With all the bleating and whining about bad weather keeping the crowd down for the tea bag rally on Saturday, I thought I should run this slideshow again. It’s of the rally at the Capitol in St. Paul to support union employees in Wisconsin. Note the weather. It was the end of February and the temperature was a few degrees above zero.
Update: And Michele Bachmann drew only 300 at a tea bag rally in South Carolina.
AKlo has $2.5 million in the bank, and no identifiable opponent for 2012. Too bad she doesn’t have a record of achievement to run on. But I guess at least she’s personable:
"She's pragmatic, smart and hard-working," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, the conservative Alabama Republican who worked with Klobuchar on the [international] adoption bill. Politically, he added, "we don't always agree... but she's a delight to be with."
I looked back over posts written here about Amy Klobuchar as a senator. Here are some of them:
The “klobuchar” as a new unit of measure
Amy Klobuchar, it’s time to get on board
Focusing on the really, really important stuff
Klobuchar disappointment, part whatever
In the original Defective empathy genes post, I described how Sigmund Spot’s early theorizing about defective empathy genes in conservatives was bearing some fruit in recent brain research:
Baron-Cohen [a neuro-science professor in England] believes that the principle cause of evil behavior is a lack – sometimes a stunning lack – of empathy.
Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.
"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.
Here’s a little more from the study described in the article linked above:
People with a large amygdala [the fear-al lobe] are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said.
Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts," it said.
"Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."
Apparently, this is even, um, apparent, to Oscar-winner Colin Firth:
Both of this year’s lead Oscar winners have published scientific papers on neuroscience. We’ve covered Natalie Portman’s work on frontal lobe development in children before, but it turns out Colin Firth has also just co-authored a study on structural brain differences in people with differing political views.
Update: The unstated implication of the post is that the research explains why all the race baiting and xenophobia works so well for the Republicans.
Lewis sums up Rand’s influence on him thusly:
There are seminal moments in the philosophical underpinnings of everyone's life. Some are recognized, and some, I suppose, remain just beneath our consciousness.
Certainly for me, the crystallization of a worldview that put liberty as its epicenter came into much clearer focus when I read "Atlas Shrugged." Obviously, I wasn't alone.
According to Lewis, he read the book in 1983 – I’m guessing here – in a pubescent fever. I mean, I know guys who read Lady Chatterly’s Lover in a similar condition, and I know it had an effect on them. Maybe Jason meant it was a semenal moment for him.
Anyway.
Atlas Shrugged is the feel good classic for every piker, scrub, grifter, and Social Darwinist to come down the pike since it was published in 1957. Gordon Gekko summed up Rand (in Wall Street) in three words,”Greed is good;” Gekko can save you a helluva lot of time reading if that’s your philosophical bent.
If you're looking for more stuff with less guilt, why, Ayn’s the gal for you!
Lewis gushes than Rand and Atlas Shrugged are second in influence only to the Bible. This comes, of course, as sad news to Aristotle, Plato, Dante, John Donne, or even humble novelists like Robert Penn Warren, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and many others.
That they would be bested by a hack screen writer is a tribute to somebody’s imagination.
Anyway, again.
Here’s a little more from the worshipful Lewis:
Her philosophy of Objectivism, placing a premium on individual reason and productive enterprise, had always been somewhat intuitive in the human condition. The statist's demand of self-sacrifice, on the other hand, has to be inculcated at an early age.
What made Rand so popular (her books have sold more than 25 million copies) was that she gave validation to millions by challenging the false altruism that remains the basis for modern liberalism to this day.
Collectivism, which uses the power of government to undermine self-interest, was anathema to Rand. And for that she was never forgiven -- especially by left-wing intellectuals.
Lewis is not only a philosophic lightweight; he doesn’t score well in science, either. There is evidence that altruism is the innate state, and it takes distant parents like Jason’s or genetic defects to turn you into the selfish dweeb who writes for the Strib.
So, who was Atlas, and why did he shrug? Probably because he didn’t have a clue.
Update: And now, for your dating pleasure: the Ayn Rand dating service. Thanks to Slate for the link.
Further update: The perverse allure of a damaged woman, a link from Avidor.
Ineffective evaluations. Because teacher evaluations are rare, seldom based on how much students are learning, and almost never have consequences, they have little impact on the quality of teaching in our public schools.Packed into this one bullet point are a number of fallacies that
education deformers rely on for their attacks on public school teachers. These misdirections pale in comparison to the larger contextual omission of the report, and indeed in all of MinnCan's ministrations: Focusing only on teacher quality to bridge educational gaps and improve learning is not likely to change outcomes. Additionally the way that deformers are approaching teacher quality will in all probability actually hurt educational outcomes.You'd think this would give pause to education deformers who seek to create rating systems built on test scores that would "have consequences" in education systems. At most, student test scores might be useful in evaluating entire schools or districts. Test makers and researchers alike agree that trying to tease out individual teacher effectiveness using student test scores is a folly and mistake. There are too many confounding variables. But in their zeal the deformers have no room for such contrary thoughts. Campbell could have added that such hubris tends to indicate corruption in those who propose such actions."The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers' effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people's notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a "teacher effect" or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.In New York City, where value-added measures have now been kept for two years, one teacher reported on his blog that his Teacher Data Report for last year was under 10 and this year is over 95 - an 85 percent change from one year to the next. The teacher reports doing nothing substantially differently for the two years as he is veteran teacher. The New York system, supposedly one of the most advanced in existence, has a given margin of error of 35 points, which of course is wildly exceeded in this one anecdotal case. More honest analysts describe VAM measures as "weak and error-prone." But not the geniuses at MinnCan.
We’re looking more like the Weimar Republic every day. Without the hyper-inflation. But with the same panicked populace.
There may even be some of you who remember a post that I did after the legislative session in Minnesota in 2009, quoting Sandy Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who wrote:
Constitutional design buffs should certainly find much of interest in today's newspapers, especially with regard to the oft-argued role of American states as "little laboratories of experimentation." One state is offering us an example of American-style "constitutional dictatorship," [Minnesota] while another demonstrates in spades the ravages of a dysfunctional constitution [California].
First, on "constitutional dictatorship," there is, somewhat surprisingly, Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a favorite of the Republican right wing (assuming there is anything else than a right wing in the GOP these days) is apparently going to use all of his powers under the Minnesota [Constitution; others] have exercised such powers, but Pawlenty's exercise in unilateral government seems to be of a different magnitude. Perhaps we should view Minnesota as having the equivalent of a Weimar Constitution Article 48, the "emergency powers clause" that allowed the president to govern by fiat. Throughout the 1920s, it was invoked more than 200 times to respond to the economic crisis. Pawlenty is sounding the same theme, as he prepares to slash spending on all sorts of public services. The fact that this will increase his attractiveness to the Republican Right, for the 2012 presidential race that has already begun, is, of course, an added benefit, since one doubts that he is banking on a political future within Minnesota itself (which didn't give him a majority at the last election; he was elected, as was Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, only because of the presence of third-party candidates). One might also look forward to whether he will refuse to certify Al Franken's election to the Senate even after the Minnesota Supreme Court, like all other Minnesota courts, says that he has won. Whoever thought that Minnesota would be the leading example of a 21st-century version of "constitutional dictatorship" among the American states? [when Coleman threw in the towel, Governor Gutshot signed the certificate] [italics are mine]
Levinson was making his observations about Pawlenty’s exercise of the power of unallotment, a maneuver ultimately determined to be unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court, in a cause entitled Brayton v. Governor Gutshot. Well, okay, it was really Brayton v. Pawlenty.
A similar exercise – governing by executive fiat – is happening now in Benton Harbor, Michigan:
As you probably know, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder recently signed legislation passed by the Republican-dominated House and Senate that gives State-appointed Emergency Financial Managers (EFMs) historically broad and sweeping powers. These new powers allow the EFM to cancel or modify contracts (including with unions) and even to fire the municipality's government.
Today, for the first time, a EFM did just that. According to a press release from the Michigan AFL-CIO, Joseph L. Harris, EFM for Benton Harbor, Michigan issued "an order prohibiting all action by all city boards, commissions, authorities and other entities, except as authorized by the emergency manager."
Pawlenty’s unallotment is of a piece with this action in Michigan. Both are arrogant and authoritarian power grabs by Republican government executives, antithetical to core notions of a democratic society. We ignore or suffer this stuff at our peril. It is in economic crisis when the charlatans appear: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. {Windrip was the authoritarian dictator in the US in the ‘30s in Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here.)
And by the way, it’s Sinclair Lewis that people ought to be reading and watching, not the shallow pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand.
A thump of the tail to E.C. Fish for a link to the Michigan news.
Update: Governor Scott Walker has a similar plan coming for a state near you.
It’s been driving me crazy for weeks. Paul Ryan reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t think of who it was.
This afternoon, it dawned on me.
Eddie Munster, of course.
I think it’s more than the hairline; it’s the eyebrows, too.
Klobuchar, now in her fifth year in the Senate, recoils at the suggestion that she's playing small ball to get along in Washington. She points to her role as one of 14 senators who pushed the Obama administration for a bipartisan fiscal commission to tackle the nation's deficit woes.
Really, she said that. I couldn’t make that up. But there you have it, boys and girls: DFL Senator Amy Klobuchar’s signature achievement.
Most of you are undoubtedly aware that a bill has been introduced in the Minnesota House to nullify the Affordable Care Act – dubbed “Obamacare” – on Tenth Amendment grounds; “they overstepped their bounds,” as constitutional scholar Mike Parry might say.
Republicans in the Minnesota House have included an amendment to the health and human services omnibus bill that would ban the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the state of Minnesota because legislators believe it to be in violation of the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution. On Wednesday night, Republicans argued that “Obamacare” would “eviscerate” state sovereignty, while DFLers made comparisons to the Confederacy and the arguments used by secessionists during the Civil War. One legislator even proposed changing the state song to “Dixie.”
Here’s more from the Minnesota Independent article about the debate on the measure:
DFLers made that point clear at several moments in the floor debate, but their strategy seemed to be to tie the ban on the Affordable Care Act to the 10th Amendment battles waged during the Civil War and Civil Rights Eras.
Rep. Steve Simon, DFL-St. Louis Park, compared the amendment offered by Gruenhagen [against the Affordable Care Act] to those arguments used by the South during those periods of American history.
“Reasonable people can disagree with the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “But what this amendment proposes is crazy, I just have to tell you.”
“We have a tradition in this country that we don’t just opt out of laws that we think are unconstitutional,” he added. “We had this debate in the 1860s with the Civil War. We had it in 1960s with civil rights.”
Simon said he didn’t want to assert that Republicans were arguing those same issues — that of slavery and discrimination — but that the 10th Amendment argument had been used in those cases as well.
Rep. Simon is correct. Before the election last fall, when Tenther Tom Emmer was running for governor, I interviewed Professor Bill Green to give us a little history of the issue of attempts to nullify federal by state legislatures. It’s twenty minutes long, but it’s worthwhile.
Radioactive material from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has fallen in rain on major cities across the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency has also detected radioactive materials in milk, air and drinking water. The EPA and other government agencies continue to insist that they expected to see some level of radiation on US soil after the Daiichi disaster, and the current radiation levels are not a cause of public health concern. Truthout [see the story at the link] has identified gaps in the government's data, however, and nuclear watchdogs are concerned that public officials are not telling Americans the whole story.
And in other news, the reactors at Fukushima finally put themselves in the big leagues. Now, we have a Cernobyl-level disaster. Congratulations, Japan! We knew you could do it.
The regrading to a "major accident" with "widespread health and environmental effects" puts Fukushima on a par with the world's worst ever peacetime nuclear event 25 years ago in the then Soviet Union.
If radioactivity emitted in Japan can fall as rain in the US, think about the intensity of that rain in the Twin Cities from an accident just upwind somewhere in Minnesota.
Avidor, whose sketches of new shushi menu items are shown in this post, also sent me a link to a website of photos of the consequences of Chernobyl.
I asked for an interview with Sen. Julie Rosen so she could explain her support for the lifting of the nuclear power plant moratorium in Minnesota, but her office demurred, saying it had other fish to fry.
Katherine Kersten moaned Sunday about Lakeville schools sending teachers to a conference about racism. Waste of money.
The Lakeville schools are sending a delegation of teachers to the 12th annual "White Privilege Conference" at the Bloomington Sheraton from Aug. 13-16. The district is shelling out $160 a pop -- plus $125 a day for teacher subs -- for this "white guilt" festival.
Unstated is the number of teachers who are going to the conference. (Probably not a lot.) Perhaps Katie needs to check her calendar, too. The conference is in August; school isn’t in session. Subs? Unlikely.
Kersten describes the conference:
The conference is sponsored by the Minnesota Justice Collaborative, a consortium of local higher-education and philanthropic institutions. It is expected to draw 1,500 teachers, students, activists, artists, social workers and counselors from more than 40 states. Minnesota public schools are represented on the list of speakers and workshop presenters.
Katie goes on to have a good belly laugh about racism in schools, or anywhere else for that matter, or that Christianity had anything to do with it! Ha Ha!
But before you take her too seriously, take a look at the video.
Update: Well, hold the phone! The early web version of Katie’s story, quoted above, called August the time of the conference. Now the column, available at the link, says it will be in April. And I just rechecked the “paper copy” of the Strib, and the dates are reported correctly there. The quote from the Strib above was a cut and paste, not a transcription, so the Strib corrected its web version, apparently without noting the correction.
I also forgot a thump of the tail to Two Putt Tommy, who reminded me of the video clips.
In observance of the upcoming Tea Bag Rally at the Capitol, here’s a video I did some time ago. Some Tea Baggers take offense at the term.
The soundtrack got laid down pretty loud; you might want to turn your audio down a touch before you start the video. Don’t turn it off, though.
This morning, readers of Hot Dish Politics were invited to suggest a caption for this photo:
We’re going to run a parallel contest here at the Stool. I’ll bet we’re funnier.
Here’s a first offering from Spot:
Get your soft, filthy insurance lawyer hand off my knee.
Readers can do better and are encouraged to try. Put your answers in the comments.
An East Bethel man who was visiting St. Paul was struck by a car while jogging on Wednesday morning. Luckily, he was caught in St. Paul and Ramsey County’s safety net. Police responded to the incident, as did local first responders, and the man was taken to Regions Hospital, a Ramsey County facility, where he is reported to be in satisfactory condition and recovering nicely.
The man was identified as Republican State Senator Michael Jungbauer.
The Des Moines Register has a pretty complete account of Ben Foster, the Pawlenty staffer in Iowa, whose botched B&E and barf escapade had a homeowner holding him at gunpoint.
The homeowners, Stacy and Kevin Steward, said their 15-year-old daughter, Chloe, went to investigate why the family dog was barking at 3 a.m.
“Kevin stated Chloe woke him up and said a man was trying to get in the house. Kevin stated he grabbed his gun, which was located in a safe, located Foster, and held him at gun point until police arrived,” the report states.
“Stacy stated after Chloe woke her up, she called 911 while Kevin approached Foster. Stacy stated Foster threw up on the back deck.”
Although his car was on the street near the Steward’s house, and he was alone, Foster also maintained he hadn’t been driving the car. Didn’t know how it got there.
George Bush the Elder held a similar view, declaring famously (so famously that I don’t need to provide a link) that some conservatives were “extra gene” conservatives. He may have crafted his theory watching W.
Now, it seems that the pioneering work of Sigmund and George the Elder is receiving some confirmation from a study by Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, as reported in the U.K. Independent. Here’s the lede from the article:
Lucy Adeniji – an evangelical Christian and author of two books on childcare – trafficked two girls and a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria to work as slaves in her east London home. She made them toil for 21 hours a day and tortured them if they displeased her. The youngest girl was 11 years old. [Since there were two girls, and one woman, it should have been “younger girl.” But I digress.]
Sentencing her to 11-and-a-half years in prison last month, Judge Simon Oliver [the judge’s name is how you know it was a case from the U.K.] said: "You are an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls' lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives."
Most people would probably agree with Judge Oliver's description of Adeniji as evil, but Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, would not be one of them. In his latest book, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, Baron-Cohen, argues that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. "Sometimes the term evil is used as a way to stop an inquiry," Baron-Cohen tells me. "'This person did it because they're evil' – as if that were an explanation."
Baron-Cohen believes that the principle cause of evil behavior is a lack – sometimes a stunning lack – of empathy.
At zero degrees of empathy [on a scale developed by the professor and described in the linked article] are two distinct groups. Baron-Cohen calls them zero-negative and zero-positive. Zero-positives include people with autism or Asperger's syndrome. They have zero empathy but their "systemising" nature means they are drawn to patterns, regularity and consistency. As a result, they are likely to follow rules and regulations – the patterns of civic life.
Zero-negatives are the pathological group. These are people with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. They are capable of inflicting physical and psychological harm on others and are unmoved by the plight of those they hurt. Baron-Cohen says people with these conditions all have one thing in common: zero empathy.
The question is: did people with these personality disorders lose their empathy or were they born that way?
One of Baron-Cohen's longitudinal studies – which began 10 years ago – found that the more testosterone a foetus generates in the womb, the less empathy the child will have post- natally. In other words, there is a negative correlation between testosterone and empathy. It would appear the sex hormone is somehow involved in shaping the "empathy circuits" of the developing brain.
Given that testosterone is found in higher quantities in men than women, it may come as no surprise that men score lower on empathy than women. So there is a clear hormonal link to empathy. Another biological factor is genetics. Recent research by Baron-Cohen and colleagues found four genes associated with empathy – one sex steroid gene, one gene related to social-emotional behaviour and two associated with neural growth.
This has, of course, implications for the utility of trying to reason or argue with conservatives.
A thump of the tail to Roger Ebert for a tweet linking to the article.
Here is the final, and I think my favorite, clip from my interview with Mayor R.T. Rybak discussing Local Government Aid and the bills for it pending in the Legislature. Part Three is a close second.
Parts One, Two, Three, and Four are at the links.
Thanks to Mayor Rybak, Communications Director John Stiles, and to one of the people who makes the Mayor’s office run, Grace, for the arrangements.
I thought to myself, gee, there’s an idea. So I contacted the Deputy – and MIchael Brodkorb, too – multiple times to see how many budgets the Senate Republicans offered when they were in the minority and Governor Gutshot was in office.
[crickets]
And no, the weasel is not the Deputy’s regular avatar.
Republicans are never more painful idiots than when they pretend to be constitutional scholars. The example de jour is from the Minnesota Independent’s article about the “school vouchers” debate in the Minnesota Senate; here’s a comment by Sen. Benjamin Kruse:
To the possible constitutional agreement [we’ll give Ben the benefit of the doubt and say he meant “argument”] here, we just saw yesterday in Arizona, the Supreme Court upheld a very, very similar piece of legislation so I think we are heading in the right direction with this,” he said.
If your read Andy Birkey’s excellent piece, you’ll see that the bill under consideration is a tax credit for private school tuition plan, a “back door” voucher plan as critics of the plan contend. The bill, an omnibus education bill passed the Senate, with the voucher plan attached, along party lines.
If you attend carefully to the decision in ARIZONA CHRISTIAN SCHOOL TUITION ORGANIZATION v. WINN, you will see that the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a U.S. Circuit Court decision and held that the plaintiffs lacked standing: they weren’t proper plaintiffs, since they were mere taxpayers. It was a 5 – 4 decision on, of course, federal grounds.
It is hard to know what the U.S. Supreme Court is going to do these days, depending as it does on whether Justice Kennedy’s lower GI track is acting up again. So, we will regretfully lay aside the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and focus on Minnesota state law, and the Minnesota Constitution, specifically.
I have written about this issue quite a lot, including in a post entitled Captain Ahab Fishsticks’ Favorite White Whale. Perhaps Senator Kruse is not aware that Minnesota has a constitution, but it does. And it speaks more directly and comprehensively to equal educational opportunities than the Arizona Constitution’s Article 11, Section 7.
Here are the first two sections of Article XIII of the Minnesota Constitution:
Section 1. UNIFORM SYSTEM OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The stability of a republican [little “r”] form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall [must] make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.
Sec. 2. PROHIBITION AS TO AIDING SECTARIAN SCHOOL. In no case shall any public money or property be appropriated or used for the support of schools wherein the distinctive doctrines, creeds or tenets of any particular Christian or other religious sect are promulgated or taught.
Something else that Sen. Kruse may not know: Minnesota had a system of tax credits for private schools that was struck down by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1974 in a case entitled MCLU v. State. Here’s a quote from my earlier post:
Oh, by the way, boys and girls, did you know that Minnesota used to have a voucher-like scheme for private, including sectarian, schools? Well, it did until the Legislature got spanked by the Minnesota Supreme Court in MCLU v. State (oh, vile MCLU!) in 1974. It was called a tax credit system, where private school tuition up to a certain amount could be credited against Minnesota income tax, and if the credit was bigger than the tax owed, the state would send you the difference. Vouchers without the actual coupon.
The Court said, in a unanimous opinion, what? Are you nuts? (That’s Spot’s paraphrase, anyway.) It’s a violation of the separation of church and state. The Court ruled [partly] on US constitutional grounds, but noted that Minnesota also had this constitutional provision:
[Art. XIII, Sec. 2, quoted above]
Current law in Minnesota holds that a tuition tax credit system for private sectarian schools is Minnesota Constitution unconstitutional. Period.
And we haven’t even talked about Section 1 yet. There was an argument in desegregation cases brought in Minnesota that segregated schools and the system of school finance violated Section 1 of Article XIII, in that the educational opportunities for minority and inner city kids was not equal to others. I don’t think that issue was ever litigated to a conclusion, but settlements that included the inter-district school choice programs and the multi-district magnet schools indicate that the defendants took the argument seriously.
It is probably time to dust off Article XIII, Section 1 again.
The voucher bill, along with tax cuts for business proposed by the Senate Republicans, are Exhibit A – or is it B, C, or D?; one loses track – of the fundamental unseriousness of Republicans about the deficit. They moan and wail about it until something their constituency wants comes along. Then, it’s where’s the checkbook?
