilling is good, drilling and mining is better. … It’s drilling and mining and using great resources like Illinois coal. You all follow the congressional baseball game. I wore this uniform proudly. It says, ‘The Miners.’ The mining industry and coal is part of the solution.
Drilling is not so good though. The reality is the US doesn’t have the reserves that nitwits like Shimkus try and claim we have.
The problem of claiming coal is the solution is that for it to be the solution, one would have to believe that electric cars are the future and the Republicans are insisting that we just need to drill more and fighting renewable incentives. Illinois relies on two basic forms of electrical power generation: coal and nuclear. Coal has problems with global warming, air quality, and water quality. Perhaps we can solve some of those problems with research. Nuclear has no where to put the waste as the day that Yucca opens, it’s full and we don’t have another spot. This raises the question for Shimkus, of how this solves any problems whatsoever given the current Illinois economy is based on coal and nuclear and the only way to move more energy usage towards coal in terms of legislation is to promote alternative fuel and electric cars which the Republican minority is specifically rejecting.
The discourse keeps getting dumber. If only people could do math.
Now, there are many problems with coal environmentally and it will be in the mix, but it’s not renewable and it’s not clean meaning it’s not sustainable in the long run. If one wanted to put the money towards the best usage for a research dollar renewables make far more sense.
McCain Continues to Try and Privatize the VA
“John McCain has said that improving veterans’ health care would be his top domestic priority as President, yet he has repeatedly voted against increased funding for veterans health care. And now he offers up an plastic card option that will lead to privatization of veterans health care. No one knows how to help and heal veterans like veterans — had I ended up in a regular hospital after returning from Iraq, I would lost my arm. McCain’s plan will only hurt the VA and our veterans more than they are already hurting.”
The urge to privatize is rather bizarre given the VA is able to specialize in common problems such as PTSD that don’t have enough cases in the general population for specialization. The VA is the only institution well suited to caring for a large number of PTSD cases or other common injuries from combat.
Kirk in Context
Ellen addresses Mark Kirk’s BS regarding pay equity. I’ve added in some Kirk commentary:
Kirk over simplifies and generally misleads constituents about the Paycheck Fairness Act by omission.
Corporate wage secrecy is one of the enablers of wage discrimination. You might remember that Lilly Ledbetter lost her ability to sue for wage discrimination compensation because she was unable to timely discover that she was the victim of wage discrimination. The PFA works to avoid that unjust outcome in making it illegal for an employer to rataliate against workers inquiring about their employers’ wage practices or disclosing their own wages to other workers. Under the PFA, defending employers are required to show that wage gaps truly are the result of factors other than sex discrimination, and U.S. Department of Labor is finally required to do its job as related to equal pay issues such as collecting wage-related data, a practice it used to have and stopped.
Oh my god, Becky, look at her butt
It is so big
She looks like one of those rap guys girlfriends
Who understands those rap guys
They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute, ok?
I mean her butt
It’s just so big
I can’t believe it’s so round
It’s just out there
I mean, it’s gross
Look, she’s just so black
Kirk would have constituents believe that the PFA is a wage discrimination rather than wage equity bill claiming that it requires women to give up control of their legal actions against employers. That is nonsense. With all the timing issues described in the Ledbetter case, and with all the limits and caps keeping pay equity awards low under current law, women have had few viable wage discrimination cases to begin with. Under PFA women are able to understand where they fit into the pay scale and can be awarded full compensatory and punative damages as are awarded in wage discrimination cases based on race or ethnicity.
I like big butts and I can not lie
You other brothers can’t deny
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waste
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung
Wanna pull up front
Cuz you notice that butt was stuffed
Deep in the jeans she’s wearing
I’m hooked and I can’t stop staring
Oh, baby I wanna get with ya
And take your picture
My homeboys tried to warn me
But with that butt you got
Me so horny
Ooh, rub all of that smooth skin
You say you wanna get in my Benz
Well use me, use me cuz you ain’t that average groupy
The class opt-out provisions of PFA that Kirk disfavors actually helps women maintain gender based pay discrimination class action lawsuits. Opt-out provisions are considered valid due process and the general class action federal rules were changed in 1966 to adopt the opt-out method with most states adopting the federal rule. The idea of a class action suit is to remove the requirement of joining every single possible plaintiff individually. The older opt-in process was rejected by the federal rules and many courts in the 1960s because they created joinder issues that the class action suit was designed to avoid and prevented classes from becoming large enough to obtain class certification without which cases would be dismissed. The public policy of the opt-out rule was most articulately described in a well known California case, Carlson v. Superior Court, 33 Cal.App.3d (July 25, 1973), where the court described its reasons for disfavoring opt-in requirements with complex notice procedures:
I’ve seen them dancin’
The hell with romancin’
She sweat, wet, got it goin’ like a turbo ‘Vette
I’m tired of magazines
saying flat butt’s the only thing
Take the average black man and ask him that
She gotta pack much back, so
Fellas (yeah), fellas (yeah)
Has your girlfriend got the butt (hell yeah)
Well shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt
Baby got back
(LA face with Oakland booty)
I like’em round and big
And when I’m throwin’ a gig
I just can’t help myself
I’m actin like an animal
Now here’s my scandal
We fear that the notice procedure employed by Edison is susceptible of great abuse. In essence, plaintiffs’ attorneys will be forced to expend extraordinary time and effort to round up persons of a disorganized class with whom they probably have had no prior contact; such occurred in the instant case. Prospective deponents who do not heed informal efforts on the part of counsel and do not appear will face potential exclusion. Thus, a defendant can effectively stifle a class action at the discovery stage, either by imposing impossibly expensive burdens on the named plaintiffs or by chipping away at the size of the class through exclusion of the unnamed plaintiffs. It is especially vital to prevent such ‘chilling’ of class actions in light of their new importance as a litigation tool, presaged by recent federal cases and our own decisions in Daar v. Yellow Cab, supra, 67 Cal.2d 695 [63 Cal.Rptr. 724, 433 P.2d 732] and Vasquez v. Superior Court, supra, 4 Cal.3d 800 [94 Cal.Rptr. 796, 484 P.2d 964].” (Italics added.)
I wanna get you home
And ugh, double ugh, ugh
I ain’t talkin’ bout Playboy
Cuz silicone parts were made for toys
I wannem real thick and juicy
So find that juicy double
Mixalot’s in trouble
Beggin’ for a piece of that bubble
So I’m lookin’ at rock videos
Watchin’ these bimbos walkin’ like hoes
You can have them bimbos
I’ll keep my women like Flo Jo
A word to the thick soul sistas
I wanna get with ya
I won’t cus or hit ya
But I gotta be straight when I say I wanna fuck
Til the break of dawn
Baby, I got it goin on
A lot of pimps won’t like this song
Cuz them punks like to hit it and quit it
But I’d rather stay and play
Cuz I’m long and I’m strong
And I’m down to get the friction on
So ladies (yeah), ladies (yeah)
If you wanna role in my Mercedes (yeah)
Then turn around
Stick it out
Even white boys got to shout
Baby got back
(LA face with the Oakland booty)
The effect of an opt-in requirement can be seen in a recent California case, Hypertouch Inc. v. Superior Court of San Mateo County, 128 Cal. App. 4th 1527 (May 5, 2005), wherein the court noted and upheld an opt-out requirement because under an opt-in procedure that was being used under a particular statute that did not follow the general rule, out of more than 100,000 estimated class members in that case, only 55 actually “opted-in.”
A New York court recently made a similar observation in Guzman v. VLM, Inc. d/b/a Reliable Bakery, Case No. 07-CV-1126, pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The court in Guzman concluded that opt-out was appropriate because “workers might be reluctant to affirmatively opt-in to the case for fear or reprisal and retaliation.”
In the name of helping women, Kirk is actually seeking to prevent women from building viable class size to maintain class action suits. This is a common corporate defense strategy against class action suits.
You can read more about the PFA at the National Women’s Law Center and see why this bill is vital for American working women.
Yeah baby
When it comes to females
Cosmo and got nothin to do with my selection
36-24-36
Only if she’s 5’3″
So your girlfriend rolls a Honda
Playin’ workout tapes by Fonda
But Fonda ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda
My anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns hon
You can do side bends or sit-ups, but please don’t lose that butt
Some brothers wanna play that hard role
and tell you that the butt need to go
So they toss it and leave it
And I pull up quick to retrieve it
So Cosmo says you’re fat
Well I ain’t down with that
Cuz your waste is small and your curves are kickin’
And I’m thinkin’ bout stickin’
To the beanpole dames in the magazines
You ain’t it Miss Thang
Give me a sista I can’t resist her
Red beans and rice didn’t miss her
Some knucklehead tried to dis
Cuz his girls were on my list
He had game but he chose to hit ’em
And pulled up quick to get with ’em
So ladies if the butt is round
And you wanna triple X throw down
Dial 1-900-mixalot and kick them nasty thoughts
Baby got back
Daily Dolt: Jerome Corsi
Not for what you think either:
As ultra-deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico continues to validate abiotic, deep-Earth theories, we should also consider exploring oil deeper in the continental United States, to find the basement fractures beneath the huge surface oil fields we now consider depleted. If the oil in Texas and Pennsylvania did not come from dinosaurs or decaying ancient plants, maybe we could find the deeper “source revenues” where that oil seeped up from fractures in the bedrock crystalline basement below.
The crazy bastard thinks oil is not created from organic material.
How is our discourse this stupid?
Meeks Is Getting Better At This
Pretty much everything today is via Rich since I started there at midnight.
Kristin McQueary interviews him asking him questions from the feedback she received from her last column on Meeks and education funding. She took some flack over at Capitol Fax for the tone of the questions, but she explicitly states she is using feedback from readers to shape the questions–a perfectly reasonable method:
Q: Why aren’t parents in low-income school districts taking more responsibility for their kids’ education?
A: These parents are also products of the same system. The system undereducated them. The system was not well funded when they went through it, so they received an inferior education and it reduced their life options. College was not an option. Now they’re in the workplace, and they have to be a waitress or some menial job that doesn’t pay much. That’s why they’re low income. That’s why they ain’t livin’ in Winnetka.
Q: But parents should be more responsible for their kids’ education.
A: That misses the point. Even if parents in New Trier had to operate on Chicago Public Schools’ budget, they would lose $31 million. They could not provide the same education today with a $31 million hole in the budget. Multiply that by 25 years and you get all the social ills we have. They couldn’t do it, even with two parents.
Q:Throwing money at the schools is not going to solve the problem.
A: I beg to differ. Ask Linda Yonke (New Trier’s superintendent) if she didn’t have that extra $7,000 per pupil, could she do the job she is doing today? She will tell you that money matters. Don’t let anybody tell you money does not matter. They have training coaches for kids taking the ACT test and ACT prep courses and 17 students in a class. When Thornton or Fenger high school students take the ACTs, that’s the first time students sat down with it. Money matters because they have a coach and aquatics and microbiology.
Also, the school that feeds into New Trier spends $21,000 per student. Those kids come prepared. They don’t need remedial courses. They are all (Advanced Placement) when they come there..
ACT Prep courses are quite important method to getting lower income students into college. If a student is not familiar with the test and test taking strategies, they don’t do as well. Some kids in suburban schools have private tutors let alone ACT/SAT prep classes. That’s a huge advantage and that’s only on a preparation class, not everything that comes before that.
Q: But back to the parents, do you admit they play a more important role than the school?
A: I am not going to let this discussion go in the way people are trying to take it. They’re trying to take this into family responsibility. We have two-parent families in our congregation, a mother and a father, who insist their kids do their homework; who take their children to school; who know who is on the local school council. But if the school doesn’t have the resources to do the job, it makes no difference the commitment level of the parent.
For people who want this argument to degenerate into a family argument is not right, and it’s not fair.
This is one of the dumber arguments. Even if parents do the best job they can, their kids aren’t in classes with kids as prepared as the well off suburbs. That alone is a handicap as students tend to do better when surrounded by students well prepared by school. This means that by accident of birth, some students get a better education by being around students better prepared. Using money to overcome that disadvantage shouldn’t be that controversial. It may not be smaller classes (only a marginal effect if one is talking between 17 and 30 students), but a student with fewer resources and parents who may be trying, but are less prepared can utilize extra tutoring and year around school.
For that matter, think about Duncan’s current idea to create boarding schools. The boarding schools would be designed to provide a stable safe environment for kids to attend school, have a structured life, and have positive role models. What’s the hold-up? Money. Duh.
To Clarify on the Banana Republic
I think the chances of it are very slim or none. The conditions for it in 1981 included a closely split Illinois Senate and a Governor of the other party. The Senate Dems currently have a veto proof majority and are expected to hold that if not build a bit on it with Obama on the fall ballot.
Just today, it would take 8 Democrats to switch and in 1981, that wasn’t the case. The only reason the Republicans could pull it off was that there were two absent Democrats in a Senate divided 30-29 and Thompson gave a questionable ruling that it wasn’t a Constitutional majority that was required, but a majority present. As Rich notes, the current Senate rules require a Constitutional majority (30 votes).
One other time it happened, but I don’t know the history on that.
My sense is that Blagojevich will try and find a way to install a friendly Senate President in some sort of move, but that he’ll fail. Much of his own party hates him and the Republicans hate him even more in the Senate. Hence, my point that he is delusional, but you can bet he’s trying to come up with some outrageous scenario in his head–something out of sport talk radio where the Cubs offer up Dempsey and a player to be named later for Johan Santana.