For those of you who, uhm, aren't old, Sista Soulja was an ancillary member of the Greatest Hip-Hop Group of All Time who, in 1992, made some very mean comments about how black people should take a week off from killing each other to kill white people instead. That kind of statement wasn't that out of left field in the glorious world of post Golden Age hip hop, and Sista Soulja probably would have faded into Bolivian if not for the actions of a young Arkansas governor.
At a very public event for Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Bill Clinton criticized Soulja's comments and Jackson for allowing her to continue to work with the Rainbow Coalition. The incident continues to be referenced whenever a national political figure tries to put his or her party's base in their place. When you have a Sista Soulja moment, you try to reassure the bulk of the American people that, although you share the same party with the crazies, you know they're crazy, and you know how to keep them under control.*
Well, doesn't that sound like exactly the kind of thing the GOP could use right now? That's all I could think of reading how some nonentity GOP congressman is watching the State of the Union with noted insane person Ted Nugent. If I'm Ricky Rubio** or Paul Ryan and I have my eyes on the 2016 prize, opportunities like these are exactly what I am looking for. Maybe it's too early to start regulating the Tea Party wack jobs, but, like, TED NUGENT, people. Low hanging fruit with no negative repercussions for giving him a little chin music.
Said Nonentity
* Please note that I am just describing the candidate's mindset and not trying to attribute craziness to anyone, let alone Jesse Jackson, who I admire.
Last week, the Washington Post ran an article which describes how the school system in Butler, Pennsylvania is hiring former state troopers to serve as armed security guards. The article is fantastic and presents about the best possible case for arming school employees. The officers who are serving in Butler Schools deserve nothing but our respect, and the Butler School System deserves all credit for demanding that only the most responsible, best trained personnel serve in these positions. That alone allays my greatest fear, which is civilians with guns taking shots at people besides the bad guys. In an emergency situation, I have a hard time imagining anyone but a trained professional hitting the person they need to stop. With trained officers, there's a much lower (but, to be sure, a non zero) chance that they choke.
It still won't prevent the unthinkable.
The sad, bad, awful truth is that so many of these tragedies end with the gunman turning the gun on themselves. A lone ex-cop with a pistol isn't going to deter someone who has already decided to die. We have multiple examples of serial killers whose planning is as thorough as it is horrifying. Think about the bombs the Colorado movie theater shooter set up in his apartment or the planning the Columbine kids did. These dudes can be smart. They can and will scout their targets. And the first bullet they fire is going to head directly for the armed security guard. The guard is a sitting duck.
And I repeat: no one has told me how we are going to pay for an armed guard in every school. There are roughly 15,000 schools in the United States. Say we can find enough retired officers to staff every school and that, out of generosity, the officers all agree to take a $30,000 salary. That's 450 millions dollars. 45 plus seven zeros, before we factor in the cost of training and benefits.
Courtesy of Josh Landau: the 2011 Class of Georgetown Law, which is a Top 14 law school, has an 8.2 percent unemployment rate. That's actually pretty good compared to how other people in other sectors are doing, but ...
8.2 percent of really smart, really obedient kids got really good GPAs in high school and college.
8.2 percent of kids did everything right, got into one of the elite institutions in America, survived the rigors and bullshit of graduate school.
8.2 percent of the most system system kids were told that their services were not needed.
I finally heard the clip, courtesy of The Black Guy Who Tips. The underrated part of this whole surreal, hilarious saga:
Rush Limbaugh thinks that the amount of birth control pills a woman takes is related to the amount of sex she is having.
Now, Rush's ignorance may intentional. He may be trying to conflate the pill with RU-486. You don't get to be a billionaire off a talk radio show without being smart. But I prefer the other interpretation, which is that he really thinks you need to take more birth control pills the more you have sex.
Santorum called Obama a "snob" because he thinks everyone should go to college. Yes, this is the same Rick Santorum who is running for the presidential nomination of the party that screams "class warfare" at the first hint of any government policy that helps the 99 percent.
This stump speech is rooted in basic resentment of fancy book learnin that attacks the supposed right to impose wrong beliefs about evolution and global warming on America's children. If you choose to roll your eyes and move on with your day, I ain't mad at cha.
However, at the core of this particular bit of Santorum nonsense is a real debate that the United States should be having. For my dissertation I interviewed a nationally known superintendent and scholar who lamented the same trend. He served a rural school district that saw its mission not just to get students ready for college but also to make sure that students stayed healthy during high school and could get jobs after. In other words, he recognized a real educational dilemma that Santorum's rhetoric only points to and exploits.
At most, only about 60 percent of kids finish college, and the numbers are well below 50 percent for black and Latino students. We need to do better for these kids, and part of that effort should be increased opportunities to go to school and increased support for students for whom college may be more difficult than the average. But especially with the price of college going up, I'm not sure that our society can afford to get everyone to college. Even if we can, we need to ensure that those students who choose not to go to college have acceptable life opportunities.
1) There's a lot going on with the Right Wing's hatred of Obama besides race. He has a funnyscary name. He reps Hawaii and Harvard. He is only the second president I can remember to not try to cultivate that aw shucks, good ol' boy bs. He is The Other in so many ways that terrify a lot of people who never, ever thought they'd see a black President.
On top of that, he's pursued policies that go against the fundamental commitment of the Right Wing to limited government. Liberal Check Yo Self Moment #1: Some people believe differently from us. Obama has done some things they find deeply wrong and terrifying.
2) That said, cmon, son.
Have fun! Google image search for "race card." You'll kill yourself with joy!!
BONUS POINT) HAHAHAHA KICKERS ARE TERRIBLE.
3) Liberal Check Yo Self Moment #2: Barack Obama campaigned as a moderate. He has governed as a moderate. Yet we liberals loved him as an agent of meaningful change in 2008. In 2012, we are just getting over our anger that Obama...governed exactly as he said he would.
I wonder why we could have POSSIBLY thought the first black president was more liberal than he is.
Seriously. People are terrible and you should know!
I remember when I thought this blog wouldn't talk about politics much. But due to overwhelming popular demand,
Yesterday, we established Romney is going to win New Hampshire in a landslide and that he actually won a state where the Republican electorate should have been relatively less favorable to him. He's got an early lead in delegate math, and he's got a superior campaign infrastructure set up that makes him better positioned than any other candidate to maximize his delegates from every possible situation.
Takao Yamada points out that more than 75 percent of the Iowa caucus goers voted for someone else. I tend to be highly skeptical of the idea that the "anyone but Romney" vote means anything. Ultimately, one real candidate would have to gather all the disparate voices that make up the more conservative side of the party and overcome the financial and institutional advantages Romney possesses.
As we've seen time and again with Newt Gingrich, once people actually get a look at a real, live person and consider them, and not some "anyone but Romney" abstract ideal, as the opponent, they start to think Romney might not be so bad. I called the Crazy Guys crazy yesterday not because I think they're crazy but because as the electorate learns about them, the electorate looks at them as too kooky to do the job. Santorum is about to go through the media treatment for the first time, and people won't like what they see. Paul is too unconventional. Perry couldn't win a student council election outside of Texas.
The only candidate with any kind of leaderly gravitas left is, somehow, Gingrich. Don't ask me why or how, but he's the only other guy in the race that I think most Republicans can imagine as President. People are comfortable with the idea of Gingrich as a leader. No one expects him to do well in NH, and if he gets a win in South Carolina he can claim momentum. If Romney really isn't going to get the nomination, I still think Gingrich is the only real threat to take it from him.
But let's be real. Newt Gingrich is not beating Mitt Romney. Romney is going to win convincingly in the Northeast, the Pacific coast, and the Upper Midwest, where the social conservative crowd is relatively less important. And even in the South and other socially conservative, do we really expect that social conservatives are going to rally behind Mr. Lova Lova? Do we really think Gingrich can go a week, let alone four months, without saying something abysmally stupid?
Things can still happen in the primary season that can affect the general election, I guess. But all the drama of who will be the Republican nominee is over.
The media's job is to attract eyeballs, so I imagine they are in full spin mode this morning. "Romney and Santorum were a virtual tie." "More than 75 percent of Caucus goers voted for 'Not Romney.'" "We move on the New Hampshire with nothing decided."
They're all lying to you. Romney got as big a win last night as he could have expected, and the contest to nominate Barack Obama's opponent is all over but the shouting.
I am not Nate Silver, so I can't give you the exact mathematical probability. But I can translate the order of finish into terms anyone can understand:
1) (tie) Mitt Romney and a Crazy Person
3) A Crazy Person
4) Newt Gingrich
Now, if you support one of the Crazy People, don't get mad at me. Get mad at the rest of the world, because I am only speaking in terms of electability, and
Brother
Bruh
Dawg
Champ
Everyone thinks your boy is crazy. Your boy has no change of getting the Republican nomination. None.
Besides, if you want to listen to people pretend to take your guy seriously, the media will try desperately over the next few days to convince you that one of the Crazy People is a real challenger to Romney, because they want to keep you watching the Campaign Show as long as possible.
But back to Romney. If Romney was going to lose the nomination, Iowa was a place he should have lost fairly decisively. Iowa's Republican voters skew conservative, which is the part of the Republican electorate with which Romney was supposed to have trouble. Romney gets to move on to New Hampshire next, which contains a much higher percentage of his natural constituency. Combined with the momentum of a better-than-expected showing, Romney is about to mollywhop everyone else in New Hampshire.
I have to cut this short to catch a plane. I will finish this thought tomorrow with the only possible dark cloud on Romney's horizon and why it's highly unlikely to stop him.
Anyway, I just skimmed what Silver wrote about last night, and it seems like he's saying the same thing I am except more artfully and precisely
