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Howdy!
Some things are better with time. Moldy cheese improves with age (although I'm told moldy meat does not). And it's not only pungent dairy products. Communications technology continues to improve. Just last night I watched 4 different reality shows about "little people". Just think: Ulysses Grant lived and died without ever seeing the daily trials and tribulations of a 3 foot tall couple making chocolate pretzels. Maybe his sadness, longing and regret are what made him die so young.


One thing that is not getting better is our political discourse. The recent campaigns on the federal level were disheartening enough. Although I did enjoy the TV ads enough to get a special application for my iPhone where the faces of my family members continuously morph into Nancy Pelosi. But I'm going to focus on the state-legislative races, which I watched much more closely.


Up until recently, our state legislative campaigns were banal, soulless, witless affairs. They basically only focused on one issue: TAXES. Every candidate was against them, everyone's opponent was not only for them, but had personally raised them, as if Harry Potter had taken his wand and said "Taxonimous Raiserosa".



There were three basic lines of attack in the tax wars.
1. Number of times:


"While on the Bird-In-Hand School Board, my opponent raised taxes 2,455 times, and then...he raised them again!
2. How high:
"My opponent introduced a bill which would have raised taxes by Infinity. That's right, INFINITY!
3. On what:
"My opponent is a bastard! He even raised taxes on Lipton's Cup-O-Soup. See! A


Bastard!!"


Of course, many of these claims were not true. I mean what kind of a bastard would raise taxes on Lipton's Cup-O-Soup?? But even to the extent they were true, no context was ever provided. Maybe taxes needed to go up. Maybe there was a deficit, or there was a need for funds to provide vital human services. These were nothing but brain-dead, empty, pandering campaigns. But again, those were the good old days.


Now, demagoging over TAXES has been replaced with with even more disheartening demagoging over PERKS. Virtually every single ad or mailing in every single state legislative race can be synopsized as follows:
"If you elect me, I will not accept any perks. I will not take a car (even if it is cheaper for the taxpayers than getting mileage) and I will not take per diems (even if they are cheaper for the taxpayers than receipt-based reimbursements). I will never vote for or accept a pay raise. In fact, I won't take any salary. I'll starve, and make damn sure my kids do too. Plus, if I get sick, I won't accept health care. In fact, I will pay the doctor NOT to treat me out of my own pocket."


"But I won't stop there. I won't take a pension. My sole plan for retirement is to wake up each morning and say "Oh Crap, I don't have any money" and then eat a bowl of moist poison. Further, if it gets cold during my term, I will not turn on the heat. Legislators do not deserve heat. And I will never accept a meal of any kind. I will eat nothing but old Skippy Super-Crunchy peanut butter. And I give you my word that I don't like crunchy stuff."


"My opponent on the other hand accepted a tax-payer funded masseuse (assuming his secretary is a masseuse). And he did it in the middle of the night! (It's always the middle of the night somewhere). He also voted to give himself a salary, claiming that his family wanted to...and I'm not making this up...EAT! That's right, he is using your hard-earned tax dollars to stuff his kid's face with formula. Has he no shame?"


Now, you are entitled to your views as to whether legislators actually get exorbitant perks (of course, if your view is "Yes" then you are entitled to hold incorrect views). But regardless, is this really the most, in fact, the only important issue we should be talking about??


Let me illustrate what I mean. Did you know that in Pennsylvania, 25% of our fellow citizens live in poverty. Tens of thousands of children go to bed hungry each night, and studies show that some kids are failing in school because they suffer from malnutrition. Mal-Freaking Nutrition!! Did you hear any candidate tell you what he or she (or he/she) would do about that?


How about Transportation? We have 14 billion dollars in unmet transportation needs, including bridges rated far more dangerous than the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota a couple of years ago. Did you get any mail about that? Some people can light their tap water on fire. Did we discuss that at all? Celine Dion does concerts right here in PA! Who the hell is putting a stop to that??


In one campaign this year a candidate got reimbursed for a meal, and on the receipt was a charge for a Mojito. A Mojito is a Cuban Alcoholic Beverage which was apparently invented by Fidel Castro himself in his early bar-tending days.


This candidate's opponent spent about a half a million dollars talking about the Mojito. It was really the only issue in the campaign. For a half million dollars, not only could you talk about poverty in that district, you could SOLVE poverty in that district!



When I ran for the Senate 2 years ago, a similar amount of money was spent talking about how I got a "luxury" car. I'm not sure what the definition of "luxury" is, but I'm pretty sure it involves not stalling out whenever one stops at a traffic light. But given that everything is called "luxury" now, including any apartment with an indoor toilet and any hotel where the rats are unarmed, I guess the car thing was fair. In fact, I'm typing this BLOG entry on my new luxury keyboard.



The point is that we all should be troubled by how low, baseless, and just plain stupid our politics are becoming. From my perspective, if you have some ideas on how to make sure our kids get a good education, or walk to school in safety, or get breakfast occasionally, I don't care if you spend your entire staff budget on back-waxing. Put another way, I want to talk about real issues, not these faux issues which cover up how utterly vapid some of our candidates are.



A couple of days ago was the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Once he gave a speech about how much we share even with people we disagree with. He said:
"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal.

Why give a speech like this when you can talk about your opponent's Mojito?

Daylin

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Howdy!

           I don't go looking for trouble.  I tend not to buy pinatas filled with angry hornets, and I rarely shout at a group of Hells Angels "Hey, you guys don't look like you could kick the crap out of anybody!"  For the most part, so long as I have a comfortable chair, a good cup of chai tea and a Bengals game to watch, I'm happy. Oh, and smelts. I need some fried smelts. Plus it doesn't hurt to be getting a shiatsu massage. And a live Klezmer band is always nice. Also, a disco ball, and nunchucks, just in case. The point is, I'm usually a pretty contented guy.

            The same thing is true in my career. I don't go around looking to investigate people or point out their personal foibles. Ken Starr is not my hero (except of course for the haircut) and if I somehow ever gained subpeona power the only person I would grill would be whoever it was that gave Celine Dion a record contract.

             Last Thursday was no different.  I was just sitting in my office doing what I usually do, drinking cans of red bull and wondering what it would be like to be a hamster, when one of my staffers brought to my attention the crazed rantings of one Kaukab Siddique.

             Mr. Siddique is a literature professor at Lincoln University, which is a state-related and supported school in Chester County. But unlike most literature professors, Mr. Siddique is interested in more than pretending that Beowulf is a BLAST to read. It seems Mr. Siddique enjoys mixing a little Mein Kampf in with his Shakespeare and Chaucer. Specifically, Mr Siddique has either publically said or written the following:

= ON ISRAEL - We must stand united to defeat, destroy and dismantle Israel. We must Unite against this hydra-headed monster that lives in Tel Aviv.

= ON The HOLOCAUST - The Auschwitz "gas chambers" story has been meticulously rebutted and destroyed...Don't take the Holocaust myth lightly, it is Israel's milk cow...The concentration camp photos show emaciated inmates as well as piles of bodies. These were from starvation and disease caused by allied bombing. The German's behavior was so good that Ellie Weisel left with the Germans when the Russians advanced towards the camp. He also wrote that the Nazis were really the victims of World War 2.

= On AMERICAN JEWS - We can see how you Jews operate. You kill, rape, destroy...Jews have taken over America by immoral and devious means. They control the government, the media, education, libraries, book chains, banks, Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

           As you can see, Mr. Siddique is quite the literature professor. He is also quite the conspiracy theorist. He makes Glen Beck look like Allistaire Cooke. But knowing this, what should be done?

           To begin with, it does seem legitimate to question whether we really should be spending tax-payer's money to fund the salary of the President of the local Third Reich Fan Club. At a time when we are cutting such basic programs as child-nutrition, environmental protection, and politician junketeering, can we really afford to subsidize dramatic readings of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"?
        Of course, this has to be juxtaposed against the back-drop of academic freedom. Professors should generally have the right to express unpopular, off-the-wall, even bat-shit crazy opinions. I once had a professor claim that he heard voices talking to him from some big guy up in the sky. Admittedly, it was a religion professor, but still.

      But as Danger Mouse once said (I think it was him) "you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts". A professor does not have the right to purvey false factual information to their students. A geography professor cannot teach that the world is flat. A professor of "Elizabethan England" cannot adopt the perspective that Elizabeth never existed, and "there's no such stinkin' thing as England".

       Similarly, if Mr. Siddique just purveyed his own unique brand of hate to drunk guys at the local sports bar, that is very different than if he actually used his classroom for the same purpose. "OK kids, tomorrow we'll cover chapter 5 of Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliffe embraces Cathy, symbolizing the Jews' hold on the stock market". Which is closer to what is happening? We're still investigating.

       The other thing to consider is the noble historical role of Lincoln University. Lincoln was the first degree-issuing university in the world to provide a higher education to black students. The first university in the world to provide a higher education to white students was...every other university in the world!

       Lincoln can take pride in the fact that such notables as Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes and Cab Calloway graduated there. Also, Sarah Palin did not, which they can also take great pride in. I am personally a big fan of Lincoln and I worry in this time of extremely tight budgets and demands to cut everything, it might be harder to get legislative support for their subsidy given Professor Himmler's remarks.

      It is profoundly ironic that Siddique has chosen a university that was founded on the ideals of equality and understanding (and that inexplicably gave him a paying job) as a platform for his hate. He is not only biting the hand that feeds him, he is smearing it in slime.

Daylin