Political pranking: now its NPR’s Schiller

The New Neo Posted on by

In a sort of tit-for-tat for the recent Governor Walker-Koch Brothers phone prank, NPR executive Ron Schiller was caught on tape saying some interesting things to people posing as Muslim donors but who were really in cahoots with James O’Keefe.

The moral of the story is (a) if you’re in public life, beware of even private conversations, unless you know for certain the people you’re speaking to are exactly who they say they are and politically aligned with you; and (b) people tend to say outrageous things (or acquiesce to them) in order to please those they think might be potential donors.

That said, don’t think I’m absolving Schiller of blame. Not at all. It’s just that nothing he says is the least bit shocking. This is NPR, after all. Anyone who listens to it even for a moment (as long as it’s not Car Talk, which I find both amusing and apolitical, despite its Cambridge origins) ought to know its biases.

Here’s my favorite part of the exchange:

At their lunch, the man posing as Kasaam told Schiller that MEAC contributes to a number of Muslim schools across the U.S. “Our organization was originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America actually,” he says.

Schiller doesn’t blink. Instead, he assumes the role of fan. “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air,” Schiller says, “it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”

If you wanted an encapsulation of the perniciously defective reasoning that passes for thought among some of our liberal “elite” (and I use that last phrase only because it’s a favorite of Schiller’s, who is “most disappointed…that the educated, so-called elite in this country is too small a percentage of the population, so that you have this very large un-educated part of the population…”), you could hardly do better than that. The irony of the Muslim attitude towards those “female voices” is rather lost on Schiller, I’m afraid.

[NOTE: Schiller is leaving NPR for the Aspen Institute, a change apparently made before the video surfaced. NPR is “appalled” at his comments on the tape. Perhaps they are appalled–that it surfaced at all.]

Opera and kids

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I went to a performance of a highly condensed (one hour long) English-langauge version of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” at Boston’s Wheelock Family Theater.

I was one of the only people in the crowd without a child or two in tow. The entire theater was alive with squirmy little ones, but I was happy to see that so many parents remain willing to take their kids to such old-fashioned dinosaur-type entertainment, and for the most part the kids were able to concentrate on it and seemed to enjoy it.

Why did I go? I’ve long had a fondness for that particular opera. Despite its childish orientation, its music is very beautiful. When I was little we learned some of the songs in first or second grade, although I had no idea of their operatic origins and didn’t become aware of them till years later when I happened to take my own child to a production and was surprised and delighted to hear the familiar tunes.

I loved the songs so much as a child that every time we had music class I was hoping they’d have us sing them again. But alas, it was rare that they ever came up, and I never thought to make a request.

Now I can listen whenever I want, courtesy of YouTube. It’s a peculiarity of the opera that the roles of the children are not only sung by two adults but by two women, with a mezzo soprano dressed as Hansel. It’s a bit weird, but once you accept the convention it works.

Here’s a beautiful concert version sans costumes, in which Kathleen Battle seems to have been overwhelmed by her own voluminous sleeves. They are singing the Prayer Song, one of those I learned so long ago, except that they are singing in the original German rather than English:

Although the opera’s composer Englebert Humperdinck created a lot of other music, it’s “Hansel and Gretel” that made his name (which, by the way, was stolen in the 60s by this strange guy). The opera was popular from the start, and incorporates lovely folk tunes into a powerful almost-Wagnerian orchestration. The libretto was written, appropriately enough, by Humperdinck’s sister:

In the 1890s, [Englebert Humperdinck’s] sister, Adelheid Wette, had written a libretto based on the Grimm fairy tale, and asked her brother to set it to music as a Christmas entertainment for her children. Later, Engelbert and Adelheid decided to turn this modest home project into a full-scale opera. Hansel and Gretel premiered on December 23, 1893 at Weimar. It was an instant hit and remains an everlasting masterpiece. The composer Richard Strauss, who was the assistant conductor for the premiere, called it “a masterwork of the first rank.”

If it’s good enough for Richard Strauss, it’s good enough for me.

The Wisonsin fleebaggers: will they or won’t they?

The New Neo Posted on by

Return to work, that is?

Only their hairdressers know for sure.

Wisconsin is an important front in a battle currently going on across the country in many states, and in many to come. The unions know it and Tea Partiers know it, although I’m not sure how many others are paying a lot of attention. It’s been stalemated for quite some time, and no one is sure how it will turn out.

[NOTE: The hairdresser reference above was just an attempt at levity (and changing the subject). For those not old enough to remember, it comes from a famous 50s Clairol ad campaign featuring the lines, “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Apparently it was taken from the original Yiddish spoken by its originator’s mother-in-law to be, “Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht?,” which translates roughly as, “Does she colour her hair? Or doesn’t she?”]

Quitting motherhood

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about Rahna Reiko Rizzuto—mother of two who gave up her rights to be their custodial parent when she divorced about ten years ago, and then decided to write a book about it— has gathered over 9,000 comments as of this writing, and the comments keep coming.

From what I can see, nearly all those who took the time to write a message in response to the story think that Rizzuto’s act was selfish, and condemn her for it. It’s also probably true that she did her kids a favor by absenting herself and letting their father take over, if she was that resentful of parenthood and that self-centered.

Here’s Rizzuto:

Ten years ago, when her sons were 5 and 3, Rizzuto received a fellowship to spend six months in Japan, researching a book about the survivors of Hiroshima. Four months in, when her children came to visit, she had an epiphany: She didn’t want to be a full-time mother anymore. When she returned to New York, she ended her 20-year marriage and chose not to be her kids’ custodial parent.

Now, Rizzuto is an author and a faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, where she teaches in creative writing. Her boys are teenagers””and, she says, they’re fine. In fact, their relationship not only survived her leaving, but “has improved.”

“I had to leave my children to find them,” she writes in an essay at Salon.com. “In my part-time motherhood, I get concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed. I go to every parent-teacher conference; I am there for performances and baseball games.”

“I had to leave my children to find them” sounds like something out of the movies, or the apocryphal (perhaps fake) Vietnam war quote, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Rizzuto’s self-serving justification of her act, and her contention that her kids are unscarred, seem to ignore the reality of what she did when she chose her career over them.

Some women and some men are just not cut out for parenthood. It would be best if they find that out before becoming parents rather than after, unlike Rizutto. People should be aware that parenthood is both a rewarding activity and an arduous marathon. Fortunately, love for their children and the joy experienced in watching them grow, coupled with a sense of duty and responsibility, usually see people through the hard times and the sheer work of it all to the pleasure and satisfaction of parenthood.

What’s collective bargaining, and why are they saying those things about it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written recently about a bunch of polls where Americans were asked what they think about the “right” to collective bargaining for public service union workers. Yesterday I wrote, “I’d also love to have seen a quiz accompanying the poll with some questions on what respondents think collective bargaining is,” because I doubt very many know at all.

Well, as though in response, the WSJ has this article [hat tip: commenter “csimon”] attempting to educate us. Here’s an excerpt:

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state””or even across states””can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. Somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political power to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in 22 states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work””without being forced to join a union or pay dues””has a much better claim than collective bargaining.

Here’s more:

This “compromise” [reducing wages but allowing collective bargaining for public employees to stand unchanged] leaves intact the structure of strong public-employee unions that helped to create the unsustainable fiscal situation; after all, the next governor may have less fiscal discipline. A long-run solution requires a change in structure, for example, by restricting collective bargaining for public employees and, to go further, by introducing a right-to-work law.

My guess is that, if most Americans knew what this was all about, they would be standing with the Governor of Wisconsin. But they don’t, and most of the MSM is probably dedicated to the proposition that they remain ignorant.

In fact, come to think of it, I wonder how many members of the press who write about collective bargaining have a clue themselves what it actually is?

[NOTE: The WSJ piece is written by Robert Barro, who is an economics professor at Harvard. Interesting, no?]

Mike Huckabee, Dan Quayle, marriage, and Natalie Portman as the new Murphy Brown

The New Neo Posted on by

No, Mike Huckabee is not the father of Natalie Portman’s love child. Dancer/choreographer Benjamin Millepied is. The couple fell in love during the filming of the abominable “Black Swan” and are said to be engaged, with Portman’s pregnancy very much on sedate display at the recent Academy Awards show when she won the Best Actress award.

Huckabee is now getting a fair amount of publicity for “slamming” Portmans’ pregnancy (although if this mild rebuke constitutes a slam, language has gotten more hopelessly liberal-PC than I had thought). Huckabee has even been compared to Dan Quayle (quelle horreur!), who famously criticized the TV show “Murphy Brown” for showing Murphy as an unwed mother and thus undermining traditional values about marriage and the place of fathers.

Quayle was widely ridiculed for criticizing a fictional character, and his remarks were treated as though they were evidence that he did not know the difference between fantasy and reality. The same cannot be said against Huckabee, although that doesn’t stop people from mocking him for his remarks (just take a look at the comments section of the link I posted to the Huffington Post, or at virtually any other liberal outlet covering the story).

First up, let’s take a YouTube trip back in time and see what Quayle actually said:

Seems to me as though he fully grasped just who the fictional Murphy Brown was, and exactly what the significance of her TV pregnancy meant both as a reflection of the decline of marriage and the norming of it for viewers. The type of unwed pregnancy Portman has—in which the parents-to-be are still together, still seemingly happy, and still seemingly able to marry but choose not to right now—is so commonplace in Hollywood and elsewhere as to be almost de rigueur.

We’ve come a long way, baby, haven’t we—right to the point where it’s Huckabee who’s now seen as the dinosaur for defending marriage and fathers; or for saying that single mothers are usually not rich and famous like Portman, but poor and struggling. No wonder so many men and women are unhappily at sea about whether marriage has any function at all.

I’ve got some questions for Portman and her “fiance:” you’ve got the money, you’ve got the time, and you’ve got the baby coming. Why not get married before the delivery?

Ms. Portman, on accepting your Best Actress award at the Oscar ceremony the other night, you thanked Millepied for giving you “the greatest gift,” presumably the baby. Is it too much to ask that you both give the baby a great gift, parents who are a married couple?

And if it’s too much to ask, why? Are you so very narcissistically intent on proving to the world that you don’t need such formalities to be in love and committed to each other? If so, why call yourselves engaged, then? And if you really are engaged, why not speed up the wedding and have it performed before the birth? Is is simply a matter of the perfect caterer being all booked?

Jack Cashill, Obama, and racism

The New Neo Posted on by

Jack Cashill has recently published a book called Deconstructing Obama, in which he advances his theory that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s well-known memoir Dreams From My Father. Cashill has been called a racist for his pains.

This accusation was as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

When I first blogged, I was stunned when I discovered that I was being accused of being a racist for one of my very first posts, which questioned the credentials of an Iranian-American journalist, not because she was Iranian-American but because she was young and inexperienced. This was six years ago, long before Obama’s candidacy, but I learned early on in my own writing life that any criticism of a person who belongs to a designated minority group, even if such criticism is connected with issues having nothing to do with race or ethnicity, elicits the “racist” charge from those who wish to discredit the argument.

Note that Cashill is very clear on what he bases his charges of ghostwriting, and it has nothing to do with race. It is those on the left who think only in terms of race—or, at least, of using race as a strategic ploy. Either they believe race is Cashill’s motive for real, in which case they are the ones thinking about whether a black man is capable of writing such a book (certainly nothing that Cashill has ever suggested, or probably even thought about), or they are cynically charging him with racism knowing it is a toxic tool that they use all the time, to great effect.

In that endeavor, Obama is a great gift to them. He mostly stands apart from such charges, but sets a tone that encourages and releases them. This was apparent even during his 2008 campaign (see this and this). About a year ago, Obama apparently did it again. No surprise, really.

[NOTE: This is probably as good a time as any to remind you that I encourage you to use the widgets here to click through to Amazon whenever you order. If you want to buy Cashill’s book or any other book I link to, just click on the link or the widgets on the right sidebar, you’ll get there.

Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t read Cashill’s book yet, although I hope to. People tell me that he mentioned my analysis of Obama’s poem “Pop” in it. That’s not the only reason I’d like to read it, of course, but I’m curious.)

Wisconsin: those pesky polls again

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a depressing Rasmussen poll out, which everyone says shows the public to be against Governor Walker’s stand on limiting public service unions’ collective bargaining rights.

I wrote “everyone says” because I can’t seem to find the actual poll results themselves—the hard data, that is—which I believe have not been released yet. I linked to Rasmussen’s summary instead, which says that, in a recent telephone survey of Wisconsin “likely” voters, “just 39% favor weakening collective bargaining rights and 52% are opposed.” But see this:

The overall sample for the survey included 30% of union households. That includes 33% with a private sector union member and 60% with a public sector union member.

Additionally, the sample includes 46% who voted for Governor Walker last November and 45% who voted for his challenger Tom Barrett. Walker actually won the election by a 52% to 46% margin.

When I read that sort of thing, I’m inclined to throw up my hands in despair. Only if 60% public sector union households is representative of Wisconsin’s population as a whole is this sort of thing even remotely valid, and the stats for Walker voters in the poll makes its sample doubly suspect. [ADDENDUM: see this.]

The strange thing is that, when Rasmussen has been criticized in the past, the charge has been that it leans more to the right than the left. So, although I tend to distrust polls in general and feel they have an agenda, I can’t quite figure out what the agenda here might be.

Maybe in the future I should just ignore polls. They don’t seem to be worth the trouble of dissecting them or even paying attention. But they do seem to grab attention, since they’re the only tool we have to gauge public opinion.

Ah, public opinion. When Rasmussen lists the questions asked in that poll, the one that grabs my attention is the very first one, “How closely have you followed recent news stories about Governor Scott Walker’s proposals to reduce the state budget deficit?” And even when we get that numbers for the answer (which we don’t have yet), my bet is that people tend to think they’re following closely when they’re not at all.

I’d also love to have seen a quiz accompanying the poll with some questions on what respondents think collective bargaining is. I’d also love to have seen question 11 (“Do you favor or oppose a proposal to weaken the collective bargaining rights of state employees?”) broken down into sections that list those “rights.” Hey, I’d like it not to have used the word “rights” at all, which seems to me to state the case that these are fundamental rights such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and those embodied in the Bill of Rights.

What’s more, I’d like to have seen a linkage in the question, not just the phrase “weakening of rights” floating in the air like that, untethered to the budget issue. It’s very possible that if I had been asked a question like “Do you favor or oppose a proposal to weaken the collective bargaining rights of state employees?” I might have answered “no,” in the absence of a direct connection to the actual issue involved here, which is the budget. After all, the connection is not readily apparent; how many people who answered the poll have a clue what’s actually being proposed in Wisconsin, and why?

It all comes down to the same thing, over and over: if voters are uninformed, they will be manipulated by others. Our entire system of government rests not only on voters’ common sense, but on their ability to understand what’s going on. Polls not only reflect whatever deficits exist in those traits, they also can exploit them and magnify them.

[NOTE: There’s also this WSJ/NBC poll, which indicates people want to reduce the deficit without cutting Social Security or Medicare. But again, look at what was actually asked.

Respondents were queried on whether they favored making cuts in Social Security to reduce the deficit. If I’d been asked that question, I would have said “no,” too, because I think older people who paid into the system all these years and have relied on it ought to get their money. But cutting those payments is not a Republican proposal right now, anyway; some sort of stepped phase-out is, as well as a change in the age of receiving benefits which is supported by the poll. So why ask the question that way?

I don’t think it’s because the pollsters don’t know what they’re doing.]

[ADDENDUM: It doesn’t sound as though Governor Walker is too terribly cowed by the polls.

And I’ve just noticed the use of the term “fleebaggers” to describe the AWOL Wisconsin Senate Democrats. Clever.]

The angry pro-union mob in Wisconsin

The New Neo Posted on by

Isn’t it interesting how much hype was made about angry (and racist) Tea Partiers, and yet no evidence was ever found?

And isn’t it interesting that, although there’s plenty of evidence of really viciously angry pro-union protesters in Wisconsin, it’s really only being reported in the right-wing media?

[NOTE: Ann Althouse and her husband Meade are doing yeomans’ work in covering the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, where they live.]