…had a friend who maintained that conservatives have no sense of humor (present company excluded, of course). I insisted he was wrong. And here’s the proof.
And then, of course, you knew that this had to come:
And then there’s this:
Q: Why did @MittRomney put his dog on top of the car? A: So @BarackObama wouldn’t eat it.
It’s come to this: dueling unshaggy dog stories.
So, is it worse to put a dog in a crate on the top of a car, or to have eaten dog as a child?
I love dogs, but my answer would be: neither. Romney’s not a dog abuser, and Obama’s not a dog killer.
But it’s not the first time dogs have played a part in politics. A dog played a rather special role in Richard Nixon’s political life:
Not to mention FDR’s:
Note how shameless Nixon is (and awkward) in trying to wring pathos out of his dog story, and FDR’s genuinely funny comic delivery.
[NOTE: By the way, have I ever mentioned how much I love YouTube? To be able to conjure up these two clips so easily is profoundly satisfying.]
In election years, whenever I hear a host of possible candidates for VP saying they have no interest in the slot, I think of this completely and totally and irredeemably non-PC song. So, sue me:
According to researchers, the answer is: only for some people, perhaps even the minority.
I don’t know. To me, these experiments have a flawed design:
Exercise may change your desire to eat, two recent studies show, by altering how certain parts of your brain respond to the sight of food…To find out, the researchers had the volunteers either vigorously ride computerized stationary bicycles or sit quietly for an hour before settling onto the M.R.I. tables. Each volunteer then swapped activities for their second session.
Immediately afterward, they watched a series of photos flash onto computer screens. Some depicted low-fat fruits and vegetables or nourishing grains, while others showcased glistening cheeseburgers, ice cream sundaes and cookies. A few photos that weren’t of food were interspersed into the array.
In the volunteers who’d been sitting for an hour, the food-reward system lit up, especially when they sighted high-fat, sugary items.
But if they had worked out for an hour first, those same people displayed much less interest in food, according to their brain scans. Their insula and other portions of the food-reward system remained relatively quiet, even in the face of sundaes.
“Responsiveness to food cues was significantly reduced after exercise,” says Todd A.
What’s the flaw that I think I see? They looked at the photos immediately afterward. It’s been my experience that exercise may reduce appetite very temporarily, but that hunger kicks in an hour or two later with a vengeance, after a person has showered and rested.
Long, long ago I was a member of a small dance company for a short while. We were preparing for a performance by not only taking our usual one and a half hour daily dance class, but also rehearsing for four or five hours every day as well.
It was a grueling regimen and I thought that well, it might be tiring but at least I’d lose weight. Not that I was fat; back when I was dancing I was always on a strict diet and I was very slender, but I was not thin by dance standards (as long as you’re alive, you can almost never be too thin by dance standards) and I was always looking to lose more.
But I didn’t. I noticed that I was ravenous, although not while I was dancing or immediately thereafter. But when I got home, my body was giving me the message to eat more to make up for the increase in calorie expenditure. It was a bitter disappointment when my weight stayed exactly the same, but I think my body was doing pretty much what it was supposed to do.
And then, when my husband was in his late twenties, he was probably the only person in history to go on a month-long bike trip—through the mountains and the deserts of California and probably using up an extra 5,000 calories a day—who ended up gaining some pounds for his troubles. Not that he was heavy to begin with, either, but he said he was ravenous and ate a lot of that trail mix type stuff, which can pack quite a wollop. And it wasn’t just muscle gain, either.
And you?
…get out of New England.
A random warm day here and there is typical. But this spring we’ve been having sustained warm weather. Not just warm either, but warm/hot and sunny and relatively dry.
I keep encountering people who automatically attribute it to global warming. That’s incorrect, of course; they are making the common error of confusing variable weather with climate change. It’s only over time, and on a larger scale, that the latter occurs.
But whatever the cause, it’s been wondrous strange. We are all North Carolinians now.
[NOTE: By the way, I had thought the term was “North Carolingans” or something like that. But apparently I had gotten a few wires crossed with this arcane fragment of knowledge. When I looked it up, I discovered the right term is “Carolinians.” The same page, however, said the residents of Massachusetts are called “Massachusettsans.” Huh? Never heard of em. In the right-hand column of the chart is a bit more discussion: apparently “Massachusite,” although not official, is traditional, whereas “Massholes” is listed as slang.]
Or do you just think you do?
Reading about the recent John Derbyshire flap started a train of thought for me that led to memories of the Boston school busing crisis of the 70s. I started to research the subject, but the first articles I read puzzled me and made me doubt my memory. They were short, and all about the black children bused in from Roxbury High to Southie and how terribly they were treated.
And that was absolutely true, of course; I recalled reading about that originally. But I also thought I remembered that the busing was reciprocal, and that it was this reverse busing that raised the ire of the South Boston community even more, because their kids were bused out of their own neighborhoods to schools in the black ghetto. The low-income white kids of South Boston were the sacrificial lambs to the idea of desegregation; children of the white rich didn’t have to go anywhere.
I started to think maybe my memory was faulty, but Wiki, of all things, came to my rescue by describing what others had not. Here’s the relevant passage, and the situation was even worse than I had remembered. To me, the only word to describe the particulars of this plan is “crazy” [emphasis mine]:
In one part of the plan, Garrity [the judge who had ordered it] decided that the entire junior class from the mostly poor white South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school in a ghetto. Half the sophomores from each school would attend the other, and seniors could decide what school to attend. David Frum asserts that South Boston and Roxbury were “generally regarded as the two worst schools in Boston, and it was never clear what educational purpose was to be served by jumbling them.”…The first day of the plan, only 100 of 1,300 students came to school at South Boston. Only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to attend Roxbury showed up.
Think about it: how many parents of students at Wellesley High, for example, would have gladly sent their children to Roxbury High? Or even to South Boston High, for that matter? And how many black parents who lived in the suburbs would have willingly sent their kids to Roxbury High, either? Hypocrisy, they name is those who implemented this program:
Opponents personally attacked Garrity, claiming that because he lived in a white suburb, his own children were not affected by his ruling. The author of the busing plan, Robert Dentler, lived in the suburb of Lexington, which was unaffected by the ruling. It has been noted that the children of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis attended school in Brookline, which was also unaffected, not being part of Boston. Garrity’s hometown of Wellesley welcomed a small number of black students under the METCO program that sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. However, most METCO students were from middle-class black families, and METCO was not available to poor white students from Boston. Another important difference in the suburbs was that white students there were not bused away from their neighborhoods, and towns were not under court order to enroll in the state-run program but did so voluntarily.
The Boston busing years were not only fraught with crises and violence and hysteria—as a little sidelight, they also ended up pretty much destroying the Boston public school system:
By the time the experiment with busing ended in 1988, the Boston school district had shrunk from 100,000 students to 57,000, only 15% of whom were white. Today the Boston Public Schools are 76% black and Hispanic, and 14% White. According to the 2000 census, Boston’s white (non-Hispanic) population is 54.48%, whereas Boston’s black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%… In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World Report (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts’ dropout rates superseding rates based on race and ethnicity citywide. South Boston, along with other poor and working class white census tracts of Charlestown and parts of Dorchester, saw an increase in control by organized crime and young deaths due to murder, overdose, and criminal involvement.
Nice going, everybody.
Especially Judge Garrity, who ordered the whole thing in what sounds like an irresponsible manner:
…[T]he plan’s ugliest element was the cross-town busing of children attending South Boston and Roxbury high schools, exchanging students from Boston’s most insular Irish Catholic neighborhood with students from the heart of the black ghetto.
The Master Plan, however, was only one of several options available to Garrity. For example, Boston school superintendent Frederick Gillis proposed an “open enrollment plan” that would have allowed families to send their children to any school in the city. This option would have been much more palatable to the public and far less costly than forced busing. But Garrity showed little interest. He gave the city only 11 weeks to prepare for the biggest social experiment in its history. Worse, six days after the court order, he unabashedly admitted he had not even read the Master Plan prior to ordering its implementation.
What’s that “the law is a ass” quote again?
More:
From its commanders to its foot soldiers, the anti-busing movement was dominated by women. They were mostly stay-at-home moms who wanted to regain control over their children’s lives. These women had long taken for granted that their children could attend the schools in their community, that they had choices concerning their children’s education…
Although the women’s movement was on the rise, the feminist establishment had no interest in the working-class woman’s struggle against forced busing. They were indifferent to the wailing mothers who where throwing themselves down in front of delivery trucks owned by the Boston Globe (the pro-busing newspaper) or fleeing from the dogs that police used to enforce curfews…
“Sometimes when I look out this window,” White reportedly said to an aide during one hellish day at the office, “I see Belfast out there.” Police had to escort and unload buses at several Boston high schools every morning and afternoon while snipers stood guard on the surrounding rooftops. Metal detectors were installed and troopers patrolled the cafeterias, hallways, and stairwells, and still racial brawls broke out daily. Garrity also ordered equal numbers of black and white police officers to guard the schools, provoking racial hostility even within the police force. “It’ll be lucky if the Boston police don’t kill each other before the day is out,” said one state trooper at the time. For three years, as many as 300 state police officers a day patrolled South Boston High. One teacher compared the school to a prison: “We can’t leave school, we can’t come early or on the weekends to do preparatory work. We are like prisoners. Everyday when I get up, it’s like getting up to go to prison.”
In some 400 orders, Garrity meddled in every aspect of the Boston Public Schools. He placed South Boston High into federal receivership and fired its popular principal. He decreed rigid racial quotas in faculty and administrative hiring. When one elementary school was converted to a middle school, Garrity issued an order requiring the urinals to be raised…
The upshot was a public school system nearly impossible to integrate because it became all black, pretty much (the article from which the following excerpts were taken was written in 1998 and is a policy review by Stanford’s Hoover Institution):
During Garrity’s tenure as de facto school superintendent, public-school enrollment dropped from 93,000 to 57,000 and the proportion of white students shrank from 65 percent of total enrollment to 28 percent. Seventy-eight school buildings closed their doors, including Roxbury High. Now whites make up 17 percent of public-school students; most of them attend one of the three selective “exam schools” like the Boston Latin School. Boston has been forced to lower its official threshold for the acceptable racial balance of each school from a minimum of 50 percent white in 1965 to a minimum of 9 percent white today…
Busing was imposed on citizens in the name of racial equality, but few public policies have harmed Boston’s black community more. Roxbury resident Loretta Roach is the chairwoman of the Citywide Educational Coalition, a group that supports public education. Roach bemoans the extent to which busing impedes black parental involvement in the “often faraway schools their children are bused to every morning.” Community support for public schools has also “evaporated since schools are no longer part of their communities. Busing destroyed the neighborhood passion for those schools that previously existed.” Gwendolyn Collins-Stevens, a Roxbury mother of six, agrees. “Busing took away the community feeling we had for our neighborhood schools,” she says, “the feeling of ”˜It’s our school and we love it.’ ”
“When schools were segregated, they were rich in other ways,” says Angela Paige Cook, founder of Paige Academy, a private school in Roxbury. Cook recalls the old network of neighborhood schools as the spring that made the black community tick. “Before busing, parents, teachers, and students often lived in the same community, attended the same churches, and shopped in the same stores. There were more positive role models for the kids in those days. When you destroy a community infrastructure, you no longer have those role models.”…
In 1982, more than 200 frustrated black parents formed the Black Parent Committee to petition Garrity to substitute a school-choice plan for busing. As newspapers reported at the time, these concerned parents complained about the injustice of “asking children to get up at 6 a.m. to ride a bus to a hostile environment where they are not going to get a good education.” Plaintiff Richard Yarde insisted that most blacks “never thought busing was the way to resolve inequality in the schools.” Like their white counterparts across town, black parents resented government usurpation of their “natural authority.” A 1982 Boston Globe poll found that 79 percent of black parents with children in the public schools favored an open-enrollment plan over forced busing. In fact, 42 percent of those polled said they did not even favor busing in 1974.
The Boston chapter of the NAACP, however, moved quickly to scuttle the Black Parent Committee’s attempt to dismantle forced busing.
School choice was finally implemented in Boston, however, in 1989. Here’s an interview with Hardin Coleman, dean of the School of Education at Boston University, who heads an advisory committee to the Boston mayor, tasked with the job of recommending ways to improve the school choice system. Coleman is a black man, and here are his views of where the situation is now. He sounds like a very reasonable guy to me:
Q: How big a role does choice play in the quality of schools?
A: What studies are finding is that it doesn’t matter what kind of school it is””for example, if it’s a magnet school or whether parents have choice. It comes down to the quality of the teachers. The more high-quality teachers you have in a school, the better it will perform, regardless of the type of students. Poverty in general predicts educational outcome phenomenally, but if you look at a school with a high poverty rate that is performing well, the difference is in the quality of the teachers.By 2014, the district will be spending $100 million on transportation before it buys a book or hires a teacher. You have to wonder what the district as a whole gains with that. If you put that money into improving the schools by recruiting and retaining good teachers, then students could go to a good school near their home. That would in turn reduce transportation costs. Which is the best investment? Having a quality school or choice and transportation. I might be tipping my hand a little on what I believe.
Q: Is race an issue in this conversation?
A: Yes and no. My father [William T. Coleman (Hon.’10)] [who was a lawyer involved in Brown v. Board of Education] believes the only way to improve educational outcomes is to have desegregated schools. I disagree with him, and we have argued about this for years. I think the most important factor is competent teachers in the classroom. The data support me. But that question is inconsequential here because Boston busing is no longer integrating students. The population is only 15 percent Anglo. You are moving culturally diverse kids around to schools with other culturally diverse kids. So there’s no busing pattern that would create integration unless you opened it up to the suburbs, such as Brookline, Newton, Winchester. Then you’d get racial and economic balance. But you can’t do that. So busing in Boston serves no purpose when it comes to integration.But in the big picture, the darker you are, the poorer you are, and if you are male, you are more likely to fail in American schools than if you are white, wealthy, and female. And that data is national. The question becomes, what do we do to reduce the risk factors for our poor black males. Improving schools would be one answer.
In Coleman’s answer and in his own life and arguments with his father, and in the dilemma of Boston’s schools, you can see the trajectory of views on the problem over time. At first it was thought that integration would do the trick. Then it wasn’t just de jure integration, it had to be de facto. But the method used by the court system to accomplish this served the needs of almost no one, and dealt a huge blow to both communities involved and the public school system in the city as a whole. Now Boston is still engaged in picking up the pieces.
Girls just want to have fun. And so do boys.
And then again in Colombia (hmmm, is there something about the water?)
And now let’s segue into something a lot more fun:
Ah, the 80s!
Oh, and by the way:
The video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” made Lauper an MTV staple. The video ran constantly on MTV and featured the late professional wrestling manager “Captain” Lou Albano as Lauper’s father, and her real-life mother, Catrine, as her mother. Also in the video are her attorney, her manager and her brother, Butch.
Rather tried making his case in a 2007 lawsuit against his former bosses, but it was thrown out of court two years later. Nonetheless, he remains convinced that he did nothing wrong. “I believed at the time that the [Rathergate] documents were genuine,” Rather says, “and I’ve never ceased believing that they are genuine.
…as well as lying:
“The story we reported has never been denied by George W. Bush, by anyone in his close circles, including his family,” says Rather. “They have never denied the bulwark of the story, the spine of the story, the thrust of the story.” (In fact, Bush officials have indeed denied it, repeatedly. In a conversation I [the author] had with former White House director of communications Dan Bartlett in 2007, he told me, “We believe the story is inaccurate, both the general thrust of it and the questionable sources they used.”)
Rather is now 81, so maybe I should just let him be. On the other hand, 81 is not so very old (and it’s getting younger all the time, from my perspective).
[NOTE: The linked article is very long, and purports to go into the real story of Bush’s national guard service, if anybody cares anymore at this point. I haven’t read it—just the initial part about Rather’s new statements concerning the Rathergate documents—although I plan to try to plow through it some time.]
Audacity, they name is Obama:
Mitt Romney handed President Obama a political gift this weekend, when his campaign announced that he would not file his tax return on time. Romney made the announcement at 5 p.m. on Friday ”” the time politicians usually put out bad news they hope no one will notice. Team Obama noticed all right. The president took a break from the Summit of the Americas in Colombia to criticize Romney’s lack of transparency, while Obama campaign manager Jim Messina declared that it “begs the question ”” what does he have to hide?”
“What does he have to hide?” will be a major theme of the Obama campaign in the coming months. Both a pro-Obama super PAC and the Democratic National Committee have videos up asking: “What’s Mitt hiding?” And Obama strategist David Axelrod has told Politico that the Obama campaign intends to make an issue of “Romney’s penchant for secrecy.” “Harkening back to my youth .”‰.”‰. there was a show called, ”˜I’ve Got A Secret.’ Increasingly, I think that would be the appropriate title for the Romney campaign,” Axelrod said, adding that voters need to ask themselves “Who is this guy? What does he stand for? What does he believe? What do we know about him?”
Seems to be the new meme, and it’s a puzzling one to me. Why would Obama, who lives in a glass house, want to throw this particular boulder? But perhaps Obama is correct in his assumption that the American public hasn’t noticed that all these charges hold true far more for Obama himself than for Romney.
That said, Romney should have been ready with his taxes, especially after he was widely criticized for dragging his feet on his tax releases during the debates. There has never been any question that this campaign will be as nasty as they come, and that the attack will focus on Romney as a fat cat capitalist pig (mixed animal metaphor there, but you know what I mean). Since Obama can’t use his usual m.o. of gaining access to an opponent’s sealed divorce records, it will just have to do instead to force Romney to reveal every single facet of his very complex economic life.
For the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, I’ve written a piece that appears at the online version of the Weekly Standard. Here’s the link—but if you want to comment, you’ll have to do so here, since the WS doesn’t have a comments section.
[NOTE: You might also be interested in this previous article of mine, about the origins of the maritime tradition of “women and children first.”]
I think these points by pollster Scott Rasmussen are true:
Now [that Romney is almost certain to become the Republican nominee] President Barack Obama moves to center stage and becomes the defining figure of the general election campaign. Now it’s about Obama, not Romney, as the election becomes primarily a referendum on his first term.
The most important indicator of the president’s prospects will be his job-approval rating…Obama’s ratings suggest we are heading for a potentially very close race. For the past 32 months, the full month approval ratings for the president have been remarkably stable, holding to a very narrow range of 44 percent to 49 percent. People seem to have formed an opinion of the president, and nothing can change their minds. Those who oppose the president tend to feel more strongly about it than those who support him.
True as far as it goes. They have not yet begun to fight, however.
The general voting public (as opposed to the politically-obsessed denizens of the blogosphere) hardly knows Romney at this point. Obama will try his very best to make sure that voters get to know the worst of Romney, or the caricatured and/or distorted version of Romney. Whereas—unlike in 2008—the public actually knows a lot now about Obama. Maybe not his past or his grades, but what’s far more important to them—his job performance.
So Obama’s approval ratings (barring some enormous game-changing event) are quite set, but Romney’s are not. That means that more of those who weakly support Obama could be moved to the Romney camp, whereas those who detest Obama are not going to be changing their minds about him.
One thing I don’t credit, however, is the oft-repeated idea that people lie on polls to say they approve of Obama more than they actually do, either because they don’t want to be thought racist or for some other reason. I don’t think that’s much of a phenomenon at all, for the simple reason that I remember it was much-discussed in 2008, and many people said McCain would do better than the polls had shown as a result. But he did not. In fact, the polls were fairly spot-on in predicting the election results.
I have long felt that 2012 would be a close election. I see no reason to change my mind now.
Wow, does time pass.
Yesterday in my post about Romney’s smarts, I wrote that in the photo of the young Romneys with their matching fisherman knit sweaters, Ann had “a bit of a Patty Hearst vibe going.”
That sparked a bit of reminiscence. It was in 1974, almost forty years ago (!!), that the Patty Hearst story unfolded with her kidnapping, although it wasn’t until 1975 that she was arrested, and 1976 till her trial began. I only vaguely recalled that her sentence had been commuted by Jimmy Carter and she was released early, and then finally pardoned by Bill Clinton, although I’d written about the Hearst story a few years ago here and here, at fairly great length.
I did remember that Patty had married her bodyguard Bernard Shaw, and gone on to live life as a mostly non-celebrity wife and mother (and Ronald Reagan admirer?) in the posher suburbs of New York. But I wondered what’s been going on with her lately, and when I searched I discovered that, in a rather remarkable achievement under the circumstances, she and her husband are still married. Their two daughters are all grown up.
Here’s one of them, highly successful model Lydia Hearst. She’s got a bit of a Patty Hearst vibe going, too, although far more glam:
Here’s more about Lydia, who led a rather unusual childhood that included her using the name “Shaw” rather than her given “Hearst-Shaw,” for security reasons. Unlike her mother, she doesn’t seem to shy away from the spotlight.
I’ve always defended Patty Hearst, as you can see if you read my posts on the subject (and before you take issue with me on that in the comments section here, please actually read them). It seemed clear to me she was a young and vulnerable kidnap victim trying to survive in a terrible and terrifying situation, who’d been brainwashed and then had also observed the country turn against her. Her life subsequent to her release has borne that out; she’s shown no indication whatsoever of radical or violent views.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Patty Hearst story is the length of her marriage to her ex-bodyguard Shaw, who in 2007 was reported to be the head of security for the Hearst Corporation. One wouldn’t have necessarily predicted the endurance of their bond. But part of the key may be this, which I wrote a couple of years ago:
My guess is that her husband (and former bodyguard) represents a figure of great stability and support to her, a person who bridges her former trauma and her present calm. It’s no accident she married her bodyguard, I would guess; he may have represented the one person able to protect her.
Because, when one actually thinks about it, no one else who should have protected her was able to do so: not her parents, not her boyfriend at the time, not the police, not the court system, not the expert witnesses, and not her lawyer (the best money could buy). In the end, she had to learn the hard lessons herself”“and one of those lessons was that many will never forgive her for what she did. But I think she’s at peace even with that.