Who Knew? Rupert Murdoch is a Flaming Liberal

Lt. Colonel Wesley Brown, the first black graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (Class of 1949) died last month. Even many Fox News affiliates took note of his story.

A handful of black students had enrolled at the Academy before, but quit in the face of intense race-based hatred and hazing. Brown, a member of the entering class of 1945, barely made it. Most white cadets refused to sit next to him in the cafeteria or classroom. He was barred from joining the choir and admitted to a biographer years later that not a day went by during his stay at Annapolis that he didn't think about quitting. But with the World War II just ended, attitudes about discrimination were changing. It was hard to argue that Hitler was a monster if a brand of racism virtually indistinguishable from Nazi ideology was going to continue to thrive in this country. Luckily, a few cadets (including Jimmy Carter) encouraged Brown to “hang in there” and he did and went on to make a career of the Navy.

More about Brown in a moment; but for now it’s interesting to consider his story in light of recent polls that show 40% of Americans identify themselves as “conservative,” outnumbering liberals 2-1. Here in Cincinnati it can feel like it’s closer to 10-1.

Many of my friends tell me they’re conservative. I tell them I’m liberal. What’s odd is that they sometimes tell me I’m not.

I say I am and say I can prove it. They say I’m not and walk away feeling a little too smug in their beliefs. They don’t believe in global warming nor in evolution. They don’t gasp when Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann put themselves forward as serious contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. They don’t notice that Sarah Palin is an intellectual lightweight or that Glenn Beck often sounds nutty. They believe in the Bible, though, and really, really, really believe in the Founding Fathers and don’t think there has been a good political idea hatched out of anyone’s head since 1787.

The Brown story makes you wonder if Americans still understand what labels like “liberal” and “conservative” mean. A “conservative” has always been someone who wants to keep society as it is. A liberal has always been a person who wants to see society change and improve. Both views have their strengths. Yet, for two decades, the loudest voices on the far-right, people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and the crew at Fox News, have done everything they could to turn the word “liberal” into a pejorative.

It might help all good Americans, then, liberal and conservative, to consider a few examples and explain how liberals really think and we’ll circle back to Brown before we finish.

Recently, the University of Michigan Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law compiled a database of all individuals wrongly convicted of serious crimes in this country and later exonerated, starting in 1989. Records show that more than 2,000 men and women have been unjustly convicted of very serious crimes, including rape and murder. Many have been freed only as a result of improvements in the use of DNA evidence, which has often conclusively established their innocence.

The database, however, looked at only 873 individuals (not surprisingly, half were black), for whom the best records existed. Collectively, they spent 10,000 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

One hundred and one innocent people were facing death sentences.

If you’re a liberal you consider this a travesty. You believe courts must do a better job of insuring that innocent people are not sent to prison. You might also oppose the death penalty, though not all liberals do.

Last September, when Rick Perry defended the 234 executions carried out in Texas during his time as governor, and said he wasn’t worried about mistakes, because his state had such a fine justice system, you had a sinking feeling. You knew, for instance, that the State of Illinois admitted it condemned at least 13 innocent men to death in years following the decision by the United States Supreme Court to reinstitute the penalty in 1977.

Go back farther and you can see plenty of reasons to be “liberal.” Do you believe a defendant on trial for murder should have legal counsel if he cannot afford it? You’re a liberal if you do because the Founding Fathers never thought to address that issue and the U. S. Supreme Court had to determine that the answer was “yes” in a series of decisions in the 1930s and 40s.

What about a defendant on trial for armed robbery? Should that individual have a lawyer if he can’t afford one? Or should he defend himself, try to stay out of jail for five or six years, relying only on his own native wit? He might be innocent, after all. If you say “he deserves a lawyer,” click your ruby slippers together and repeat three times, “There's no place so perfect for conservatives as the past” and be transported back to 1963. Up until then defendants on trial in non-capital felony cases had no lawyers unless they could pay for them.

If you think that’s wrong and claim you’re conservative, it’s time to come out of the closet.

You, madam or sir, are a flaming liberal!

What about the whole matter of Brown and the idea that all Americans deserve equal treatment? Should Wesley Brown have been allowed to enroll at the U. S. Naval Academy in the first place? Should Herman Cain be allowed to run for higher office? Should Colin Powell be a general? Should black and white soldiers fighting today in Afghanistan serve in integrated military units? They couldn’t until President Harry Truman took a liberal stance and ordered U. S. armed forces to eliminate the color line in 1948. At the time, Strom Thurmond, U. S. senator from South Carolina, and a red, white and blue conservative till the day he died in 2003, called the new policy “un-American.”

He was opposed to race-mixing and warned: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” Good old Strom Thurmond! Served 48 years in the Senate. Ran in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate for president on an anti-integration platform. Switched to the Republican Party sixteen years later because Barry Goldwater, the conservative candidate for president, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A conservative, good and true, was Senator Thurmond.

Keep blacks out of the swimming pools, the schools (including Annapolis), and, for sure, voting booths. Not necessarily your bedroom though. In 2003 after seventy-eight years of secrets and silence, it was revealed that Strom Thurmond had fathered a child by his family’s black teenage maid in 1925. Down South they call that miscegenation.

And Thurmond was against it.

You’d think our political opponents on the right might see the irony and be a bit more humble. “Conservatism,” after all, has often meant standing directly in the path of human advancement. In 1521 it meant believing it was acceptable to burn church critics at the stake. In 1611, when the King James Bible was published, you supported King James when he claimed to rule by divine right. In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, conservatives called it justice to hang men and women for witchcraft, and no defense lawyers required. In 1775 you considered George Washington and all those who would later become the Founding Fathers traitors. In 1861 you stood with the slave owners. In 1920 you predicted disaster if women voted and said it would lead to increases in the divorce rate.

In 1967, like Senator Thurmond, you opposed interracial marriage. So you knew it was a dark day in American history when a few “activist” judges on the United States Supreme Court stepped in that summer and voted 9-0 in favor of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia. The court ruled that if two people loved each other they could marry. (Police officers had invaded the Loving’s home at night, had apprehended the criminals in their own bed, with a wedding certificate from another state affixed to the bedroom wall). For decades the laws of the State of Virginia had held that a racially mixed marriage was a felony (again: no lawyer needed at trial if you couldn’t pay for one yourself), and conservatives heartily approved, just as they imagined the Founding Fathers must have intended. So: you’re a true conservative if you believe the government should be able to tell people who they can and cannot marry. And you’re a liberal if you believe marriage between races is acceptable.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the most conservative TV network on the face of the planet? Why that curmudgeon is a liberal! Divorced twice. Old white fellow. Married to a woman of Chinese extraction.

Conservatives used to call that miscegenation.

Rick Perry Was...Um...Uh..Right: Get Rid of the U. S. Department of Education

IF YOU SAW RICK PERRY'S MOST RECENT DEBATE PERFORMANCE you know it was... um...not marked by...uh...Let me think. Give me a second. Oops.

I think the word I'm looking for is "coherence."

At the time, Mr. Perry was outlining the steps he'd take if elected president and trying to list three federal departments he'd eliminate. One was Commerce. Another was Education. The third was... uh...well... maybe Baking?

Still, the Governor was onto something. I'm a retired teacher and the chances I'd vote for Perry are as slim as a New York City fashion model. That doesn't mean I wouldn't be thrilled to see President Perry, if he should win, close down the U. S. Department of Education. I doubt many teachers would mourn its passing, or notice, unless someone announced it over the PA system at their school and gave them the news. 

Like I say:  I can't see a scenario where I end up voting for the Texas Hair Model. But if he does get to the Oval Office I hope one of his first acts is to issue an executive order that sends Arne Duncan, that insufferable ass, right back into the classroom in the lowest performing school in the US of A. 

I'd like to see Arne do a little teaching. 

Really, what does the Department of Education do?  (Its budget for 2011 was estimated to be $71 billion and employees numbered  more than 5,000.) I'm going to say this for sure:  I taught 33 years, and never saw a hint of evidence that what the Department was doing was helping teachers or in any way helping students.

So let's see if we can't cut a few dollars from the federal deficit. On this Tea Party folks and Real Teachers can unite. According to Friday's New York Times, even the Department of Agriculture is cutting back these days. Dozens of reports are being scrapped this year. So we're not going to have the annual goat census (it was 3,000,000 in 2010). 

The catfish census (177,000,000) is out and we're going to have to do without a report that calculates the value of honey sales by North Dakota bee keepers ($70 million). 

We won't know any more which state is #1 in sales of mink pelts (Wisconsin) and we won't have a clue which state (Texas!) shipped the most flats of pansies.



Maybe we don't need the Department of Education.
Maybe we need to get all bureaucrats and education refomers into the classroom.
Then let them work their magic!

Young teachers might not recall:  but the U. S. Department of Education was created in 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, and then turned over to control of Shirley Hufstedler, who you might guess had an extensive background in education.

No! If you guessed that, you'd be a total doofus! That would have made sense. Ms. Hufstedler was a former federal judge.

It was the start of a tradition, where seven out of nine people who ran (or run) the Department never taught a day in their and another taught only phys. ed., and so routinely failed to understand the challenges in a real classroom. So what did we gain? Well, the people at Education churned out all kinds of reports. They tabulated and measured. They put together cool charts and graphs, issued all sorts of regulations, and multiplied the paperwork speech therapists and special education teachers and just about everyone else had to complete.

(If Secretary Duncan and leading reformers have their way teachers are soon going to have to fill out a whole lot more forms and we're going to bury U. S. education in useless statistics.)

Then in 2002, the Big Wigs at the Department of Education began focusing on implementation of No Child Left Behind. They talked a great game:  helping states write new standards, then national standards when state standards yielded less-than-zero results. Mr. Duncan almost guaranteed success and called for a "Race to the Top" program, a bold new plan to improve America's public schools.

If you think it's a mess now, wait until the avalanche of "value added" charts and graphs hits schools and bureaucrats set about trying to measure everything every teacher does, has done, or ever might think about doing, from the first grade art teacher (number of brush strokes per child), on up to the middle school speech therapist (correct syllables spoken), to the high school band director (notes played per minute).

It's going to be the I.R.S. model for education.

WE'VE SPENT BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on this effort--and about all we've got to show for it is more frustration for the good teachers, who are always swamped trying to do their jobs.

Don't get me wrong:  We need to do more to weed out bad teachers. And once we do I say we fill those empty spots at the front of the classroom with the likes of Duncan and Michelle Rhee, with Wendy Kopp of Teach for America (let that lady TEACH!), Joel I. Klein, self-appointed saviour of the New York City Schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who says the key is grading schools), Steven Brill (who wrote a book fixing schools) and Davis Guggenheim (producer of Waiting for "Superman") to name just a few.

We don't need to wait for Superman. We've got Rhee and Kopp and Brill, sitting on the bench, telling real teachers what to do, just waiting for the chance to get in the game and save the day.

So...yeah....um...I say we do without the goat census and close down the Department of Education. And for god sakes, make these experts TEACH.

How Low Can You Go? Kasich, Perry, and the Average Worker

To hear Governor Kasich tell it, public sector workers are grossly overpaid and taxpayers are loaded down with economic chains.  He has to rein in pay and benefits.  Unions are evil and greedy and the cause of our present economic malaise.

On the surface, it's a position that has appeal to conservative voters, but you have to wonder:  "How low do Kasich and his allies really want Ohio workers to go?"

Consider the record of Governor Rick Perry, who touts his success with jobs creation in Texas in recent years, as a sort of model for the future.  On the surface, Mr. Perry has a solid record.  Gross Domestic Production rose 2.6% nationally in 2010.  Texas had a rate of 2.8%. 

Unemployment has been lower in Texas, too:  8.5% vs. 9.1% across the country, according to reports out just today. 

So put on your cowboy boots and buckle up your holster, buckaroo, and head to Texas if you want a good ol' job.  Perry for president!  And Michelle Bachmann for VP.  Bachmann once argued that doing away with the minimum wage would cure unemployment. 

The "good old Medieval days."
When the serfs still knew their place.

So would a return to feudalism. 

But I digress.

As always, the full picture is more complicated than politicians like Kasich ever care to admit.  In 2010 almost 1 in 10 Texas workers (9.5%) worked at or below the federal minimum wage (vs. 6.0% nationally).  So you can GO to Texas and find work.

You just might have to be content with minimum wage.

Even better, in 2009, 26% of the workforce in Perry's state went without health care vs. 17% nationwide.  (See New York Times; 8-16-11)

Maybe that's the plan in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey where fiscal hawks like Kasich rule.  Let's cut costs for taxpayers, follow the Texas model, so to speak.  Let's face it, teachers, if you gave up health care entirely, the burden on taxpayers could be dramatically reduced.  And police?  Really, you and your firemen buddies are grossly overpaid.  With your union bargaining rights gone, you really should be willing to do your part and swallow a 25% cut in pay.

If you don't like it pack up that U-Haul and head for Texas.

In the end, that's the question I'd like to hear asked at the next Republican presidential debate:  How LOW do they want the average American worker to go?

Call me a crazy liberal:  but I'd prefer to hear my politicians promise to fight to improve conditions for low-paid workers in this country, who promise to help pull working Americans up, in Ohio and elsewhere, not tear unionized workers down.