The Sum of All Right-Wing Fears

IN THE WAKE OF THE BLOODBATH at Newtown, Connecticut and the strange year that was 2012, it seems we might need to try to interpret a little conservative thinking.

I’ve been studying the matter and believe I’ve got it down. I think—if I understand it right—that Mr. Obama has been having illicit sex with circus clowns.

I think that’s about the level of most of what has been passing for conservative logic in recent months.

What else have conservatives been trying to tell us? Where are they going at the start of this new year? For starters: Obama is a tyrant. Since he took office the Bill of Rights has been turned into fast food wrapping paper. (Angry white guys can hardly watch Fox News excoriate the President on a daily basis any more.)

So conservatives must rise up and…take back America...and buy guns and vote. Because nothing says tyranny like allowing political opponents to cast ballots and stock up on ammo. It didn’t really matter though, because everyone on their side knew they were going to kick butt in the 2012 election. That’s what Fox News said; and the polls were all wrong, because only gay people care about percentages. What? Obama won???

Obama is like Hitler!

Under Obamacare insurance companies can no longer refuse coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. This includes toddlers with rare genetic disorders and type-1 diabetic teens. What’s the next step, you ask?

Gas chambers for granny.

If taxes go up on the superrich, like the Koch brothers, then we are one step from a communist takeover. This is why the Koch brothers, worth $31 billion apiece, donate tens of millions of dollars to right wing causes, including smashing labor unions. Nothing says “communism” like teachers and fire fighters and bakers of Twinkies trying to win improved wages and benefits. These people want to remain in the great American middle class?

Yep: to the right, that’s “communism.”

Speaking of unions, how greedy can those thugs be? All they want to do is kill good jobs in this country. This is why job creators—here we are thinking, people just like Mitt Romney—have no choice but to create jobs in Bangladesh, where the minimum wage is $37 per month.

Gun sales in this country reached record highs in 2012, with 16.8 million background checks carried out by the F.B.I. You can’t fool conservatives—even if that does mean 45,902 guns were sold daily (it was a Leap Year). Obama plans to take away all their guns.

Glenn Beck says there may be giant magnets.

If anyone (even NASA scientists) mentions global warming or climate change or even says, “Boy, it’s a hot one today,” clearly they are part of a plot to destroy capitalism. They want to create a world government where BP and Shell Oil are denied their inalienable rights—since corporations are now people—to drill in Arctic waters and Americans are forced to eat vegan.

If gay people marry, traditional marriage will be dead, because gay people want to marry in a traditional way. Wedding cakes will no longer be baked.

Tuxedo sales will plummet.

The Chicken Dance will be only a memory.

Anyone who says, “Happy holidays,” in the weeks leading up to Christmas secretly hopes Christians spontaneously combust. (Yeah: some psychologist on Fox News explained it! Obama hates Christmas because when he was a boy his father never gave him a pony.)

We don’t need gun control to keep kids in school safe. We need to put God back in the schools. That means everyone reads the King James Bible—even Buddhists and Mormons and Jews. We need to arm teachers or maybe issue Kevlar-covered Bibles because nothing says “happy children” quite like defensive weaponry stacked near the reading center in a second grade classroom.

SPEAKING OF GOD, IF YOU GET RAPED and end up pregnant that’s His way of showing He loves you. If a mugger crushes your skull and you wind up with no health insurance and stuck in an emergency room it’s His way of saying Obamacare is socialized medicine.

And don’t say He didn’t warn you.

God believes all fifty states need concealed carry laws and He doesn’t like the 47% either.

The Founding Fathers knew everything and you couldn’t possibly beat any of them if you played them in Jeopardy. If the Founding Fathers were for freedom of religion then freedom of religion is still good enough for Christians today. Liberals, those people who hate America, insist that American citizens who happen to be Muslim should be able to build mosques where they want, such as in towns where they live. The Founding Fathers weren’t a pack of Muslims. They weren’t gay, either.

Okay, they weren’t black or female or poor white males either; but that’s not the point.

The Founding Fathers wanted pregnant women who were considering abortions to undergo invasive vaginal probes. It’s all laid out in Article III, Section 3 of the U. S. Constitution.

And you know why Obama is a tyrant? He’s planning to ignore the 22nd Amendment, which limits the chief executive to two terms—because the Founding Fathers never thought to limit a president’s tenure. You can’t fool right-wing thinkers! They know evolution and Hawaiian birth certificates can be faked. They know Obama plans to seize power and run for a third term in 2016, a fourth in 2020, a fifth in 2024, a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth!

My God, how long can that man last?

In summation, have we mentioned that Obama sends Kwanza cards to terrorists? And what about those circus clowns? Sean Hannity says Obama is a lepidopterist. 

And if you hear it on Fox News it has to be true.

 

You can't fool conservatives, they know he's plotting for 2016 and beyond.
Well beyond! Time to stock up on more guns.

In the Perfect World of Governor Kasich and Don Blankenship

WHAT CAN GOVERNOR JOHN KASICH be thinking today? His approval rating is in the drink. More than 1.3 million Ohioans have signed petitions to place Senate Bill 5 up for a referendum.

Maybe ordinary, working Ohioans don’t want a state where business ride roughshod over anyone in their way. Maybe Ohioans don’t want businessmen to rule their state with an iron grip. Maybe they don’t want to go backwards in time.

It’s a great myth, with Kasich and all the business types—watch Fox News for an hour and you’ll see what swill they spill—that government is inefficient and run by idiots and government employees are incompetent sloths. By comparison, businessmen are wise and moral and just and know exactly what’s best for the economy and know that jobs can only be added if government gets out of the way.

What could possibly go wrong if we simply let the free-market work its magic and let all those great business minds have their way?

IT’ WORTH TAKING NOTE OF A STORY that appeared in The Vindicator, the Warren, Ohio newspaper a few days ago. In one story, we heard that more than a million Ohioans were standing up and saying, “Enough, Governor Kasich, enough.” There was another story, which had nothing to do with Senate Bill 5 on the surface, and everything to do with Senate Bill 5 beneath.

This is a story about what you get when business people have unfettered power. You get Don Blankenship of Massey Energy in West Virginia—a fellow Kasich would probably call a model of good business sense.

You know what they say at Fox News: Government regulation is always bad—too many rules and protections for workers—stupid safety rules and the like. Or, something like: “Regulation is strangling the economy, regulation is killing good jobs.”

At least it doesn’t kill workers.

Recent investigation shows that managers at Massey Energy, a company owned by Blankenship until recently, kept two sets of safety books at the Upper Big Branch mine where an explosion caused the deaths of 29 miners last year. One set was for their use, the other to be shown to government inspectors. It was important, you see, to keep interfering safety experts away and keep coal production operations running smoothly.

Remember, what the Tea Party people like to say: Second only to Jesus, businessman know best.

The families of the 29 dead workers might disagree. They might call hiding serious safety problems criminal conduct, not free enterprise. People like Kasich, who hate unions, call this a “perfect world.” Twenty-nine dead? No big deal! Profit is what counts.

And counts—and counts.

That’s the world Kasich and Blankenship and the fake journalists at Fox News dream of, a better time when conservatism ruled America and the worker, like the slave who came before him, knew his place.

I think they call it 1890.

THE VOTERS OF THE BUCKEYE STATE don’t want to return to the past and neither do the families of those dead West Virginia miners. So far, one former Massey employee, security chief Hughie Stover, has been indicted for lying to the FBI and federal mine safety officials. Eighteen other Massey officials have refused to testify in the investigation, citing their Fifth Amendment protections. One of them is Mr. Blankenship.

So let’s be clear about why we must defeat Senate Bill 5. In a world run by former Lehman Brothers types like Governor Kasich and owners like Don Blankenships, with the Glenn Becks of the world cheering them on from the media sidelines, it will be open season on worker rights if we don’t fight them.

You don’t have to be some kind of “commie,” as Beck implies, just to know we don’t want to go backwards and wipe out a century of progress. We don’t want to go back to the age of the Robber Barons.

A century ago miners used mules and died by the thousands every year.
That's why we have government safety inspections.

 

Governor Kasich puts the Bible (and Koran) Back in Ohio Schools

SOMETIMES IT JUST DOESN’T GET ANY BETTER when talking about Governor Kasich and his plan to remake Ohio schools. He’s a good Christian. Everyone knows that. 

He’s the jobs governor too. 

His plan—and the plan of Republicans in the legislature—is to increase the number of vouchers available to parents and let more and more parents “escape” failing public schools. Praise the Lord Let children go to religious schools!

Did someone say: “Praise Allah?” 

I’ve been thinking about this for some time. But a story in The New York Times makes me feel prescient. That is: if you give parents vouchers to send children to Christian schools, where do you draw the line? 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a life-long fan of the First Amendment.  

I just can’t wait to see some of our political weasels try to chew their way out of the sack they’re currently sewing. I want to see what happens when someone wants to create a Muslim school in Dayton or Cleveland and get their hands on state money?

Put the Bible back in schools? What about the Koran? This is going to be a hell of a mess for conservatives to sort out.  

Bill Cunningham, the voice of WLW radio in Cincinnati, who delights in calling the president “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” may have to re-calibrate his message. And do we know Kasich’s middle name? John R. Kasich? Does that “R” stand for “Rashid?” 

Of course, it would be stupid to mix education, politics and religion, but Kasich and his boys do.  

Giving state money to private schools, an idea popular with the Holy Trinity of right-wing education reform, (Kasich, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Chris Christie in New Jersey) carries risks they blithely ignore.

Pick up the February 2010 issue of National Geographic, for starters. Read about the Jessop family. They’re good religious folk, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. With communities spread across the Southwest and north to Canada, the church has thousands of children who could benefit from a voucher program. 

Of course there are flaws in this picture. The church practices polygamy and Joe Jessop leads the show. The man has multiple wives, 46 children, and 239 grandchildren. He could have an elementary school all his own.

Two wives and maybe nine future vouchers for state-funded education.

I remember reading an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer some years back, about a goofy church over in Adams County. The “minister” was shown in a photograph at the pulpit wearing a Nazi uniform. The story went on to highlight his Jew-baiting sermons. Today, he’d be eligible for state money if he set up his own school. 

Now, for the love of God, or Allah, or The Great Whomever, a shady Muslim organization is moving in on voucher programs. (A shady Muslim organization would be the same as a shady Christian or shady sectarian organization; the word “shady,” not “Muslim” is key.) Want to know where we’re headed? Think:  Harmony School of Innovation, run by the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator down in Texas, with offshoots in Ohio. A company called TDM recently won a contract for $8.2 million to build that school. And so you have everything Governor Kasich could possibly desire! Voucher money for kids. Religion back in school. More jobs for Texans—and Ohioans, when we bring this model north!

What could go wrong? 

First, the Cosmos Foundation (which runs 33 Texas charter schools and gets $100 million in taxpayer funding), is a business run by Turkish immigrants. Secondly, many of the founders and operators are followers of Fethulan Gulen, a charismatic preacher of a moderate brand of Islam. If that doesn’t make Kasich choke on his conservative Wheaties, nothing will. 

Remember how law-makers insisted that private enterprise would only increase efficiency in Ohio education? Down in Texas, there have been complaints from numerous local construction companies. Even when they bid lower, TDM and Turkish-owned firms win almost every contract. Out of 35 jobs worth $82 million, since January 2009, Turkish-controlled entities won all but three, worth only $1.5 million. 

Well, what did you expect? If you’re going to insist that business and education are Siamese twins, you want to make a profit, right?

You’re not going into the education game to lose money! 

I’m a liberal. And I absolutely support equality for members of all religions, not to mention members of none. I think you’re an idiot if you don’t know that most Muslims are just as firmly opposed to terrorism as most Christians are.

Still, if you think Kasich is the worst governor west of New Jersey, this story gets better: At one San Antonio school run by Cosmos the entryway features a turquoise arch and the ceiling lobby shows a sun, a star, and crescent moon, clearly Islamic decorative devices. At least some of the female students wear head scarves and all but a few of the 33 principals in the system are Turkish men. Of 1,500 employees at Harmony schools, 292 are on special “H-1B” visas meant to allow skilled foreign workers to fill needs unmet by U. S. workers. 

A professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. Ronil Hira, explains the Harmony schools’ preference for hiring immigrants as a matter of economics. They can pay them less; and for the immigrant teacher it’s a step toward a green card. 

If I’m a crazy right-wing person what does all this prove? Tune in to Fox News at 5 p.m. and watch as the King of Blackboards, Glenn Beck, reveals the truth.  

Governor Kasich is in favor of madrassas in Ohio!!!! 

Numbers Don't Lie: Our Teachers (and Doctors) Are Failing

I RETIRED FROM TEACHING three years ago. So I finally have time to do a little writing. If you follow education news these days you have to know public school teachers are being fed a steady diet of abuse by critics. When U. S. students are compared and ranked, internationally, based on test scores the results are depressing.

It has to be teachers, right? Not long ago, Glenn Beck lumped teachers’ unions in with Islamic terrorists. Seriously. The movie Waiting for Superman made it look like teachers were a bunch of slugs. Here in Ohio Governor Kasich acts like we’re Vikings intent on ransacking the State Treasury.

I talk to teachers these days and find them more discouraged than at any time since I first became interested in a career in education. So my blog will always be a defense of good teachers—but never bad ones. 

There’s a difference, which most of our leaders and almost all of the critics seem to forget. Take Arne Duncan. He says education reform is “all about the talent.”

He means it’s all about teachers.

Trust me:  I’m a liberal. I voted for President Obama and always knew he had a valid birth certificate. But I’d like to sock Mr. Duncan, his Secretary of Education in the jaw. (Same goes for Davis Guggenheim, producer of Waiting for Superman, by the way.)

If you listen to critics this is what you hear:  We have a “school crisis” on our hands. How do we know? We know because our students finished 25^th in math in 2006, when students from thirty nations were tested. Worse, we spend more on education than almost all the countries that beat us. See:  America’s teachers are lazy and overpaid.

Here were the bleak math results in 2006:

1. Finland
2. South Korea
3. Netherlands
4. Switzerland
5. Canada
6. Japan
7. New Zealand
8. Belgium
9. Australia
10. Denmark
11. Czech Republic
12. Iceland
13. Austria
14. Germany
15. Sweden
16. Ireland
17. France
18. United Kingdom
19. Poland
20. Slovak Republic
21. Hungary
22. Luxembourg
23. Norway
24. Spain 
25. UNITED STATES
26. Portugal
27. Italy
28. Greece
29. Turkey
30. Mexico

Study that list a bit and it can seem depressing. Our poor students were just baffled when it came to multiplying decimals and transforming common fractions into percentages. Who else could you blame? It had to be teachers.

In my case, I looked at that list for a long time and wondered. Was America going to math hell in a hand basket?

WHAT OTHER PROBLEMS WERE CRITICS MISSING? Was it just America’s teachers who were failing? Or was there a broader cultural failure to concern us?

What about doctors?

Time magazine provided the first hint of danger in a brief comparison (December 12, 2008) of health care systems round the world. After that, I was on the story like Woodward and Bernstein, or maybe just Woodward, since it’s just me.

Health care costs in the United States ate up 16% of GDP, the highest figure in the world, a per capita cost of $7,026. Life expectancy was 77.8 years.

Japan spent 7.9% of GDP, or $2,690 per capita. Yet the Japanese lived an average of 83 years.

Numbers don’t lie and the more numbers you study the more lying you don’t see. School reformers like Secretary Duncan assure us that if we collect enough data and tie test results to teacher pay we can save American education. Maybe we can collect enough data to save hospitals, too. In southern Minnesota people live into their 80’s. People in eastern Kentucky live a mere 72.6 years.

What’s needed, clearly, is a system to rate doctors and nurses in Minnesota “excellent” and medical people in Kentucky “failing” or under “academic watch” or some category of that nature. Or we could fire all the Kentucky medical people and get some real professionals in there to clean up the mess.

In fact, to get a picture of how our oncologists and proctologists are doing, let’s gather some data. Compare life expectancy in the same countries that beat out our brains in math.

Here were the dismal “health care” rankings for 2009:

1.    Japan                          

2.    Australia                     

3.    Canada                                   

4.    France                        

5.    Sweden                      

6.    Switzerland                

7.    Iceland                                   

8.    Israel                          

9.    New Zealand             

10.  Italy                            

11.  Norway                      

12.  Spain                          

13.  Austria                                   

14.  Greece                        

15.  Netherlands                

16.  Luxembourg               

17.  Germany                    

18.  Belgium                      

19.  Finland           

20.  United Kingdom        

21.  Denmark                    

22.  Ireland                        

23.  Portugal                      

24.  UNITED STATES    

25.  Czech Republic          

26.  Mexico                       

27.  South Korea               

28.  Poland                        

29.  Slovakia                     

30.  Turkey                     

So, what do simple lists prove? If America’s teachers are failing, a truth the media universally accept, then this chart proves that U. S. doctors are lazy and overpaid idiots—and they aren’t even unionized.

(Thank god they don't have tenure!!!)

So, Mr. Duncan, if you ever do get punched in the nose by an angry, retired teacher, head for Canada if you want good affordable health care.

And don’t mention our terrible doctors to Glenn Beck.

He’ll only start crying.

(For even MORE chilling statistical evidence go to:  “America's Teachers Stink Up the Place Again.”