mturovskiy

We had quite the fancy post written on this topic, explaining the different categories of dog/dog sociability and what each of them means. We were going to sort various dogs we know and love into those categories and tell you how and why they happened to find themselves at that particular spot on the sociability spectrum.

We had graphics and cute dog photos and all kinds of impressive sounding jargon going on. And then we realized something…

We were doing the exact thing we strive not to do when it comes to dog/dog sociability and the answer to this million dollar question. We were simultaneously oversimplifying and overcomplicating how dogs engage with other dogs.

So, instead of that post we’re going to try to cut straight to the chase. Here’s the deal in the absolute simplest of nutshells we can put it:

How a dog engages with other dogs depends on a variety of factors including not just that dog’s personality but the personality of the dog(s) with whom he/she is interacting, the environment in which they are interacting, the behavior of the humans present, and any number of variables down to how that dog happens to be feeling that day or at that moment and if maybe there is a squirrel in that tree or someone left a burrito wrapper on the ground.

In short, there is no such thing as a simple yes or no answer to that oh so often posed question that accurately captures what people want to know when they ask it. Certainly there are dogs who are more dog social than others, ranging from those who typically get along with most dogs in most situations to those who only get along with particular dogs in particular situations.

We started out with those labels (check ’em out here) because they are a good jumping off point and they help illustrate that dog/dog sociability exists on a spectrum (much like, !!, human sociability).

We also enjoy that particular linked article because it touches on how sociability changes with age. Age dynamics in dog/dog play bring to mind an analogy of the ball pit at Chuck-E-Cheese. It’s typical to see small human children having a blast in the ball pit and while there are social faux pas and disagreements, they’re rarely serious in nature to the adults in the room (3 year old angst is super serious to a 3 year old) and often serve as good learning opportunities.

Now imagine that ball pit filled with adolescents. You’d likely even see some big differences if you observed 7th graders vs high school juniors. And what about adults?  There are definitely plenty of us out there who’d still love to jump in the ball pit with wild abandon (and those who’d eventually rethink our choice). There are also plenty of us who think the ball pit would be awesome if we had it to ourselves or were there with just a few close friends (Dinner party & Netflix in the ball pit? Um, yes.). But what if it was filled with glow stick wielding tweens and the sounds of the latest Katy Perry club remix? Or for some of us, even birthday cake faced toddlers?

Now humor us and take this little analogy a step further… What kind of social interactions might you see if all of those different age groups were tossed in together? Play around with various age mixes and personality types. Tweak the environmental circumstances. The possible social dynamics are fairly endless.

Have you heard that phrase, “All dogs are individuals?” There are incredible depths of truth in those four little words.

Let us break it down in another way… Just because a dog was/wasn’t great in shelter play group doesn’t mean they will/won’t be great at the dog park doesn’t mean they can/can’t live with your resident pets doesn’t mean they will/won’t love doggie daycare doesn’t mean they love/hate meeting dogs on walks doesn’t mean they will/won’t be okay sniffing hello at the vet’s office doesn’t mean they do/don’t want to be friends with your neighbor’s/sister’s/cousin’s/boyfriend’s dog.

You can take that crazy run on sentence of a thought experiment even further as you unpack each situation, considering maybe it wasn’t all doggie daycares but the particular one you tried that day or one or more of the dogs they encountered at play time, and that not every incarnation of a place or situation is created equal.

So how the heck do you know if a certain social situation or play buddy is a good one for your dog?  Simple. You get to know your dog and learn to understand how dogs communicate. Then, you put that knowledge into action and help your dog be happy and social in a way that works for him/her, and you notice if at some point that seems to change and adjust accordingly.

You also accept that normal sociability looks a little bit different for every single dog and honor that your dog’s preferences are okay. If you are concerned that he/she is being held back by fear issues or poor social skills, you work on it and enlist the help of a trainer if you need one.

What if you’re adopting a dog that needs to get along with your resident pets? Here is the truth that’s not stated plainly nearly often enough… There are no absolutes on that.

It’s not that the shelter or rescue doesn’t want to be forthcoming with you about the dog’s ability to live with your resident pets. It’s that the best we can give you is an educated guess about how successful we think they’ll be and what a successful integration plan might look like for that particular dog.

We often say not to do it because of all the variables at play but there are totally dogs out there who actually will be okay with the just toss ’em together approach. There are also many, many, many dogs (and cats, especially cats) who are not. That goes for the new addition and for the resident pets; both sides of the equation are equally important. What a good shelter or rescue can do is tell you what they know to be true about that particular dog’s personality and experiences and help provide a framework to set you up for success.

People successfully and happily add new animals to their existing companion crews all the time and they use different frameworks for integration based on the animals’ and households’ individual needs. The magic ingredients are patience, love, respect, getting to know the animals involved, and being able to help them communicate successfully, both with you and each other.

It may not sound as awesome and magical as just tossing glitter on everyone and watching it create a sparkly love fest of zen canines & felines but it’s what works. And isn’t the beauty found in a harmonious relationship really where the magic comes from anyway?

---

As this is such an often discussed topic, we wanted to pull together some of our favorite already existing pieces for your further perusal.

Tails from the Lab: Learning to Speak Dog: A Great Jumping Off Point for Your Journey into Canine Communication

–-> Why we love it: Successfully and accurately understanding and communicating with your dog is the foundation for everything you will do together.

He Just Wants to Say Hi! by Suzanne Clothier : Musings on Canine (and Human) Rudeness

–> Why we love it: Because normal and appropriate dog behavior often gets incorrectly categorized as problem behavior in our wacky human world.

What Makes a Good Puppy Class? by Dr. Ian Dunbar: Early Socialization Done Right

–> Why we love it: Because much like human children, puppies need appropriate and abundant opportunities to learn rather than micromanagement and the earlier we set dogs up for success, the less work we’ll have to do down the road.

Are Domestic Dogs Losing the Ability to Get Along with Each Other? by Laura Brody: Normal Dog Behavior in a Human-Centric World

–> Why we love it: Because, while the reality is that stray dogs around the world are absolutely not living some utopian existence, there is important food for thought here regarding how the constraints put in place by and the choices of humans are impacting dog behavior.

Are Dogs Pack Animals? by Jean Donaldson: We’ll Give You a Hint…The Answer is No

–>Why we love it: Because so much of what we get wrong about dog/dog and dog/human interaction stems from misconceptions about pack theory.

My Dog Got Kicked Out of Daycare Today by Robin Bennett: Not Every Dog is a Party Dog and That’s Okay

–> Why we love it: Because honoring your dog’s social and emotional needs is so important, as is understanding that not wanting to hang at doggie daycare is completely normal and acceptable behavior.

It’s Only Funny Until Your Dog Runs Out of Spoons by E. Foley: But He Usually Loves to Play/Meet Other Dogs!

–> Why we love it: Remember that thing about what the dog loved or at least tolerated yesterday, he might not love or accept today? Here’s why.

Multi-Dog Household Aggression by Pat Miller: What Might Be Causing the Tension and How You Can Diffuse It

–> Why we love it: It touches on very meaningful and often overlooked variables that may be causing tension and/or aggression in your household and gives practical advice on what you can do to improve the situation.

---

There’s so much more information out there and if you’d like to continue discovering and learning along with your dog, you can find many of our favorite books, articles, and websites in our behavior resource library.

And to whoever you are, reading this and searching a little deeper for the answer to the question asked in the title, thank you for loving and respecting dogs for who they are. Seeking to understand is one of the greatest expressions of love that exist.

The post Is He Good With Other Dogs? appeared first on Dogs Out Loud.

Pickles was found as a stray. His owner never claimed him.

He came to live with us, and we loved him so much. He was such a good little dog. Socially motivated and eager to connect, he gave hugs and adored snuggling. He was great with other dogs and gentle with children. He ran happily next to my bike and was always up for an adventure.

The first time we left Pickles alone for a short time, we came home to a scene that hit me in the guts like a punch out of nowhere. Pickles had panicked at being left, shredding the thick plastic pan of his crate and injuring himself in the process. The carpet was soaked with his blood, and his paws and mouth were sore. He crawled out of his crate, eyes wide and tail tucked to his belly button, and froze in fear. For nearly ten minutes, little Pickles was practically catatonic, unable to walk and unresponsive to touch or verbal reassurance.

Some level of isolation distress is not uncommon in dogs who have just come from the pound, but this was extreme. Pickles was immediately started on the best behavioral modification plan and pharmaceutical help we could give him.

More demons appeared, however. As I went to leash him the next day, my hand moving quickly towards him caused him to flinch and hit the ground in terror, screaming, then lunge upwards and bite my arms before running into his crate to hide. The word “no” made him likewise hit the ground, eyes wide and face tight, then hackle up and bark furiously. Our roommate’s raised voice (in excitement, not anger) or direct eye contact provoked similar defensive barking, and when my fiancé picked up a stick-like toy to engage Pickles in play, the little dog ran away and hid behind my legs.

Pickles was in a safe environment and he was loved. He also posed a significant safety risk: to himself, to his adopters, and to the community. In a committed home with good management and training, dogs with similar issues to Pickles may be kept successfully. But Pickles wasn’t in a long-term situation. He was in rescue.

I’ve written about it before, but putting a face to the dilemma is so much harder. Rehabilitating Pickles would be a long-term project. During the time that it would take to help him, twenty other needy dogs in our community could be saved. Just because those dogs weren’t in front of me, just because they didn’t have eyes I could look into and soft, warm fur under my hands, did that make them any less deserving than Pickles? Furthermore, even with the very best training, Pickles had shown that he was willing to use his teeth when frightened, and therefore presented a very real liability to place.

And what about Pickles himself? His separation issues had nothing to do with the crate – he was perfectly comfortable in it when someone was nearby, but freaked out when left gated in the kitchen with food toys (which went untouched) or loose with another dog for company. The fact that he panicked so badly as to injure himself was heartbreaking. I couldn’t imagine the sheer level of terror I would have to feel to rip off fingernails or claw at something until my fingers bled. How much trauma would I have to endure before a simple word or action caused me to reflexively respond with violence and fright?

Pickles had the best time we could give him. He played with dogs at the park and rolled in mud puddles like a little piggy, making sure to flop side-to-side to coat himself evenly with sticky slime. He ran and ran. He jumped baby gates and went over and under our backyard fence, wiggling with pride at his vertical accomplishments as I laughed and thanked the stars for leashes. He ate all the best things – bacon cheeseburgers, ice cream, roast beef, cream cheese, pepperoni. He discovered the joys of squeaky toys and raw meat in Kongs and real bones from the butcher and sleeping in bed (under the covers, of course). He was told that he was a good, good boy, the best, and that he was loved and safe.

And then the vet came, and Pickles left the world safe and loved, in arms that held him close, with a voice whispering all the kind things he needed to know. And it sucked, and I cried for days.

During Pickles’ time with us, I’ve been honest about him on Facebook and with my students, both the good and the bad. I’ve shared how he snarled over bully sticks and how he was respectful of kitties. I’ve shared how, while he didn’t even know the word “sit,” he definitely knew about the joys of car rides.

And I get that this topic is awful. It is. It’s horrible, and it hurts so badly that a bright, funny, sensitive little dog had to die. It hurts that people have sent me messages telling me how very wrong this decision was, and how love alone could have saved Pickles if I’d only cared enough (or worse yet, how I should send him to Cesar Milan). It hurts to know that whomever had Pickles may at this very minute have a new puppy, one who doesn’t bite them when they say “no” or destroy their house when they leave him… yet.

The truth is that this is the reality of our world right now. There are not enough resources available to save every dog, and it’s not in every dog’s best interest to be kept alive. Sometimes letting go is the kindest thing.

But it’s fixable, readers, and that’s why I’ve been honest about Pickles’ story even though the hate mail tears me up a little more each time and the days with him shredded my emotions. The answer is education. It’s catching Pickles’ family when he was still a baby, and teaching them about separation training and socialization and the dangers of physical punishment. Did you know that my blog posts about socialization, puppy care, and management only reach about 1/10 of the people (if that) that the blog posts about aggression reach? Puppy stuff may not be as sexy as discussions about biting dogs, but if we could get the word out about the former the latter would become much less necessary. It really is that simple, and that difficult.

Pickles isn’t my first compassion hold, and I suspect he won’t be my last (although I hope otherwise). In fostering over one hundred dogs, this is the third time a dog has come into my life and my heart with hopes of a bright future, only to show me that they can’t be safe or happy. (Many others have come into my home during their last days, as creaky old fifteen-year-old dogs who need a soft place to lay their heads for a few days or weeks or months, but we all know that it’s not the same to euthanize an old, sick dog as it is to say goodbye to a young dog like Pickles.)

Please know that Pickles’ story happens, more often than you may think. And please, help me to prevent it from happening to other dogs.

Filed under: Aggression, Anxiety, Euthanasia, Fear, Preventing Behavior Problems, Puppy Training, Relationships, Rescue, Socialization

by Gaius Publius

I recently did a piece about Greece that implied a number of similarities to Ukraine's recent upheavals. There I said:

All of this loops the Greek story into the Ukraine story, which most people still don't realize isn't just about Putin, though that makes a convenient (and cartoonish) Us vs. The Villain cautionary tale. It's about continuing the ... yes, neo-liberal project ... deeper into eastern Europe.

I want to explain some of that here, via three concepts — the cover story, the actual story, and the Putin element in each case — with a side look at "the neo-liberal project," which both of these stories exemplify.

The Story in Greece

The CNN-ready cover story on Greece is is a story of punishing helpers or helping punishers — the audience can take the story either way, as it chooses. "Bad Greece" got itself in economic trouble and "good Europeans" — led by German and other elites — have offered a helping hand, but only if the Greek government makes painful adjustments, such as cutting pensions (their form of our Social Security) and privatizing much of their infrastructure, such as their airports and shipping facilities. Money, but with strings.

The Greeks deserve this treatment because bad (profligate, lazy) people deserve to suffer when they fall. Welfare, when given to "the wrong people," should come with thorns; bailout money, when given to "the wrong people," should come with some pain, with strings.

The actual story is that the forces of privatization on the "liberal left" in Europe have found a nation in a great deal of economic trouble, thanks in large part to looting from outside, and they're offering a "helping" hand in order to further loot the country via those privatizing strings. In the minds of the looters (we'll call them "neo-liberals" below) every government-owned operation (Athens airport, say) is a missed profit opportunity for someone rich enough to buy it, and the world would be better if everything were made private.

But airports and other revenue opportunities don't privatize themselves; they have to be pried loose from government. Corruption will pry them loose, or friends on the inside. That's how the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and others got their hands on 75 years' worth of revenue from the Chicago parking meters. They had a "friend," Mayor Richard M. Daley, on the inside willing to sell it to them on the cheap.

"Shock Doctrine"-type operations will do it also. As Naomi Klein documents in her book of the same name, the shock of Hurricane Katrina's devastation was the perfect opportunity to privatize (monetize) New Orleans' public schools.

The Putin element is that Greece, if driven from the Eurozone by the Eurozone's brutal (but "liberal") hand, might accept aid from Russia, aid with fewer strings. In anticipation, the U.S. has reportedly told the Greek president it will not allow this, with militarized regime change on offer if he considers it — as opposed to the ballot-box regime change that the Eurozone is trying to force.

The "Neo-Liberal Project"

I call the above-described form of privatization (monetization) of government-held property the "neo-liberal project." Notice that while neo-liberals share goals with big-money conservatives on the right, most of these privatizers are what we otherwise call "liberals" — like Mayor Richard Daley, for example; or the helpful people at the IMF and the European Central Bank; or Bill Clinton, who wanted to privatize Social Security in 1997, if it weren't for a certain blue dress and the woman inside it:

Had it not been for Monica's captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be "reformed" and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.

We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton's orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric "Special Issues" on the White House agenda. ...

The "Special Issues" secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

It's the same game, whether played from the left or the right, as the video above clearly shows. When the game is played from the right, they call it Milton Friedman conservatism. When it's played from the left, they call it neo-liberalism ("new" liberalism, like Tony Blair's "New" Labour in the U.K.; like what it was, only not).

The privatizing game is mainly played from the left, because that's where most of the players are. The Western world is mostly run by "liberals" like these. When Democrats vote for mainstream "liberals," this is what they put into office.

The Ukrainian Story

There's a parallel to Greece in the recent events in the Ukraine. The cover story is that Ukraine was ruled by "bad president Yanukovych" who was friendly to Russia; Ukraine had a revolution, an uprising; and it's now ruled by "good prime minister Yatseniuk" under acting president Turchynov. Yatseniuk wants to take Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.

In this story, the Putin element comes at the beginning. The "good Europeans" wanted to lend a helping hand to Yanukovych and his government via loans and other inducements because Ukraine was in financial trouble (sound familiar?). Putin also offered a helping hand, so two deals were on the table. The Russian-leaning ("bad") Yanukovych wanted to accept the Russian deal over the E.U. deal, but the uprising deposed him. When the new West-leaning government accepted the European offer instead, the cover story tells us that Putin got angry, invaded Crimea, and is provoking a crisis. At the moment, Ukraine is experiencing either an invasion or a civil war, depending on who you talk to.

The real story is detailed below. The bottom line is that the West's offer of help was the standard neo-liberal offer — the strings were handcuffs. Putin actually presented a better offer, but the West worked covertly to install their own people (Yatseniuk in particular) to make sure that the European deal was accepted and Putin was spurned, even though much of the country is ethnically Russian and pro-Putin. The cover story also ignores Putin's reaction to the advancing NATO encirclement of Russia, of which the Ukraine story is a part.

The ethnicity is complex. The economics are not.

Who was the provocateur in the Ukrainian uprising? The West had a huge hand in provoking (and financing) it. Here's Chris Floyd with the story. Watch for the names Pierre Omidyar, billionaire founder of eBay; the innocently named USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, the "government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid"; and the likewise innocently named National Endowment for Democracy.

Floyd begins:

Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda

The Western intervention in Ukraine has now [spring, 2014] led the region to the brink of war. Political opposition to government of President Viktor Yanukovych — a corrupt and thuggish regime, but as with so many corrupt and thuggish regimes one sees these days, a democratically elected one — was funded in substantial part by organizations of or affiliated with the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (a longtime vehicle for Washington-friendly coups), and USAID. It also received substantial financial backing from Western oligarchs, such as billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and sole bankroller of the new venue for “adversarial” journalism, First Look, as Pandodaily reports.

Yanukovych sparked massive protests late last year when he turned down a financial deal from the European Union and chose a $15 billion aid package from Russia instead. The EU deal would have put cash-strapped Ukraine in a financial straitjacket, much like Greece, without actually promising any path for eventually joining the EU. There was one other stipulation in the EU’s proffered agreement that was almost never reported: it would have also forbidden Ukraine to “accept further assistance from the Russians,” as Patrick Smith notes in an important piece in Salon.com. It was a ruthless take-it-or-leave-it deal, and would have left Ukraine without any leverage, unable to parlay its unique position between East and West to its own advantage in the future, or conduct its foreign and economic policies as it saw fit. Yanukovych took the Russian deal, which would have given Ukraine cash in hand immediately and did not come with the same draconian restrictions.

It was a policy decision. It might have been the wrong policy decision; millions of Ukrainians thought so. Yanukovych, already unpopular before the deal, would have almost certainly been ousted from office by democratic means in national elections scheduled for 2015. But the outpouring of displeasure at this policy decision grew into a call for the removal of the government. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Washington was maneuvering to put their preferred candidate, Arseniy Yatseniuk, in charge of the Ukrainian government, as a leaked tape of a conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, clearly showed. It is worth noting that when Yanukovych was finally ousted from power — after the opposition reneged on an EU-brokered deal for an interim unity government and new elections in December — Arseniy Yatseniuk duly took charge of the Ukrainian government, as planned.

By all accounts, Viktor Yanukovych was an unsavoury character running an unsavoury government, backed by unsavoury oligarchs exploiting the country for their own benefit, and leaving it unnecessarily impoverished and chaotic. In this, he was not so different from his predecessors, or from many of those who have supplanted him, who also have oligarchic backing and dubious connections (see addendum below). But in any case, the idea of supporting an unconstitutional overthrow of a freely elected Ukrainian government in an uprising based squarely on the volatile linguistic and cultural fault-lines that divide the country seems an obvious recipe for chaos and strife. It was also certain to provoke a severe response from Russia. It was, in other words, a monumentally stupid line of policy[.]

The above-mentioned Victoria Nuland has a place in the Greece story as well; click and you'll see her with the Greek president, explaining how things work.

About that neo-liberal intrusion into Ukraine, Floyd quotes Patrick Smith from a piece at Salon:

“[U.S.] foreign policy cliques remain wholly committed to the spread of the neo-liberal order on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions. This is American policy in the 21st century. No one can entertain any illusion (as this columnist confesses to have done) that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post–Cold War order. Imposing “democracy,” the American kind, was the American story from the start, of course, and has been the mission since Wilson codified it even before he entered the White House. When the Cold War ended we began a decade of triumphalist bullying — economic warfare waged as “the Washington Consensus” — which came to the same thing.”

And:

“Instantly after Yanukovych was hounded from Kiev, seduction began its turn to betrayal. The Americans and Europeans started shuffling their feet as to what they would do for Ukrainians now that Russia has shut off the $15 billion tap. Nobody wants to pick up the bill, it turns out. Washington and the E.U. are now pushing the International Monetary Fund forward as the leader of a Western bailout. If the past is any guide, Ukrainians are now likely to get the “shock therapy” the economist Jeffrey Sachs urged in Russia, Poland and elsewhere after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Sachs subsequently (and dishonestly) denied he played any such role — understandable given the calamitous results, notably in Russia — but the prescription called for off-the-shelf neoliberalism, applied without reference to any local realities, and Ukrainians are about to get their dosage."

And regarding Pierre Omidyar:

Omidyar seems very much a part of the “neo-liberal order” which, as Patrick Smith noted above, the United States has been pushing “on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions.” So it is not surprising to see him playing a role in trying to spread this order to Ukraine, in tandem with the overt efforts and backroom machinations of the U.S. government. Omidyar is, openly, a firm adherent of the neo-liberal order — privitazing public assets for individual profit, converting charity and state aid to profitable enterprises for select investors, and working to elect or install governments that support these policies.

Billionaires helping governments help billionaires. One big happy family. Who needs left or right when everyone with real money works together?

Greece and Ukraine, the Bottom Line

So far, the U.S. has not had a direct hand in the upheaval in Greece, but it has had a hand in the upheaval in Ukraine, though unnoticed. In all other respects there are major parallels. In both cases an economically distressed country is targeted as prey (is there another word for this?) by Western elites bent on straitjacket economics ("off-the-shelf neoliberalism" is Chris Floyd's term) and a deal that comes with a price. In the case of Ukraine, there was a counteroffer (Russia's), so regime change by force was on the table early.

Will there be regime change by force in Greece? Many, like Joseph Stiglitz quoted here, think that's already being attempted via the destruction of the leftist Syriza party's credibility and policy options. If this piece at Naked Capitalism is correct, more direct intervention, with U.S. support, may be coming.

GP

My insider knowledge tells me that this is how all cat ladies wake up in the morning, with their felines on their head. I had no idea iguanas behave the same way.

This iguana hitched a ride all the way from its house onto Muni, and both the iguana and his owner seemed extremely relaxed about it. I can’t be sure that this is Charlie, or Charlie’s cousin, who is not to be confused with Skippy, the iguana of Wall Street Journal fame. But his athleticism is none the less impressive.

More of the Muni zoo this way, everybody.

Photo by @snacks_in_the_grass

credit: Tyler

Forever Alone

owlturdcomix:

The ultimate victory.

image | twitter | facebook

By Barry Rascovar

June 29, 2015 –Larry Hogan Jr. never has had an affinity for Baltimore. He’s never lived in a big city. He’s a suburban Washington, suburban Annapolis kind of guy.

Hogan also is a cold, calculating political animal. He has embraced  a staunch right-wing mindset — all government spending is bad, all liberal social programs are wasteful, all outlays that don’t help him politically are a boondoggle.

Thus, it was easy for Governor Hogan to kill more than a decade worth of work, more than a quarter-billion dollars already spent and to forfeit $900 million in federal funds that would have gone toward building a pivotal rail-transit line for Baltimore, the Red Line.

No Help

It is reminiscent of President Gerald Ford’s stern rebuke to New York City’s pleas for urgent help to avert imminent bankruptcy in 1975. As the New York Daily News summed it up so aptly in its banner headline the next day: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.

Ford thought a bailout would be a wasteful boondoggle, too. Why save the nation’s greatest city? That’s not government’s role!

Hogan takes the same unyielding attitude toward Baltimore, which in his mind really isn’t part of Maryland.

It’s such a nonentity — where poor people live — that when he sent word on Twitter of his $2 billion in road projects and $167 million for the Purple Line project in the Washington suburbs, Hogan’s aides failed to show Baltimore City on their map. It had vanished into the Chesapeake Bay.

Freudian slip? You bet.

When asked that day what was in his transportation package for Baltimore, the Republican governor said there was nothing.

Saw It Off

Hogan would just as soon see Baltimore and its expensive needs disappear, or as Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater famously said in 1963, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”

It’s no surprise Hogan committed over 90 percent of his transportation package to roads and bridges, becoming the darling of the asphalt and concrete industries. Fund-raising checks will roll in from those interest groups.

Giving the back of the hand to Baltimore is becoming a Hogan habit. Sure, he put on a good face by sending in the National Guard and jovially walking the mean streets of the city briefly (with State Police protection, of course).

But what has the governor done for Baltimore since then to address city residents’ discontent? Precious little.

This is the same governor who deep-sixed needed education aid for city schools in his first budget and then backed out of a compromise to restore some of those funds.

It was just more wasteful, irresponsible spending in Hogan’s eyes.

Body Blow for City

Failing to support the Red Line is a crushing blow for the state’s only large city, a city that in many respects is barely treading water.

The Red Line could have been a giant jobs-generator and income-producer in an urban center with very high unemployment. Instead, he called it a “boondoggle.” (Ironically, Hogan at the same event praised the Purple Line because of it jobs-producing potential.)

it would have been a godsend for the people in West Baltimore who rioted in April over their impoverished conditions, creating access to employment opportunities along the Red Line route, from Woodlawn to Johns Hopkins Bayview.

it would have sparked retail and commercial development and housing at nearly two dozen Red LIne stations.

it would have rejuvenated Baltimore’s sagging downtown business district.

It would have eased some of the traffic gridlock and auto pollution.

Most of all, it would have given Baltimore a connected, viable rail-transit system, providing the missing link not just for city residents but for suburban families living to the east and west.

Sticking to Pledge

The Red Line is dead, killed by a stubborn Larry Hogan. He has fulfilled his campaign promise to conservative, non-urban followers.

There won’t be any major rail transit expansion in Baltimore for two decades or more, thanks to Hogan. That $900 million set aside for the Red Line is lost forever. The highway boys are cheering

The $288 million already spent by the statehas now been turned by Hogan into government waste. His staff, in typical Republican fashion, blamed Democrat Martin O’Malley for that spending on the Red Line, though the onus rightly should have been placed on Republican Bob Ehrlich, who gave the go-ahead.

What Hogan won’t admit is that this money had been well spent — until Hogan turned that sophisticated planning and detailed engineering blueprints to ashes. The wasteful governor is Larry Hogan.

Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz astutely asked Hogan in a statement what he proposes as his Plan B, his back-up plan, for Baltimore.

There is no alternative. Hogan to City: ‘Drop Dead.’

Now Hogan’s aides are scrambling to come up with some pitiful city road work that can be paraded as a Potemkin Village of a transportation substitute for Baltimore.

Political Calculation

The governor’s decision was a cold, calculated political move: fortify rural and suburban support with $2 billion in road and bridge work and hunt for additional votes for the next election in the Washington suburbs, thanks to his tentative support of the Purple Line.

But don’t be surprised if the Purple Line never gets built.

Hogan remains hostile toward rapid transit. He wants to do the job on the cheap, squeezing Prince George’s and Montgomery counties for hefty extra contributions and then getting a private-sector consortium of builders to chip in another $400 million or more.

This most likely means a slimmed-down rail line that won’t work well or no line at all. There’s also the chance the private-sector developer will be forced to charge exorbitant ticket fares for decades to recoup the investment demanded by Hogan.

Birds of a Feather

It’s no accident Hogan picked a transportation secretary known as a highway man, with zero experience in rapid rail transit. He was brought in to kill at least one of the expensive mass-transit projects, and he  may eventually succeed in killing both.

No wonder Hogan and Secretary Pete Rahn talked about the Red Line as “fatally flawed” and a “boondoggle” because — horrors of horrors — it included costly tunnels through the heart of downtown Baltimore.

Exactly how do you build an efficient subway line — or an “underground” as the British call it — without spending a lot of money to take the Red LIne below grade through the heart of a crowded urban center?

Anything built on the surface would compound downtown gridlock and make a joke of Red Line time savings. Sure, tunneling is very expensive but not if you take into consideration that it will be serving Baltimoreans a century from now.

By Hogan’s and Rahn’s thinking, all of the Washington Metro’s downtown subterranean rail network is a gigantic boondoggle. So is New York City’s subway. And London’s, too.

It’s a phony argument that stalwart conservatives like Hogan trot out.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who helped Hogan get elected, used the same sort of illogic in 2009 to blow up a badly needed $12 billion rail tunnel between his state and New York City that would have doubled New Jersey commuter capacity.

Christie, like Hogan, set aside the long-term good he might do so he could boast to voters about chopping off the head of a wasteful project.

Solid Democratic

What’s wasteful in this case is failing to give Baltimore a decent mass-transit system that holds the potential to stimulate economic development, job growth and improve residents’ quality of life.

Hogan has no interest, though, in anything dealing with Baltimore. He feels like a stranger there. It’s overwhelmingly Democratic turf. Why bother?

“With these projects, we’re going to touch the lives of citizens across the state,” Hogan said in his announcement. He needed to add the words, “except in Baltimore.”

Now Rahn & Co. are hastily trying to jerry-rig an alternative transportation scheme for Baltimore.

More buses on narrow, overcrowded city streets?

Paving over the existing light-rail line and converting it into a busway?

Or just shoveling more transportation dollars to the city to re-pave its potholed network of deteriorating asphalt?

Without speedy rail transit nothing will prove effective in the long run. Yet Hogan says won’t pay for it in Baltimore (though he will in suburban Washington).

Burying Baltimore

Larry Hogan has put a deep nail in Baltimore’s coffin. He’s not looking to ameliorate the damage, either.

Maryland’s governor is a jovial, common-man sort of figure, but we’re learning that he holds a rigidly conservative view of the world.

In Hogan’s world, Baltimore needs to fend for itself because this governor — to use lyrics from the musical  “West Side Story” — would rather “let it sink back in the ocean.”

# # #

The post Hogan to Baltimore: ‘Drop Dead’ appeared first on politicalmaryland.com.

Some keks for the night owls:

Share

This space reserved for your ad.

Ravens outside linebacker Terrell Suggs, a terrifying beast on a football field, feasted on fellow NFC players on Celebrity Family Feud Sunday night.

Terrell Suggs helped his AFC peers win a Celebrity Family Feud title on ABC Family Sunday night. Suggs' charisma coupled with his unforced humor could someday, and seamlessly, replace Steve Harvey, if or when the iconic host retires. All I'm saying is that the budding filmmaker has another career option to consider if the movie industry respectfully declines him.

The linebacker clearly treated -- or mistreated depending on who you cheer for -- the buzzer like Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Had only the cameraman zoomed in on fellow AFC North cohort Antonio Brown's face when Suggs slammed the button on the joystick to answer.

I'm sure Brown swung by Big Ben's house later that evening, tears streaming down his eyes. The news was hard to break, but after a cup of Earl Grey tea and a pint of Talenti pistachio gelato ice cream, the wideout mustered up the courage to say that he doesn't want to run routes on Suggs' side this year.

Suggs, half-beast, half-man, is on a mission to topple his personal best, 14 sacks he registered in 2011.

Vernon Davis didn't get a chance to catch his breath after Harvey asked the question, "something a man might name after himself."

Suggs' showcased his acute brainpower while Davis froze -- like he will in Week 6 -- and supplied the nation's top response: son or daughter, which then he was rewarded 61 points.

At the end of the day, the Ravens will face most of the game show's participants later in 2015 and Suggs got the job done by instilling tremendous amounts of fear in them.

By Barry Rascovar

June 15, 2015 — Decision time is nearing on the future of Baltimore’s planned Red Line rail route. Will Gov. Larry Hogan, Jr. be celebrated as a hero or lambasted as a goat?

That question has hovered over the Republican governor ever since he won election last November.

Will he appease his conservative followers and live up to his campaign pledge to kill both the Red Line and the Purple Line in suburban Washington?

Such a move would be a stunning waste of half a billion dollars in state taxpayer dollars already spent. But think of the message it would send to the tea party crowd and Republican ideologues who coalesced around Hogan as a budget-cutter.

Yet it would end any chance of détente between Republican Hogan and the heavily Democratic General Assembly. Such a crushing blow to the three largest Democratic jurisdictions would guarantee all-out warfare — and gridlock — over the next three years in the State House.

Even worse, Hogan would look like a heartless ogre turning his back on impoverished Baltimore right after the dreadful damage of April’s civil unrest.

Rookie Mistake in Japan

The governor’s recent, all-out embrace in Japan of magnetic levitation high-speed trains between Baltimore and Washington was the sort of mistake a rookie politician makes.

Does this mean Hogan supports an unproven technology with a minimum price tag of $10 billion (under the fiction the state wouldn’t pay anything) but not the far more important — and cheaper — Red and Purple Lines?

Adding an inside-the-beltway, east to west light-rail route between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties makes enormous sense.

Commuting would prove far easier for tens of thousands of people living in suburban communities south of the Capital Beltway. It also would serve poor minority neighborhoods in those two counties. These are the Marylanders who need rapid transit the most.

However, the Washington region already has an extensive Metro system heavily financed by the federal government. If the Purple Line fades to black under Hogan, it’s not a crushing blow.

It would be a stupid move politically and from an economic development standpoint — and a waste of hundreds of millions already spent. But it would hardly be a calamity.

On the other hand, deep-sixing the Red Line would be another nail in Baltimore’s’ coffin.

The region lacks a legitimate rapid-rail system. It’s got a Toonerville Trolley of a light-rail route running north-south, from Hunt Valley to the outskirts of Glen Burnie. And it’s got a heavy-rail subway between Johns Hopkins Hospital and Owings Mills in northwest Baltimore County.

Sadly, the two lines don’t connect. There is no fixed rail route through East or Northeast Baltimore, no rapid rail available to residents of West Baltimore where the disturbances took place.

A True Rail Network

The Red Line would create an imperfect but viable rail system.

East and West Baltimore residents could quickly and easily commute across town as well as north-south. Thousands of workers employed at Social Security headquarters and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Woodlawn would have fast, convenient train service to their campuses.

The woeful Security Square Mall in western Baltimore County would be given new life for residential, commercial and retail purposes.

The Red Line also would serve nearly every recreational and cultural event in downtown Baltimore.

For West Baltimore residents desperate for jobs, the Red Lines would be a crucial help line. Employment centers in diverse parts of the region suddenly would be within reach by rail connections.

The 19 Red Line stations could become catalysts for small-scale economic growth and job-creation, too. That’s what has happened in other cities as new rail-transit lines open.

Let’s not forget, as well, the enormous economic boost that the Red Line and Purple Line would give Maryland’s still-lagging economy.

The Red Line alone means 10,000 direct construction and related jobs — all of them paying solid wages. These workers would earn $540 million, at a minimum, as the line is built. The economic impact is far larger if indirect jobs are counted.

For once, Baltimore would have a connected mass transit system, a key lacking ingredient in its attempt to attract the car-less, millennial generation to Charm City.

Forfeiting a Billion Dollars

Here’s another reason why Hogan’s rejection of the Red Line or Purple Line would be penny wise and pound foolish: There’s nearly a billion dollars of federal funds already budgeted for the two projects.

If Hogan tosses the planned routes in the waste can, all that federal money disappears. Maryland then goes to the back of a long line of cities seeking funds for mass transit projects of their own. New transit lines in Maryland would be set back a decade or more.

Yes, Hogan campaigned as a foe of the Red and Purple lines. If he’s smart, though, he will wiggle out of that bind by finding ways to trim construction costs and requiring a larger local match.

We tend to forget that while rapid rail is expensive to build initially — $3 billion for the Red and Purple lines — those tracks will serve the Central Maryland community, where most of the state’s citizens live, not for decades but for centuries.

The London Underground, with 270 stations, is over 150 years old and more popular than ever.

Governors must make hard, difficult choices. Giving the go-ahead on the two rapid rail lines might prove temporarily uncomfortable for Hogan but it is clearly the right thing to do — for future generations of Marylanders and for his own place in the history books.

Barry Rascovar’s blog is www.politicalmaryland.com. He can be reached at brascovar@hotmail.com.

The post Hogan: Hero or Goat? appeared first on politicalmaryland.com.

Last week CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling went to prison. If he were white, he probably wouldn’t be there.

Sterling was one of the CIA’s few African-American case officers, and he became the first to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency. That happened shortly before the CIA fired him in late 2001. The official in Langley who did the firing face-to-face was John Brennan, now the CIA’s director and a close adviser to President Obama.

Five months ago, in court, prosecutors kept claiming that Sterling’s pursuit of the racial-bias lawsuit showed a key “motive” for providing classified information to journalist James Risen. The government’s case at the highly problematic trial was built entirely on circumstantial evidence. Lacking anything more, the prosecution hammered on ostensible motives, telling the jury that Sterling’s “anger,” “bitterness” and “selfishness” had caused him to reveal CIA secrets.

But the history of Sterling’s conflicts with the CIA has involved a pattern of top-down retaliation. Sterling became a problem for high-ranking officials, who surely did not like the bad publicity that his unprecedented lawsuit generated. And Sterling caused further hostility in high places when, in the spring of 2003, he went through channels to tell Senate Intelligence Committee staffers of his concerns about the CIA’s reckless Operation Merlin, which had given Iran some flawed design information for a nuclear weapons component.

Among the U.S. government’s advantages at the trial last winter was the fact that the jury did not include a single African-American. And it was drawn from a jury pool imbued with the CIA-friendly company town atmosphere of Northern Virginia.

Sterling’s long struggle against institutionalized racism is far from over. It continues as he pursues a legal appeal of his three-and-a-half year sentence. He’s in a prison near Denver, nearly 900 miles from his home in the St. Louis area, making it very difficult for his wife Holly to visit.

Last week, as Sterling headed to Colorado, journalist Kevin Gosztola wrote an illuminating piece that indicated the federal Bureau of Prisons has engaged in retaliation by placing Sterling in a prison so far from home. Gosztola concluded: “There really is no accountability for BOP officials who inappropriately designate inmates for prisons far away from their families.”

With the government eager to isolate Jeffrey Sterling, it’s important for him to hear from people who wish him well. Before going to prison, Sterling could see many warmly supportive comments online, posted by contributors to the Sterling Family Fund and signers of the petition that urged the Justice Department to drop all charges against him. Now he can get postal mail at: Jeffrey Sterling, 38338-044, FCI Englewood, Federal Correctional Institution, 9595 West Quincy Ave., Littleton, CO 80123.

(Sterling can receive only letters and cards. “All incoming correspondence is reviewed,” the Sterling Family Fund notes. “It is important that all content is of an uplifting nature as any disparaging comments about the government, the trial or any peoples involved will have negative consequences for Jeffrey.”)

While it’s vital that Sterling hear from well-wishers, it’s also crucial that the public hear from him. “The Invisible Man: CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling,” released the day after he was sentenced in mid-May, made it possible for the public to hear his voice. The short documentary (which I produced for ExposeFacts) was directed by Oscar nominee Judith Ehrlich.

More recently, journalist Peter Maass did a fine job with an extensive article, “How Jeffrey Sterling Took on the CIA — and Lost Everything.”

It should be unacceptable that racism helped the government to put Jeffrey Sterling in prison.

Image is a screen shot from “The Invisible Man” documentary.

By Barry Rascovar

June 17, 2015 — Sometimes you just want to scream, “What an outrage!”

That certainly is the case with the “Baltimore Book Burning” revealed in The Baltimore Sun — hundreds of books mindlessly trashed by city school officials who seemed to have forgotten their raison d’etre: to create a love of learning among children and to better the community.

Instead of taking the textbooks and library books from the now-closed Heritage High School (shuttered as a cost-saving move) and wisely offering them to students, their parents or others in the community who might benefit from the knowledge and pleasure books can impart, bureaucratic knuckleheads opted to “recycle” them — a polite, modern-day way of conducting an old-fashioned book-burning.

Any book published before 2000 was deemed outdated and thus useless to other schools or to the citizens of Baltimore who might benefit from reading a good yarn, or a book that helps them learn.

That’s right, books the same age as the one I wrote, entitled, “The Great Game of Maryland Politics,” were deemed antiquated. All those words about the politicians and government actions during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were judged to be useless by so-called “educators.”

So were books by Mark Twain, John Milton, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare and Elie Wiesel.

Anti-education Educators?

There were plenty of newer books in the junk pile, too, because no one from school headquarters bothered to supervise this mass destruction of knowledge printed on paper.

It’s hard to remain hopeful about Baltimore’s future when the school system seems dominated by anti-education paper-pushers and numbers-crunchers.

No wonder many teachers, parents and elected officials were anguished by this flagrant display of uncaring hostility toward the written word.

How can they have faith in the city’s education leaders after witnessing this sickening waste and intentional destruction of essential learning tools?

Back to the Basics

Baltimore is a struggling, aging urban city with serious poverty, employment, housing and crime issues that urgently need addressing. It also has a school system filled with too many unthinking placeholders more concerned about their paychecks than the basics of education.

Humanity suffers when there are intentional book-burnings like this one. Ignorance flourishes when bureaucrats fail to open their eyes to simple, creative solutions that would benefit society.

What happened at Heritage High School is unacceptable. Baltimore City’s political leaders need to act.

Either the school system becomes a partner in educating and uplifting the city’s communities or it becomes an enemy of the people.

###

The post Hopeless in Baltimore? appeared first on politicalmaryland.com.

Let me tell you a little story.  There is a generic drug manufacturer outside Pittsburgh, PA called Mylan.  This company is now facing a hostile takeover bid from an Israeli company Teva.  It seems that Teva has started purchasing Mylan stock.  They have already purchased 5% of Mylan’s outstanding stock.

Mylan is now asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the matter.  You see, there is a provision that says when large stock purchases of U.S. companies are made, those purchases must be reviewed by anti-trust authorities.  Sounds reasonable, we don’t want our companies to fall to hostile takeovers by foreigners.

But, there is a problem with the request from Mylan.  You may not recognize the name of the company, but earlier this year, Mylan went ahead with the purchase of a small drug company in the Netherlands.  Once that purchase was completed, Mylan announced that it was changing its corporate citizenship to the Netherlands.

This move from Mylan was so it could reduce its taxes on drugs sold overseas.  In other words, it was a move directed by greed by corporate executives by to avoid paying their fair share of taxes to the country that they are part of.  This procedure is called “inversion.”

Many members of Congress lashed out at the company for their inversion move.  Almost all of the members of Congress who lashed out were Democrats.  Republicans didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the process.  However, that begs the question.  Should a company who claims the U.S. as its corporate headquarters and still declares that the company is from the Netherlands be protected under the very anti-trust laws they themselves have looked to avoid?

In legal terms, Mylan probably has a defensible position.  Since it claims that its principal office remains in Pennsylvania, which makes it a “U.S. issuer” of stock for federal anti-trust purposes.  The optics of this is quite another matter.  The company abandoned its U.S. Citizenship in order to pay less in federal taxes, yet they now want that same federal government to protect them.

I think Rep. Chris Van Hollen (R-MD) summed it up very nicely.  He said:

“Mylan is trying to have its cake and eat it too.  It is an intolerable abuse of a loophole when U.S. corporations pretend they are based overseas in order to get out of paying their fair share and duck their responsibilities to the United States. It’s just plain hypocrisy when one of those same inverted companies claims that it is actually a U.S. company because it needs the special protections U.S. law gives to American companies.”

The FTC should remind Mylan that when it chose to invert to avoid paying taxes, it gave up the privileges given to companies which remain committed to the United States. And Congress needs to act now to close the inversion loophole and fix our broken tax code to reward companies that locate and invest in America.”

At this writing, I have not found a single comment from any Republican on the matter.  We all know how the Republicans, especially conservatives, hate government interference.  In 2008 and 2009 they wanted to let the auto industry in America collapse.  Are they willing to sit by and let Teva carry out its hostile takeover of Mylan?

Would they consider this a case of protecting a U.S. company or one of protecting a Netherlands company?  Where is Mitt Romney saying let Mylan fail?  Why isn’t Fox Business screaming about using tax payers money to defend a foreign company?  As usual, when an instance of something created by these loopholes in our tax code that Republicans all seem to favor arise and makes a mess of things, they remain very quiet.

I am somewhat torn in this matter.  On one hand, I don’t want anything to happen to the jobs that a hostile takeover could reap.  On the other hand, why should our government use our laws to defend a company that no longer wants to be an American Company for lower taxes?

Van Hollen is right.  This company abandoned us.  We have seen other companies abandon us as well.  There will be more companies following suit.  Unless the tax codes are changed and these “inversion” loopholes are closed for good.  How many companies will join Mylan in denouncing their company citizenship if the FTC helps Mylan in the fight?

What would stop other companies from denouncing their company citizenship in favor of lower taxes, knowing the government will still use U.S. laws to defend them?  Part of paying your taxes is getting protection in these kinds of cases.  If you abandon your citizenship so you don’t have to pay your taxes, why should we defend you?

That is the dilemma that our outdated tax code has given us.  We are now faced with the dilemma of using tax payer dollars to basically protect a foreign company, or not.  It will be interesting to see how the FTC responds.  It will be even more interesting to see conservative responses to their decision.

Everything you love you do so because of imposed social value and expectation. U think if Jeff Mangum was some rando puttering away at open mic night in your local campus coffee shop “oh comely” would make you cry? Pfffft. Friends. Come on now.

Michael Berry is a small-time radio talk show host in the Houston market.  His former jobs included being on Houston City Council, being married to the Texas Secretary of State, being a full time self-described Southern Baptist, being an admitted hit-and-run driver, and secretly hanging out in Houston gay bars on drag queen night.

As you can see, he’s just your average run of the mill regular rightwing talk show host. He also advocated bombing a mosque, which I think is kinda required to keep your RightWing Nut license.

Michael was plenty upset about the goings-on in McKinney, Texas.  He got to running his mouth and just could not bring himself to stop until he got dangerously close to using the N word.

“Let me ask you, how many among you would put on a badge and a police uniform today?” Berry said. “How many of you would put on a badge, police uniform and be the first to respond — by yourself — to a crowd of teenagers, amped up — watch ‘em! Man, they’re screaming! ‘Get outta here! Who are you?! You don’t know what you! You go! You get! Who are you?! You can’t do that! No man, we gon’ get you! You bet — !’ I mean you’re talking about like jungle animals. I mean this is wild, crazy, out of control.”

And then, to make white people in Texas look even more like idiots, he goes on a few minutes later ….

Berry said white people had probably been the ones to call the police at the pool party.

“Yes, they’re probably white people, scared to death, peeking through the blinds, ‘Oh my God! There’s a bunch of black people and they’re out on the streets and they’re fightin’ and carryin’ on and they’re playing that music from Jay-Z,” Berry said. “They’re scared to death! That’s who his bosses are. He’s there to keep the peace in his community.”

God in heaven above, not Jay-Z!  And, oh yeah, nothing scares white people like black people at a pool party.

Thank you for cracker-splainin’ that to us, Michael.

If you want to hear Berry do his imitation of a black minister or black parents, listen here.

.

 

 

(h/t @Shoq for the head's up on this article)

I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

...

In 2009, the subject of my student's complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn't hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student's complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.

In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student's emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

I wrote about this fear on my blog, and while the response was mostly positive, some liberals called me paranoid, or expressed doubt about why any teacher would nix the particular texts I listed. I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do they are at least two decades removed from the job search.

...

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice.

...
The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there's a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don't even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody.
...

...

Thank's to the Conservative Long War on Labor, today almost every worker in almost every job in almost every state is an "at-will" employee who may be canned by the boss for almost any reason, or no reason at all:

[A]n employer may terminate its employees at will, for any or no reason ... the employer may act peremptorily, arbitrarily, or inconsistently, without providing specific protections such as prior warning, fair procedures, objective evaluation, or preferential reassignment ... The mere existence of an employment relationship affords no expectation, protectable by law, that employment will continue, or will end only on certain conditions, unless the parties have actually adopted such terms.[6]

Yes, there are exceptions such as race, religion, sex, handicap status and so forth, but the burden of affirmatively proving that you were fired because you're a member of one of those protected categories falls to the fired employee, and short of discovering a cache of documents in which your boss explicitly outlines his plans to terminate you because you're a woman or gay or over 40, you're usually shit outta luck. 

Welcome to Capitalism 101!

I have seen people sacked for being too unattractive for the new boss's tastes.  For having too must melanin.  For being dangerously competent.  For being too honest.  Too old. Because the boss's drinking buddy or mistress doesn't like you.  For having the wrong last name.  For having the bad luck of not knowing an alderman who owes you a favor. Because the boss needed to make a soft place for one of his pals to land when he got laid off from some other division.

Because in a free and unregulated labor market, firing you because, well, fuck you, that's why, is the boss's very own modern-day droit du seigneur.

...

When colleges made the checkbooks of the parents of temperamental children their primary focus, they went out of the eternal verity business.

Which is a real shame.

A Yemeni civil engineer has filed a lawsuit in a United States federal court requesting that a judge declare that a drone strike was unlawful and resulted in the wrongful deaths of two members of his family.

On August 29, 2012, Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s brother-in-law, Salem, and his nephew, Waleed, were killed. The drone strike was reportedly a “signature strike,” which means based on patterns of life an attack team decided to carry out the strike that killed his family.

Salem, according to the complaint filed by Reprieve, was “an imam known locally for his sermons against terrorist violence.” Days before Salem’s death, “he had preached in Khashamir against al Qaeda and its methods.”

“Faisal’s nephew Waleed was the village’s local traffic policeman, who accompanied Salem as protection to an evening meeting with three youths who had driven into the village earlier in the day and had asked to meet with Salem. These three young men were the apparent targets of the drone strike,” the complaint claims.

“While the drone operators fixed on the visitors as their principal targets, Salem and Waleed were anonymously—but deliberately—attacked simply for having spoken to them.”

The complaint argues that Khashamir was not nearby “any battlefield” and, therefore, there was no “urgent military purpose or other emergency” to justify exterminating Salem and Waleed.

“The strike plainly violated the Torture Victim Prevention Act’s ban on extrajudicial killings,” the complaint further suggests. “Even if the strikes were taken as part of the United States’ war on al Qaeda, the strike violated the principles of distinction and proportionality. These are established norms of the laws of war, which are elements of customary international law that the United States explicitly acknowledges bind this country and apply to its drone warfare operations.”

An unnamed Yemeni official contacted family to offer condolences, which could be viewed as a tacit admission that wrongful deaths occurred.

Faisal bin ali Jaber pursued avenues of justice in Yemen but was met with “official silence.” He traveled to the US in late 2013 to meet with members of Congress and representatives of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“Do they approve of such a policy? Do they approve of the killing of innocent civilians in a very far country?” Jaber wanted to find out. Or, are they people who believe Yemen means them no harm? “What is their reaction? Are they a peaceful society which really doesn’t mean any harm to other people?”

While officials were willing to offer “personal condolences” for his loss of family, “they could not or would not explain the reason for the attack or acknowledge officially that a US drone killed” his relatives.

Obama acknowledged weeks ago that a US drone had killed two hostages, an Italian and an American, who were being held hostage by al Qaeda. He stated that victims’ “families deserve to know the truth” and maintained that his apology demonstrated how the US is willing to “confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”

In the filed complaint, Reprieve asks, “The President has now admitted to killing innocent Americans and Italians with drones; why are the bereaved families of innocent Yemenis less entitled to the truth?”

Salem, who was 43 years-old, had a wife and seven children—Mohammed, Ahmed, Abdullah, Muznah, Shaimaa, Omaimah and Khadijah. Waleed was 26-years-old and had a wife and a child.

From the complaint:

…The week before the strike, Khashamir was unusually full of activity with Eid Ramadan and preparations for the August 28th hometown wedding of Faisal’s eldest son, Wahb. Yemeni wedding celebrations are elaborate and can extend for a week or more. The extended family of bin Ali Jabers converged on the village. Faisal had planned a full week of celebrations and was in Khashamir before the wedding arranging elaborate entertainment and meals.

Salem gave a guest sermon at a local in the port town of Mukalla. He spoke about “killing outside of law.” He described studying the “ideology” of al Qaeda “opponents and specifically challenged al Qaeda to justify its attacks on civilians.”

According to Faisal, the sermon went something like, “al Qaeda say that Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi [Yemen’s president] is kafir [a disbeliever] because he supports foreigners, and that people who support AbdoRabo [including Yemenis] are kuffaar [disbelievers] and can be attacked. This is not permissible in Islam. No religion, no constitution can ever accept this. I challenge al Qaeda to show me one piece of evidence in Islam that says such killing is justified.”

Family feared the outspoken preacher might face attacks and endanger family if he kept speaking in this manner. But, according to Faisal, when asked to tone his rhetoric down, he told Faisal, “I am an imam. If I, a leader in my community, do not take it on myself to speak against extremism, who will?”

On August 29, three men, who were unknown to the local villagers and were driving a 1980s model Suzuki Vitara 4X4, entered the village and went to the house of Salem’s father, Ahmed. They requested to speak to him but Ahmed was afraid and told them Salem was “visiting neighboring villages.”

The same men returned around 5 pm that same day. Ahmed informed the men that Salem was not here but they could wait “in his house or return in the evening when they would find Salem at the mosque after evening prayers.” So, the men returned at 8:30 pm and had a “local child” inform Salem that they were there to meet with him.

Waleed offered to accompany Salem. They went to meet the men. Two of the men sat with Salem underneath a palm tree. The third man stood nearby and watched the meeting.

As described in the complaint, it was around 9 pm. The first missile hit the meeting area and then a second, third and a fourth missile.

Eyewitnesses say the “first two strikes directly hit Salem, Waleed and two of the three strangers. The third missile seemed to have been aimed at where the third visitor was located, somewhat apart from the others. It reportedly hit him as he lay dazed or wounded after the first two strikes. The fourth strike hit the car.”

Each of the men were blown to pieces. In order to find their body parts, people who knew them had to search for “distinctive hair” on their heads.

The Intercept reported in April that US intelligence had been notified by Yemeni security personnel that Salem and Waleed were not the targets.

“To this day,” the complaint explains, “nobody in the village knows the identities and affiliations of the three young strangers. Nor does anyone know what purpose they had in wanting to meet with Salem. All that is known from the accounts of people who saw them before the strike and from their scattered remains found in the blast area, is that they were young, either still in or just out of their teens, and that they wanted to discuss Salem’s anti-terrorism sermon with him.”

Reprieve contends that none of the unknown men killed were “high-level, high value targets.” If they were “acceptable targets,” they could have easily been arrested because they spent a “significant period” loitering before the meeting. And the human rights organization adds, “There is no moral or legal rationale that justifies US drone operators waiting to strike until after Salem and Waleed joined the three visitors.”

The deaths of Salem and Waleed were “both avoidable” and “part of a broader picture of willful official blindness to unnecessary innocent civilian death that pervades the US drone program.”

Image of Faisal bin Ali Jaber

It’s 1:30 am and Wisconsin Republican State Representative Mary Czaja has a shot of genius:  let anybody, including high school dropouts, teach school.

Good Lord, how drunk was she?  She’s totally eliminating teacher licensing standards.

“The districts are going to be the ones that hire these people, and I firmly believe that they’re not going to throw somebody in there that isn’t doing a good job,” Czaja said. “This is just flexibilities. They don’t have to use it.”

Czaja couldn’t name any districts that had asked for the broader flexibilities.

So, a high school dropout might work cheaper than a fully licensed teacher, ya think?

Governor Scott Walker does. Walker proposed easing teacher certification provisions in his original budget request.

Mississippi is excited about the possibly of losing last place in eduction.

Thanks to Mark for the heads up.

Reminder:  Top Ten Results of Electing a Libertarian President

1.  Your new favorite charitable cause? Meat inspection.

2.  Cheerfully decorated tip jars at stop signs to pay for roads.

3.  The National Weather Service to be replaced by your Uncle Buster’s rain gauge.

4.  The Texas lottery will now handle sewage disposal. You win the lottery, we take your sewage.

5.  New research reveals that clean water flowing into your house is unnecessary and likely to be the cause of obesity, bad breath, and the disco craze.

6.  Mugging victims must now dial Call-a-Bubba. You call Bubba, and he comes over and shoots something.

7.  Juanita’s Fried Pies will proudly provide the ingredients for some heartwarming s’mores if your house catches on fire.

8.  Elections will now be run by Guy Fieri of the Cooking Channel.

9.  In case of another attack on U.S. soil, you will be given a complimentary Trailways bus ticket to a foreign country of your choice.

10.  U.S. motto “E Pluribus Unum” will be replaced with “Get the Hell Off My Lawn!”

There are two laws in Missouri that really go against each other.  The first is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The second is Missouri’s 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law about abortion.  This problem is coming to a head.

A woman who belongs to the Satanic Temple wants an abortion.  She went to Planned Parenthood and filed an exemption form stating that the 72 hour waiting period places an undue burden on her religious beliefs.  Planned Parenthood rejected the exemption form based on Missouri’s 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law.  The woman, called Mary Doe in court documents, and the Satanists have filed suit over the denial.

In Missouri, and several other states, the waiting period has no medical or scientific basis.  It is merely a forced waiting period so the woman can digest the “informed consent” material they are forced to endure.  This material has no medical or scientific background or need either.  Most of the material is intended to make a woman feel guilty about her choice, thus forcing her to change her mind.

The Satanic Temple says that is a violation of the RFRA.  Spokesman Lucien Greaves says that “in our tenets, we hold that one should make decisions based on the best scientific evidence available and that a woman’s body – anyone’s body – are subject to ones own will.”  He claims that the state mandated material is not scientifically based, is nothing more than state-propaganda designed to sway an individual’s decision, and therefore is against their religion.

That puts the 72 hour waiting period and “informed consent” law in conflict with the RFRA.  The really weird part of this story is that the Hobby Lobby case at the Supreme Court opened the door for this conflict to happen.  In the Hobby Lobby case, Hobby Lobby argued that certain contraceptives were abortifacients.  They are not abortifacients, yet Hobby Lobby argued that they believe they were and therefore should not be forced to provide them in their health coverage.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby.  In essence, the court ruled that even if the science does not support your claim, as long as you hold “deeply religious beliefs” about your argument, you are right.  Which brings us to the “informed consent” law in Missouri.

The Satanic Temple is saying that they believe that the material being forced upon women is not scientifically based and inaccurate.  Under the Hobby Lobby ruling, they only need argue they have a “deeply held religious belief” that the material is bogus and therefore, they are correct.

There have been other challenges to the waiting period laws that have failed.  However, this is the first one using the RFRA as a reason the waiting period laws are invalid.  I know that not many people are going to support the Satanic Temple.  However, it is a religion, whether or not you agree with them, and therefore should be protected under the RFRA as well.

The other sad part of the story is that the Satanic Temple cannot get a pro-bono lawyer to take up their case.  So, they are forced to look for donations to continue this case.  I am extremely surprised that the ACLU doesn’t take up the case.  So, I ask the ACLU to please explain why you aren’t taking up this case.

The ruling in this case has a lot of ramifications.  None of them, in my opinion, are positive for the Conservative Christian right who are behind these anti-abortion laws.  If the courts rule in favor of the Satanic Temple, what does that mean for everyone else?  Would these waiting period laws be stricken?  Probably not.  More likely, the state legislature would change the waiting period laws to remove any religious exemptions from them.

Taking that step would indicate that they really don’t believe in the RFRA they so dramatically scream about when it suits their desires.  It would also prove that they are only interested in forcing their beliefs on everyone else, religious freedom be damned.

If the court rules against the Satanic Temple, there would be a legitimate argument that the court is “defining what is religion and what isn’t.”  That would also be bad for everyone.  If the court rules that the Satanic Temple isn’t a real religion, which religion will be next?

Yes, this case is one that is worth watching. The arguments put forth by the state to defend their waiting period law will allow the world to see just how insincere they are about religious freedom.  It will open up the can of worms that prove their arguments about religious liberty is one-sided and hypocritical.

To be frank, I hope this turns out to be a real dilemma for the Christian right.  It will only accelerate the movement away from religion recent polls are indicating is happening.  Then, maybe, we can have legitimate discussions about our issues and not have religious bellicose drowning out potential solutions.

credit: Sarah

Mitch McConnell had an epic fail at 1 am. It was pretty much like I thought it would go. Our government is paralyzed, they failed to do anything about Section 215 of  The Patriot Act. This will not stop McConnell from trying again next week on May 31st at 1 a.m. because his dirty work has to be done while everyone is sleeping. This isn't just about collecting everyone's phone records illegally, this is about money. It's always about money. The Blackstone Group, Sen. Mitch McConnell: Campaign Finance/Money - Summary - Senator 2014 | OpenSecrets  Booz Allen, (former employer of Edward Snowden) there are very high stakes in this game of spying, that is the main reason that McConnell doesn't want this cash cow to die. Millions, if not billions of reasons. It's a cash cow when over 70% of the NSA's budget goes to contractors. Who then donate to the various committees
The names no one even utters when it comes to this so-called "Patriot Act" are Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The notion that this oppressive violation of Americans rights that was instigated by these liars and war criminals even needs to be debated or otherwise extended is ludicrous. It needs to stop and it looks like it will despite Mitch McConnell's insistence that there is a "consensus" in favor of the extension. Our government thinks it's ok to break the law and hoover up our phone records, but when it's their turn to hand over information, suddenly there's just crickets, In the Same Week, the U.S. and U.K. Hide Their War Crimes by Invoking "National Security" - The Intercept
We all can be spied on in the name of the War On Terror, no place to hide for us, but the government isn't about to share their private information with it's people. You can't have it both ways.
Kudo's to Rand Paul for a 101/2 hr. theatrical filibuster. Rand Paul calls it a night after 10 1/2 hours - Seung Min Kim and Alex Byers - POLITICO
I still wouldn't vote for him. I won't vote for anyone anymore.
The tracking and control of the American people has to stop, but my fear is now that the apparatus is already there it will just go deeper and darker.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
This NSA program has to end and hopefully it will die on May 31st, when like so much legislation, it just languishes with no action taken. A victim of my own country's inertia, maybe on June 1st I'll be thankful those clowns in Washington can't get anything done.
Have you ever gone to the NSA's website? it's creepy as all hell. Check out that Barbie girl on the lower right advertising for career opportunities, that's not the worst of it, check out the CryptoKids® America's Future Codemakers & Codebreakers Um ok, look at where the NSA is actually telling kids to protect themselves online, when we all actually need protection from them! WTF? June 1st can't get here fast enough.

Elizabeth Cotten had an unlikely musical career. As a left-handed young girl she taught herself to play her brother’s banjo. Then she bought a guitar from Sears Roebuck at 11 and proceeded to play it Jimi Hendrix-style, upside-down. After getting married at 17 she basically gave up playing guitar for 25 years, except for occasional church performances. Quite at random, she was hired as a maid by part of the Seeger family—working for Pete Seeger’s dad and the children of his second wife. She picked up the guitar again, and blew everybody’s mind. Mike Seeger (Pete’s half-brother) started recording her and the sessions were made into an album from Folkways Records—Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar. Her signature tune “Freight Train” became hugely popular among the folk musicians of the revival of the late 50s/early 60s, being covered by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan among many others.

She started to tour and perform with big names, released another influential record in 1967, Shake Sugaree, and kept touring and playing till the end of her life (January 5, 1895 – June 29, 1987). Her unusual picking style was greatly admired, because it’s totally awesome! People have worked out alternate ways to play the songs that don’t involve playing the guitar upside down and backwards. (John spent two weeks learning “Freight Train” when we were on Martha’s Vineyard last year, causing our children to, in extremis, institute a strict “no Freight Train” policy. Happily, though, now it reminds us of my aunt’s house and all being together with my siblings and cousins, and beach plums, and the creek with its perfect flat wet stones, and the cold Atlantic, so grey.) Her music is distinctive because of the bass lines—the strings sounding the lowest notes were at the bottom of the guitar and so she picks out distinctive tunes on them. The highest string being on top, she sometimes treats the guitar like a banjo—since that’s where the high-pitched drone string is. I just learned reading the wikipedia article that she wrote “Freight Train” at 11!

Her voice is wonderful, but many of her best songs are instrumental only:

I’m having trouble choosing here, “In The Sweet By and By” is beautiful…some songs are painfully short, like “Mama, There’s Nobody Here But The Baby” or “Ain’t Got No Honey Baby Now.” [Which I can’t find a working video of :/ ] 56 seconds? NO. Although Harry Taussig plays a killer version on steel guitar. I’ll close with the topical “Take Me Back to Baltimore.”

My dad is an incredible guitarist, and plays steel 12-string bottle-neck slide, though he removes the second string from the highest two strings, making it 10-string. He also picks in this style—and we are big fans of Ry Cooder who is a master at it. When I was a kid we always had music playing. My godfather played the fiddle and we had plenty of other random musicians at parties, which, in South Carolina through to the late 70s were always two- or three-day affairs. We had a whole crew of Hell’s Angels camped out in the back yard one time. My brother and I would sing, folk songs like “Froggy Went a-Courting.” That’s happiness for me, standing on the front porch catching lizards on the screen, listening to live music and the leathery sounds of the palmetto pushed by the wind, live oaks tossing their heads and their festoons of Spanish moss, my feet slowly blackening with the super-fine dust of mildew that settles inevitably on the grey floor of any screen porch, the sky and the hydrangeas planted around the base of the house and the screen porch ceiling all alike powder-blue, the smell of salt water and marsh and endless joints burning mingled into a perfect sweetness. High tide. Got to be high tide at 2 p.m. with a summer thunderstorm blowing up far across the river. Not low tide and with all hanging breathless and hot, and the mud flats on the sandbar across the river stinking in the sun. Eating cold boiled peanuts and watermelon and drinking sweet tea. Perfect. Except now I’m homesick!

I faked a seizure so I could get my breakfast early.

That’s right. Shaking, collapsing, the whole works for hours until a bowl of food arrived and then MAGICALLY I was cured. Proceeded to run around the yard and chase butterflies.

Ahead of today's rate rigging settlement, @GeigerWire got @bsurveillance up to speed: http://t.co/ZIovgDJ1Iq #Libor pic.twitter.com/IPw8jXFtVz

— David Meyers (@davidfmeyers) May 20, 2015

Yesterday the Department of Justice announced guilty pleas from Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland for manipulating international currency markets. The banks also agreed to pay fines totaling $5.8 billion.

In order to rig the markets in their favor the banks formed a group known as “The Cartel” where traders from Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS, RBS, and Barclays conspired to rig LIBOR and currency exchange rates. The Cartel’s reach was extensive and the group was able to shift global currency exchange and interest rates by acting in collusion through their respective financial institutions.

To join the group, which operated an exclusive chatroom to conspire on trades, a trader would go through a gang initiation process of sorts complete with a probationary period and a threat.

The trader, who was the main Euro trader for Barclays in 2011, made various arguments about how he “would add value” to the chatroom, according to the NYDFS. Ultimately, they let him join for a one-month trial, but allegedly with a pretty ominous warning:

“[M]ess this up and sleep with one eye open at night.” Fortunately for that trader (but probably not so fortunately, in the end), he was allowed to stay in the group until it was dissolved in 2012.

Banksters truly play the part sometimes. The sleep with one eye open threat is just one of many quotes from traders rigging the market that display a criminal mindset.

The banks in question claim to have terminated all the traders involved in the Cartel though they offered little in the way of evidence to prove it. Of course, we could all just trust them to do the right thing. What could go wrong?