Progress

Just one anecdote, of many, from this outstanding Steven Brill article in the New Yorker on NYC's public schools and their radically unionized teachers. The room in question is one of the union-mandated "Rubber Rooms" where incompetent and/or misbehaving teachers are stored (at full pay) while their cases are ajudicated per their contracts:

The walls of the large, rectangular room were covered with photographs of Barack Obama and various news clippings. Just to the right of a poster that proclaimed “Bloomberg’s 3 Rs: Rubber Room Racism,” a smiling young woman sat in a lounge chair that she had brought from home. She declined to say what the charges against her were or to allow her name to be used, but told me that she was there “because I’m a smart black woman.”

I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”

Read the whole thing; it's a remarkable piece. What's far more remarkable to me, though, is where it was published. Fifteen or so years ago, you'd only see this kind of critical reporting of a teacher's union in conservative-leaning magazines like Forbes. Seeing an article this tough on what it calls "the [Democratic] the Party’s most powerful support group" in the New Yorker almost gives me... what was that word?

Oh yeah: hope.

H/T: Kaus.

Letter To The Editor

Editor, Auburn Magazine,

Even given the abysmal descent into of style over substance, touchie-feelie "Oprah" writing and embarrassing errors that have come to dominate the pages of Auburn Magazine during the tenure of editor Betsy Robertson, this quarter's issue has to be an all-time low. I suppose one could make a legitimate argument for giving a prominent alumnae such as Selena Roberts coverage in the magazine, but turning that coverage into a fawning puff piece is inexcusable [the article is not yet available online; when it is, I'll link to it --WC].

Selena Roberts is not a credit to Auburn University; she is a disgrace upon its good name. I still can't believe that Auburn Magazine--of all publications!--not only brushed over and excused Roberts' serial abuses as a New York Times "reporter," but couldn't find so much as one paragraph to note Roberts' slanderous and unfounded attack on the Auburn athletic department and the Reverend Chette Williams in early 2005. Back then, Roberts ran a breathless column insinuating Williams was guilty of NCAA violations on behalf of AU.

Subsequent investigations by Auburn and the NCAA found nothing of the sort, but Roberts, true to form, never retracted or apologized, and her unsubstantiated hit piece is quoted to this day by representatives of rival schools. And that doesn't even touch on the article's airy dismissal of Roberts' infamous rush to judgement (and subsequent "what, me, responsible?" reaction) to the Duke Lacrosse hoax.

No doubt Roberts' editors at the arch-liberal Times were more than pleased to read an assault on those redneck rubes and their backwards Christian ways written by one of their own, but under no circumstances should Roberts have received six pages of celebrity worship coverage in the University's own alumni publication.

Auburn Magazine is badly adrift, and in dire need of new leadership.

Sincerely,
--Will Collier, AE '92

(Cross-posted at From The Bleachers.)

BSG At The IBD

Just try and tell me the author of this Investor's Business Daily column isn't a Battlestar Galactica fan:

Kennedy and the rest of the fracking opposition say that since the technique uses a lot of water, we should worry about possible groundwater pollution and the impact on water supplies, rivers and streams.

David Scott's Sign

David Scott's satellite office, referenced here, is about a mile from my house. I just drove past it on my lunch break, and a brand-new replacement sign was already up.

It's almost like they had a back-up sign ready, just in case.

Precisely

Dorothy Rabinowitz, at OpinionJournal:

The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans. He knows the crowds—he is at home with those. He is a stranger to the country’s heart and character.

He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don’t take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don’t know they want to go and being told it’s good for them.

Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answer—the same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning.

It took this battle over health care to reveal the bloom coming off this rose, but that was coming. It began with the spectacle of the president, impelled to go abroad to apologize for his nation—repeatedly. It is not, in the end, the demonstrators in those town-hall meetings or the agitations of his political enemies that Mr. Obama should fear. It is the judgment of those Americans who have been sitting quietly in their homes, listening to him.

Two Cheers For Michael Lind

Leftie Michael Lind, writing in Salon, makes a game and appreciated (at least by me) effort at denouncing liberal bigotry against Southerners, with particular scorn directed at the likes of Kevin Drum and Kathleen Parker:

Oh, those dumb white Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe in preposterous conspiracy theories. Well, maybe one other group, the most reliably Democratic demographic in the whole U.S. electorate. A 2005 study by RAND and Oregon State University showed that a majority of blacks believed that a cure for AIDS was being withheld from the poor; that nearly half believed that AIDS was man-made, with a quarter believing that it was created in a U.S. government laboratory and 12 percent naming the CIA as its source. Black paranoia about AIDS is understandable, given the Tuskegee experiments. Even so, the theory that AIDS was created by the CIA to commit genocide against black people is wackier than the craziest Birther conspiracy theories. Would Kathleen Parker write, or the Washington Post publish, a column arguing that black Democrats "have seceded from sanity"? Would Kevin Drum applaud Parker's insult and extend to it to all African-Americans?

Lind's article isn't perfect. He couldn't stop himself from explaining away the polititcal proclivities of conservative Southerners with quasi-Marxist twaddle, painting them as uneducated victims of antibellum "ogliarchy" who want but for their liberal betters to show the way (just once I'd like to see at least one Leftist admit that their ideological rivals just might be able to think for themselves), but even for all that, I applaud his overall effort. It's a damn sight more civil than 99% of the garbage that gets thrown in this direction by the "intelligencia" and the media.

UPDATE: Quoth the Blogfaddah, "But isn’t insulting white Southerners one of the main pleasures of liberalism? I mean, if you have to give that up, what’s the point?" Well, they can always fall back on the self-aggrandizing air of moral superiority...

David Scott Is Hiding From His Constituents

I noticed with some interest this story about Congressman David Scott, as linked by the Blogfaddah and Hot Air. In the video linked below, Scott screams at a questioner at an open meeting, implying the doctor who politely asked Scott some direct questions was not one of Scott's constituents. As you'll see in the report, this was (being charitable) a mistaken impression on Scott's part.

Fair warning--the volume on the commercial preceding the news report is ear-splitting:



An unedited version of the meeting, including Scott's rant, can be seen here.

Scott represents the 13th District in Georgia, which has been stretched many miles around Interstate 285 to collect a number of localities. As is the case with the doctor in the video, Scott happens to be my own personal congresscritter, and as it happens, I checked last week to see whether or not he'd be making any appearances during August.

It turns out that Scott is planning one and only one meeting on health care during this month-long recess, and he's holding it in the Democratic stronghold of Jonesboro, in Clayton County. In point of fact, this appearance doesn't even seem to be an actual town meeting; it's billed on Scott's website as a "health fair."

Although I didn't know it at the time, I took Scott's advice and emailed his office on Wednesday to ask whether the Congressman would be holding any actual meetings up here in the northernmost spur of his district, the not-remotely-a-Democratic-stronghold of Smryna in Cobb County. Smith's staffer, Michael Andel, replied that Scott holds "events all over the place," and noted that he'd held a town meeting in Smyrna last year, but stopped replying when I asked specifically whether a meeting on health care--which after all is something of a vital issue at the moment--would be held in this area during the recess. I suppose more than one meeting every two years is a bit too taxing on the Congressman's busy schedule.

I can't say I was terribly surprised. Scott very rarely pays any attention to the northern half of his district, which is highly gerrymandered to insure a majority of the votes come from Clayton County. Scott puts up a billboard every two years (and he should update the photograph on it--I didn't realize until I watched the video linked above that his hair has turned grey) and recently put in a satellite office in the basement of a local bank, but other than that we don't see or hear much of him at all.

And apparently, we'll be seeing even less these days. Judging by Scott's behavior over in Douglasville last week, he's got very little interest in being questioned, much less in being disagreed with.

Those darn free citizens. It's like they think Congressmen work for them, instead of the other way around.