Genocidal tyrant Rubert Murdoch made a smart move by putting Thomas Frank, labor's post-ironic champion, on his roster of columnists — though I don't know what Frank's column title means. (Is the tilting yard where knights joust and ladies swoon to see them? Or does "tilting yard" have some industrial-age, manual-labor, fighting-the-rentiers meaning I don't know about?)

The latest column from the beloved Baffler co-founder summons a figure from a misty, long-ago time: Dickey Flatt, the Mexia, Texas printer who — through the "Dickey Flatt test" — once served as Anaxagoras to Sen. Phil Gramm's Socrates:

Although it seems hard to believe now, it once pleased the press to call Mr. Gramm a "populist." Long before he scolded the common man as a whiner, Mr. Gramm was widely thought to have the common touch himself. He was the sort of politician who could "connect with working people," he said in 1995, and he used to wax righteous about "the people who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon." Mr. Gramm even came up with his own salt-of-the-earth everyman to champion: one Dickey Flatt, a printer in Texas, whose tax burden had to be weighed against the cost of any federal program before it won Sen. Gramm's judicious nod.

To judge by Mr. Gramm's legislative deeds, however, what the Dickey Flatts of this nation wanted most of all—what they longed for right down to the ends of their weary, ink-stained fingers—was the enactment of big money's legislative agenda.

Mr. Gramm invoked the long-suffering family farmer to demand the repeal of the estate tax. He fought New Deal banking rules not in order to clear the way for lucrative corporate mergers, but just to "make things simpler for anyone who has a checking account, car insurance or a share of stock." Subprime lending itself he defended as "one of the blessings" of prosperity, which blessings he illustrated with the story of his own hardworking mother, who had to accept a higher rate for her mortgage but who still paid it off on time.

Since the age-old longing of dirt farmers everywhere was deregulated financial markets, Mr. Gramm gave the people what they wanted. His Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 allowed investment banks to merge with commercial banks and insurance companies. And he helped craft the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed energy trading to go unregulated, making possible certain of Enron's amazing escapades the following year. It also sanctioned an unregulated market in credit default swaps, the financial derivatives that may be the next act in the ongoing credit-market tragedy.

Whole article here (and that "certain of" in the phrase "making possible certain of Enron's amazing escapades" at least reassures me that the WSJ's copy desk is still paying attention).

As noted yesterday, I am not persuaded that trying to roll back the free market is as popular or populist a position as Frank believes. But it's not what I think or Tom Frank thinks that matters. It's what Dickey Flatt thinks. I called up Flatt Stationers Inc. to find out, and I found the 66-year-old printer to be not only the essence of Lone Star cordiality but a staunch supporter of his former senator.

"It couldn't be any more far from the truth," Flatt said of Frank's column. "He got it all wrong. When a reporter just goes by what's out there and doesn't do much research, that's what happens."

Back in the halcyon days of the 20th century, L.A. Times contributor A. S. Hamrah, along with the great illustrator R. Sikoryak, concocted a Hamrahesque gag so recondite it worked: an exploration of the striking similarities between the spare, absurd stage dramas of postmodern pioneer Samuel Beckett and the spare, absurd "Nancy" comic strips of Ernie Bushmiller. Appearing in Issue # 15 of the late, lamented Hermenaut, and scandalously absent from the web ever since (which is the real point of this post), "The Beckett/Bushmiller Letters" purported to be the newly discovered correspondence between the two creators. 

If it was unintentional hoax, it is still proving to be an effective one after nearly a decade. Editor and Publisher reports with a straight face that R.C. Harvey's Rants & Raves newsletter (also apparently with a straight face) has begun a new investigation into this intriguing, and heretofore totally unknown, literary friendship. Once again, though, the story has proven too good to be true. Tom Spurgeon suspects this thing's as fishy as a makeshift rod and reel Sluggo would leave dangling while he catches a nap. Dan Nadel concludes that it's as phony as a three-dollar bill from Rollo's chauffeur. I can also attest that the Beckett/Bushmiller correspondence is entirely a product of the imaginations of bored Gen-Xers, back when they still had those.

The rumor about how Sluggo died from eating Pop Rocks and drinking Pepsi, however, is 100% true.

Update: E&P has updated its article, calling the article a "hoax," which it's actually not, but it's worth it for this observation:

"Nancy" has been perceived as a simple children's strip by some and sort of existential by others.

During my drive in this morning, KUSC personality Dennis Bartel (who is not, I'm afraid, one of my aliases), announced an informal poll result that left me not astounded but disappointed.

The question: Should the station continue using United Kingdom titles such as Sir Edward Elgar, Sir William Walton, Sir Loin of Beef, etc. when announcing musical luminaries?

According to Bartel, either two-thirds or three-quarters of his listeners opted to retain these titles on the air. he didn't provide exact numbers, but it was a landslide in favor of toadying to foreign potentates.

He did mention that folks in the anti-title minority were quite energetic, many of them referring to Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution (though as Bartel noted, correctly in my view, this text only enjoins the U.S. from bestowing titles, not private citizens from accepting or honoring them.) He also invited all and sundry to continue emailing their votes and thoughts to him at dbartel@kusc.org.

Please send him an email. In my America only dominatrixes deserve to be referred to by fancy royal titles, so I'm hoping to flip those poll results around. But it wouldn't be very freedom-loving of me to tell you how to vote. Pro or anti, send your ideas to dbartel@kusc.org.

The Christian Science Monitor says Congress is squirming in its seat, and for good reason:

A recent Gallup Poll confirms what many lawmakers say they're hearing from their constituents: that confidence in Congress has never been lower. Only 12 percent of Americans say they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress as an institution – the lowest level ever for any US institution since Gallup began asking the question 35 years ago. Congressional job approval, a slightly different question, has dropped to 18 percent.

And as the Wall Street Journal points out, "White House officials ... note that approval ratings for Congress are even lower than the president's — at an abysmal 13% in the latest Journal poll." Ouch.

But do they really care? Republican Reps. Tom Udall and Tim Murphy don't hide their concern in back-to-back NPR interviews — but, as the Monitor points out, voters seem pretty happy with their individual representatives.

Even better for Congressional Democrats, the Monitor points out, "Some Republicans worry that the public doesn't know enough about Congress to blame the right party":

"Not only does Congress have an approval rating below bubonic plague and head lice, I saw a recent poll that as many as 40 percent of people still believe that Congress is in Republican hands," says Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas.

Even some Republican groups, points out Robert Novak, have had enough:

The Lincoln Club of Orange County is telling the GOP leaders of both the House and Senate that it is too late to repent. They must go -- or else lose big money.

The message: "Come Nov. 5, should the current GOP leadership in either house survive to lead in a new Congress, the Lincoln Club of Orange County will review the financial backing of all congressional Republicans, and we urge others to do likewise. A GOP caucus that would re-elect such leaders is not one we would likely continue to support. Because, simply put, we refuse to support a permanent minority."

That may be tough love, but Dems are all too happy to blame their record on a stubborn Republican minority. Daniel W. Reilly of Politico reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn't letting the deadlock get him down, and Barack Obama's making sure Congressional Democrats are seen as part of the solution rather than the problem.

While we're at it:

*Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images

The non-profit news startup ProPublica (in whose service we wish former colleagues well) updates its joint "60 Minutes" report on al-Hurra ("The Free One"), the Arabic television network funded by about half a billion taxpayer dollars.

Before getting to the details of ProPublica's case against the network, I want to note that my colleagues and I at another gem of the non-profit news business long ago made the case against al-Hurra as well as other Arabic journalism efforts by the U.S. government. Briefly, al-Hurra and its U.S.-citizen-funded ilk stood (and stand) accused of misreading the local market, failing to win audiences, being stapled to an obsolete Cold War model of propaganda, not pencilling out in even the most modest financials, delivering a product that people already get in better and more accessible forms and committing the mortal journalistic sin of being boring. (A spokesperson for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees several of these entities, replied with vigor. And more recently, when Karen Hughes departed her public diplomacy post, the L.A. Times editorial board, whose humor is more sanguine and less bilious, tried to find a silver lining in the story.)

To this list ProPublica's Dafna Linzer adds another charge: propaganda against U.S. national interests. I'm going to disagree, however, and say that this is the one area where al-Hurra is actually performing up to expectations.

America's most recently re-appreciated Founding Father got it almost-right 232 years ago. Put this one in your firecracker and blow it up:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.

— John Adams, July 3, 1776

Read all about it.

Over at the WashPost, Gene Weingarten is still polishing that Pulitzer they gave him for his widely discussed Joshua Bell busking story from last year, but he's got an embarrassing revelation: Somebody at a long-dead Chicago paper did almost exactly the same story in 1930.

To his credit, Weingarten breaks the story himself, but some commenters are saying, "fiddlesticks!" One demands he give back the prize, and commenter lhooq46 has a critique I can really agree with:

What was more unoriginal than the article was the selection of music that Joshua Bell played. I'm sorry, but I would not have stopped to listen for "Thais" or "Ave Maria" no matter how well they were performed - I've heard these pieces hundreds of times & I'm beyond sick and tired of them!!!

But for my money, the best analysis of the original busking stunt came in this vehement and contemptuous article by Richard Taruskin:

All concerned knew perfectly well that people at rush hour are preoccupied with other things than arts and leisure, and would not break their stride. But the fulfillment of the self- fulfilling prophecy gave Weingarten the pretext he sought, in an article titled "Pearls Before Breakfast," to cluck and tut, to quote Kant and Tocqueville, and to carry on as if now we knew what really happened at Abu Ghraib.

Bloggers took up the refrain. Notice, wrote one, that "all the children wanted to stop and listen. They knew. But their parents kept them moving on. Sadly it reminds me of an occasion when children wanted to stop and listen to Christ but his disciples didn't let them." Saddest for me was that the weblist of the American Musicological Society, my professional organization, added its meed of clucking and cackling. Scholars are supposed to be skeptical of spin and pose, but here we were piling on. My hat goes off to one Ben H., a netizen who saw through it all. "Perhaps the Post could do a whole series of articles about philistines ignoring Joshua Bell's sublime music-making in different locations," he suggested:

1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!)

2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!)

3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!)

4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!)

5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)

Oh, my heaven! (Oh, my Hubbard?) Is Will Smith a secret Scientologist? Is that why he appeared in that dreadful sequel to "Men in Black"? If he is (and he says he's not), why is he being so coy about it? Will the private school that he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith are funding inculcate scientological principles on the impressionable minds of the young students who attend?

And, breathlessly, above all: Why are they being given such a hard time about it?

It's a private school, and Smith & Smith are entitled to fund it according to their educational vision, without having to explain, deny or be coy about their personal beliefs. At least, unlike a celebrity or two we could name, they're not trying to shove beliefs of any sort down our throats. Maybe, as one educator in the know says, the school will cram a lot of Scientology jargon into kids' heads, maybe it actually will make learning more fun by having children learn through experience instead of deadly long lectures, and maybe it will do both.

This is why we have private schools, so that people of any particular belief can frame education according to their own philosophies. Sometimes this means no standardized testing, and sometimes it means Advanced Placement kindergarten.

There is something to be taken from this whole celebrity stew, though. The Smiths' money is the Smiths' call. But what if the taxpayers were called on to pay for kids' education at this school? If the supporters of school vouchers had their way — and they never give up on trying to have their way — this is the kind of question we'd have to confront.

This is why school vouchers are not, as proponents like to frame it, just a way to save students from miserable inner-city schools. Once the public's money is involved, the public should have the right to ask these questions and approve or disapprove of whether a school like the Smiths' would be entitled to a share of that money.

Vouchers aren't just problematic for public schools, or for public expenditure. They're a problem for private schools, too. Once the public is paying, it has the right to demand — and it should demand — good performance from those schools. But how do we measure performance? These days, through standardized tests. So what about schools whose very philosophy runs counter to those tests? The private schools wouldn't just put financial pressure on public schools; the public would be placing subtle financial pressure on private schools to change their ways to make them acceptable for public funding. There goes the beautiful diversity of private schooling.

Is the Smiths' school an example of that beautiful diversity? That's up to the beholder. The important point is that private schooling works best for both private and public schools when it stays private.

Will the honeymoon never end? Gay marriage keeps people talking.

Responding to David Benkof's* Blowback "Marriage ban is not a 'wedge issue'," one reader wonders who needs protection:

It's hard to know where to start responding to Benkof's hate screed, disguised as it is in the cloak of reasonable argument.  First, he announces that efforts to ban gay marriage are not a "wedge issue," offering as proof nothing more than that some marriage-equality advocates have said they are.  Then he decides that anyone who has ever cheated on a wife or husband is unqualified to say what marriage is.  The fact that someone does not have a perfect, or even a good, marriage does not invalidate his or her opinion on the subject.

Then Benkof starts in on how marriage-equality supporters are trying to "redefine" marriage.  In actuality, proponents of gay marriage are simply pointing out the inherent inequity of denying basic rights because of sexual orientation.  It is unconstitutional to create two separate classes of law-abiding citizens and grant to one class rights that are denied to the other.

Benkof also hits the usual pandering notes of "traditional" marriage and "marriage protection," never explaining why marriage needs protection from people who want to get married, and pleads for rationality and compromise while advocating writing discrimination into state laws.

Susan Hathaway

Our news coverage draws this response from frequent contributor Jasmyne Cannick:

Re: "For one same-sex couple, marriage was always the goal" (June 16, 2008)

I'd like to challenge the L.A. Times to for once, feature a gay or lesbian couple in a story that isn't white or one half white.  You wouldn't know it from the Times' coverage of gay marriage in California, but there are Black, Latino, and Asian gays too.  And no, we're not all rushing down the aisle to get married either.  By the way---the story you ran on the two Black lesbians abusing their five year-old doesn't count. 

Just a thought.

Jasmyne Cannick
West Adams, Los Angeles

And another reader says heterosexuals are peeved about definitions, not threats to marriage:

Every article and op-ed I read about gay marriage has the same talking points.  I don’t know why proponents of gay marriage feel that we married heterosexuals feel threatened.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Traditionally, men and women marry.  Unions of gay persons should be called something else because it is something else.  Liberal politicians just want your vote…gay, illegal alien, convicted felon, stray cats...

Mike Mancuso

* This spelling of the name Benkof was corrected after this post was published. Thanks to David Benkof for pointing out my error.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here's the NEA's new report "Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005." While the percentage of self-identified artists, as a portion of the toal workforce, remained constant over the 15-year period, the report suggests a surprisingly robust creative community. Sez NEA Chairman Dana Gioia:

There are now almost two million Americans who describe their primary occupation as artist. Representing 1.4 percent of the U.S. labor force, artists constitute one of the largest classes of workers in the nation—only slightly smaller than the total number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the U.S. military (2.2 million). Artists represent a larger group than the legal profession (lawyers, judges, and paralegals), medical doctors (physicians, surgeons, and dentists), or agricultural workers (farmers, ranchers, foresters, and fishers).

With plenty of state-by-state and profession-by-profession breakdowns, it's an interesting study. Read the full report.

Larry Lessig gives a spirited defense of Chief Judge Alex Kozinksi and a big raspberry to the media coverage of his porn saga:

What I mean by "the Kozinski mess" is the total inability of the media -- including we, the media, bloggers -- to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.

Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let's translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski's have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family -- pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family's stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won't like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: "Hey look," he says, "look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house."

The editorial board defended the judge today, and my own view is that if Kozinski deserves condemnation, it's for being one of those people who forwards you "funny emails," a practice that was universally deplored when Bill Clinton was still in office. But that's always been the weird thing about "funny email" forwarders: Sometimes they're people who in person are perfectly hip and intelligent. They just turn into pushy, forced-laughter-demanding Mr. Hydes when they stumble down the dark and dangerous corridors of the interwebs without proper supervision. I've seen this phenomenon many times over the years.

If you haven't seen Patterico's collection of Kozinskiana, here it is. (Need I note that it's NSFW?) I think it's clear that Kozinski's original defense that he found these "funny" is obviously true, even if the material is obviously unfunny. There's certainly nothing in here that seems designed to stimulate the cloacae, which I think is still one of the critical distinctions in deciding what constitutes obscenity.

The teachers' walkout is going on all over town. I saw walkers at three schools on my way in, including my own kid's school.

These pictures barely suggest so, but there are a suspicious number of kids on the picket line. I counted at least a dozen kids walking the line at Rosewood Ave. Elementary, but did not have my camera. (Which is mine, btw, not the L.A. Time', so you can't blame Sam Zell for the horrible picture quality.) 

As this was a one-hour walkout and it's now 10:20, it may be winding down. Here's how the ed board thought of the strike yesterday:

The district's argument doesn't wash. With some planning, the schools should be able to keep students safe for one hour. Even so, while respecting the teachers' right to stage a high-profile protest, we wish they wouldn't do it in this particular way. The morning walkout likely will result in a lost school day for many students while making little difference to the lawmakers who hold the schools' fates in the balance.

As it is with Catholics and their local priest, as it is with Americans and their local politician, so I have little sympathy with teachers as a group but am fond of my own kid's in loco, who is far from perfect but kept good order during a chaotic morning at the school and even went ahead with a planned field trip. To where I have no idea, because that's the kind of involved dad I am.

So as I'm getting ready to vote this morning, I look through my pile of literature from the state and county to make sure the address of my polling place is the same as usual. The only current piece of mail I find is an absentee voter pack, which does not contain the address and which I then throw away. I head down to the usual polling place and find it's open for business.

But when they check me out on the rolls, I discover I'm marked down as the recipient of an absentee ballot, and thus ineligible for a real ballot. It turns out that the absentee ballot I threw in a dumpster an hour before was the only ballot I was allowed, and I was supposed to drop that off at the polling place. The kind folks at the polling place provided me with a provisional ballot and I was required to fill out a bunch of personal information, including the last four digits of my social. (Is there any activity left in America that does not require you to bear the mark of the beast?)

The trick is that I never requested a vote-by-mail ballot, and would never vote by mail under any circumstances. I vote out of a sentimental attachment to dying ways of life, for the tiny bit of satisfaction I get from taking the trip to the polling place, seeing all the earnest oldsters behind the folding table and going through the rituals of our democratic charade. What could be more pointless than voting absentee, where you miss out on the whole Four-Freedoms vibe of the activity? Today I even brought my camera to get some nice election-day pics, but since I remained the only voter in the Hollywood Neighborhood City Hall throughout my ballot brouhaha, that didn't amount to much. Still, here are some shots of folks hanging out in and around Hollywood.

My questions: 1) Why would I have received an absentee ballot when I didn't request one? The poll workers, who were pretty clearly hoping I would just leave, said it was probably a mixup. On the page that had my name, I and one other person had been marked down as having received a vote-by-mail ballot, so it doesn't seem to be that common to order them. (I wouldn't even know how to order one, let alone how to get off the vote-by-mail list that I seem to be on now.)

2) What are the odds that my provisional ballot will get counted? This is one of the lowest-impact elections I can recall, and as indicated above I'm not a big believer in elections, government or democracy, so I won't get exercised either way, but in her list of reasons for giving provisional ballots, Secretary of State Debra Bowen says I'm entitled to have my vote counted:

• Records indicate that the voter requested an absentee ballot and the voter fails to turn in the absentee ballot at the polls on Election Day. The Elections Official’s Office will check the records, and if the voter did not vote an absentee ballot, the voter’s provisional ballot will be counted.

Of course, that's if some sneaky dumpster-diver didn't grab my absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it sometime today! Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to commit vote fraud, but you never know. Did I mention that more people seem to be on bikes these days?

I love it when you can actually see in your daily life the evidence of one of these big news stories we're always writing about (oil price spike hits Angelenos hardest!). Maybe it's just my imagination, but traffic has seemed a lot lighter in recent weeks, and my slow route in this morning took me past hundreds of alt.transporation users:

See? It's the market, not smart growth or urban planning or any other government activity, that is actually getting people out of their cars. Which is another reason I have to keep harping about this ballot business. Election day is one of the few times that I actually get out and around in the morning, before reporting to the impenetrable fortress of the L.A. Times building. If I haven't got a polling place to go to, I'll be cutting myself off from the wellspring of my success, from the common man.

And speaking of the common man, that first picture above is several weeks old: The Bill Johnson poster became progressively more covered with graffiti and finally vanished entirely from its place at the corner of Beverly and Commonwealth. I wish I could say the graffiti indicated knowledge of our extensive Johnson coverage, but it was all just regular tagging.

Happy election day.

More child-proofing in the red-hot center of American culture: You can get arrested for serving wine at an art gallery opening. Police in East Hampton, N.Y. cuffed and booked 67-year-old gallery owner Ruth Kalb (alias "Ruth Vered") on charges of serving alcohol without a license over the Memorial Day vacation. Partygoers, left to confront, stone-cold sober, an exhibition of photography by movie stars, were shocked.

Courtesy of ArtsJournal.

At the Center for Immigration Studies, David North says foreign students who are too poor to have cars can't be contributing to the U.S. economy:

For several decades in the last century many foreign leaders, particularly from Europe’s former colonies, had been educated in America and were friendly to the United States. That was and is a purely good thing.

Further, at the university level, it is helpful to U.S. students to have non-U.S. students in their classes — particularly in the fields of the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. It makes for a more cosmopolitan experience for the Americans involved. Unfortunately, most foreign students, particularly at the graduate level, are studying science, mathematics, and engineering, fields where the students’ overseas backgrounds are of lesser value.

But foreign students as a plus for the American economy, like soy beans grown in Iowa and exported to China? That’s an argument that does not stand up under examination.

Straw man argument? Not exactly: He's responding to the annual "Open Doors" report from the Institute of International Education, which states: "International students contribute approximately $14.5 billion dollars to the U.S. economy, through their expenditure on tuition and living expenses."

North says that figure's wrong: See what you think of his proof. Still, I'm not sure how important the balance-of-payments argument is among the universities that want to attract more foreign students. The main attraction is that they pay full tuition, isn't it?

In a cover story for the Jewish Journal, Brad A. Greenberg gives a long, fascinating profile of Kevin MacDonald, the Cal State Long Beach professor whose, um, particular interest in The Jews has created a dilemma for the college. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll just note that praise is due to: 1) Cal State Long Beach, which is doing a creditable job of balancing MacDonald's academic rights (if you believe such rights exist, as I don't) against the need to protect itself against both anti-Semitism and lawsuits; 2. Greenberg, who seems to maintain a perfectly dry tone in the face of some pretty hair-raising stuff (and I only say seems because I'd never heard of MacDonald before reading this piece and have nothing against which to measure it); and in a strange way, 3) MacDonald himself, who blends creepiness, crackpottery and a surprising forthrightness into a weird form of amiability that I can sort of respect. I hate to use such a hoary cliché, but he's a quintessentially American type of oddball, the kind you don't want to listen to because he occasionally makes you say "Hm, he's got a point." In particular, check out his case for why David Irving's biography of Goebbels should be put back on the shelves; if the book is as he characterizes it, then... Hm, he's got a point. (Experts alert: If it's not as he describes it, the comments are open!)

As I said, I'd never heard of MacDonald before this piece, but in the way of such things, once you're aware of him, he starts showing up everywhere. Interestingly, his real pillars of support are not just among white supremacists. (MacDonald, don'tcha know, isn't against other ethnicities; he's just supportive of his own European roots.) Instead, he attracts some pretty broad interest for his particular case on immigration:

MacDonald's core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.

"European people in this country will be a minority in a few years," MacDonald said. "I don't think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs."

Which is weird, because I thought building secure border fences was one of those areas where The Jews and the proud European-Americans were in perfect harmony. This stuff gets so confusing so fast you can drive yourself crazy. And then you get tenure, I think.

Whatever your race, creed, color or religion, enjoy this beautiful weekend.

The California State Supreme Court just overturned the ban on gay marriages.

I'm really happy for all my gay friends, but personal bottom line? This is going to cost me a fortune in wedding presents.

People are talking about the anti-religion comments and sour attitude toward the Chosen People expressed in Albert Einstein's letter to his pal Goodchild, but I think the most interesting phrase is in in a throwaway clause:

And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.

Einstein produced plenty of random thoughts on the passing scene, most of which strike me more for their banality than anything else. Whether he did or did not believe in Goddess doesn't seem to me probative of much — and like Manley Pointer, I been believing in nothing ever since I was born. In fact, I'm pretty sure appealing to authority to support your disbelief defeats the whole purpose of being a rationalist.

But there's one aspect of Einstein's non-scientific punditry that has always been catnip to me: his abiding, total and frequently repeated hatred of patriotism and the use of force. You can always depend on Albert E. for good anti-bullyism, and his Actonian formulation here is the clearest expression of that philosophy I've seen. What sets it off from sermon-on-the-mount piety is that it doesn't pretend to any great moral position; force and power are bad not because they're wicked but because they're stupid and unhealthy.

Since I'm the resident thought-tormented Ron Paul fan on staff, I've taken a special interest in the Paul supporters who are objecting to the attention we've paid to the white-supremacist past of Paul-connected judicial candidate Bill Johnson.

Thanks, everybody, for commenting. Some clarifications are in order:

Commenter "Tracey," declares that Johnson is not the author of the so-called Pace Amendment. This is incorrect. Johnson confirmed in a phone call with our own Robert Greene that he is indeed the author of the Pace amendment and of the "James O. Pace" book Amendment to the Constitution.

Commenter "blakmira" calls us "lower than scum" for the "smear" on Paul in our editorial about the Johnson campaign, which noted that Johnson had affiliated himself with the Paul-for-president campaign; apparently our mentioning that was clear evidence of counter-rEVOLutionary tendencies. In any event, Paul himself appears to be taking the matter seriously enough that he has renounced his end of the affiliation. Here is an email we just received from Paul's congressional chief of staff Tom Lizardo:

Over the past several weeks, I have also been involved in assisting Dr Paul with the consideration of candidates who are seeking his endorsement for their campaigns.  We have gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements.  During that period, we have also received and reviewed requests from dozens of candidates.

Although Bill Johnson's name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process.  In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.

Several commenters claim that they know Bill Johnson and he couldn't possibly be a racist. We make no judgments on what Johnson believes in his heart, only on what he has publicly advocated. But Paul, whose attentiveness to such matters has not always been impressive, deserves credit for taking quick action in this case. The claim by another commenter that Johnson is part Japanese is also incorrect, though Johnson does speak fluent Japanese as a by-product of his LDS mission in the land of the Rising Sun. We can confirm that "Turning Japanese" by the Vapours remains one of the finest works of rock orientalism ever recorded.

Finally, a commenter at dailypaul.com claims that our staffer is the same Robert Greene who writes self-help books on "How to crush your competitor," "How to secure the corner office," "How to take over your supervisor's position" and "The 48 Laws of Power." I can confirm that Greene is not that person and that if he ever wrote a self-help book it would be about how you can become a better person by scrupulously reading the fine print of voter information packets in obscure municipal elections. Nor is he the Robert Greene who denounced Shakespeare in his "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentaunce." Moreover, Robert Greene confirms that he is a Stratfordian in good standing, though if pressed he would put Pericles, Prince of Tyre in the "disputed authorship" category.

Hope that clears things up.

"Everyone who has tried posting books online has done it again. That's a pretty good indicator it works. An artist's enemy is obscurity, not piracy."

That's the no-introduction-needed Cory Doctorow talking about the brave new freeware-everywhere world with his fellow Canucks at MacLeans.

It's easy enough (and probably premature) to mock the death throes of intellectual property behemoths. Doctorow goes one better by actually making a living in the barter economy, though the details are a bit vague: He says he lives off the advertising at BoingBoing and is getting bigger advances on his novels. All I know of life on earth tells me every time a writer gets a generous book advance a publisher gets a little bit poorer, and it's not clear to me how long such a system can last. But that would be in keeping with Doctorow's contempt for stability as a goal:

The question to ask about any intellectual property rights regime, he says, is "does it encourage or discourage involvement, art-making, information-sharing?" In his opinion, the current system only serves corporate dinosaurs, "big dying institutions." They use copyright to try to regulate technology, to criminalize (or at least turn a profit on) all the peer-to-peer file sharing that is the "Internet's greatest achievement: lowering the cost of mass collaboration, the barriers to innovation."

It adds up to an eternal and futile attempt to throttle the mechanisms of change. Long before sheet-music publishers fought record makers (who later battled radio stations, who complained of TV and so on), monks who produced manuscripts were damning the printing press as the devil's engine. What's particularly galling for Doctorow is that "yesterday's pirate is today's admiral — Sony, the VCR pirate, denounced by moviemakers a generation ago, has come full circle to sue Napster's successors." Of course, institutions — especially wealthy ones — want to live on, even past their times, Doctorow acknowledges. "I used to be a bartender, and there was always somebody who didn't want the night to end. But there comes a time when you have to put the chairs up on the table."

As a fulltime employee of a big, dying institution and as the guy who never wants the bar to close, I can confirm that Doctorow is exactly right. Read the whole story.

...I fell in love with a Mexican girl right before she got busted coming to work in a citrus farm.

From the Star of the Southwest comes an interesting comment on immigration reform from the area's chief Border Patrol agent. Victor M. Manjarrez Jr. tells the Associated Press that the Patrol is being forced to divert attention from catching criminals and potential terrorists to the pursuit of people who are jumping the border in search of work:

"Most of these people are economic migrants but we have to deal with them between the ports of entry because we have not, in terms of a legislative fix, determined what we do with these people," Manjarrez said. "I think it's pretty obvious that the country has a need for economic migrants. To what degree, I don't know. That's for the country to decide and for the politicians to decide."

Full story here.  Manjarrez estimates that of the 75,000 border crossers arrested in the 268-mile El Paso sector in 2007, at least 87% were coming for work. Without this "clutter," he says, agents would be better able to focus on securing the border against actual threats.

This was essentially my point a few years back, when I made the case for visaless exchange among the NAFTA countries. That's a bit more ambitious than the kind of "comprehensive reform" that usually amounts to issuing more guest worker visas. But I don't see the downside in ensuring that all non-criminal traffic into the United States (and out of it: read the story for details about how historically visaless entry has actually encouraged out-migration) is routed through legitimate border crossings where the feds can know who's who.

If you do know of a downside, the comments are wide open.

The Center for Immigration Studies' Norman Matloff comes up with a new measure that, he says, indicates H-1B visa recipients are not in fact the best and the brightest that proponents sometimes suggest they are.

I don't know how persuasive you'll find Matloff's "talent measure," or TM value. I think it fails to prove Matloff's main conclusions: that H-1B holders overall are not noticeably more skilled than native workers and that within the universe of H-1B holders, Western Europeans are more skilled than Asians. But the TM value has one attraction: It uses a marketplace value for making its assessment.

The value is calculated by comparing the ratio of the worker's salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. So if you've got a TM value of 1.0 you're making essentially the average salary for the job you're doing. Since employers can't (officially at least) pay visa holders less than the stated prevailing wage, nobody should show a TM value of less than 1.0. On the other hand, if you're a gifted worker you should have a higher TM value because you can command a higher salary.

The shocking conclusion? One multiplied by one equals one:

• The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.
• The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.
• Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.
• Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that “Johnnie can’t do math” in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc" can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

The breakouts by company and nation of origin are interesting, but I'm not sure they prove anything other than that Microsoft appears to be a generous employer and that immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command higher salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus a little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German brings language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and technological strength, would be worth paying a premium for. 

Or maybe language skills have nothing to do with it, and there are some other variables at work. (For example, suppose most or all of the people in the U.S. doing a particular job are Indian H-1B holders: Then a TM value of 1.0 could just mean that they're all above average, Lake Woebegone-style.) In any event, I don't see how these numbers refute the claims of the hypothetical industrialist or lily-livered immigration supporter who thinks the best person to judge what skills he or she needs is the person doing the hiring.

Prove that I just don't get it or am being intentionally obtuse by reading the whole article right here.

Update: Matloff responds. Good stuff in the comments too...

Lest we think the Special Order 40 controversy is just an L.A. thang, the Arizona state legislature has voted overwhelmingly to prohibit local police departments from instituting similar rules. According to AP:

The bill also would prohibit county and city governments from having policies that prevent or restrict them from receiving or exchanging information about people's immigration status in certain instances. Those cases include determining the eligibility of people for public benefits that are off-limits to illegal immigrants and confirming the identity of arrested people.

The bill also encourages local cops to get federal training in immigration enforcement. Here's the full text.

In Maricopa County, America's Toughest Blowhard Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, isn't waiting for the governor's signature to begin his own campaign of immigration raids.

Richard Rothstein, last seen debating the achievement gap in a Dust-Up with Russlyn Ali, takes to the lackluster Cato Unbound with an interesting take on the 25th anniversary of the report A Nation At Risk, which examined the nation's puported crisis in education. According to Rothstein, the doomsaying of 1983, like most of the doomsaying from that period, turned out to be wrong. But unlike your harmless, garden-variety doomsaying, this one had some negative results:

Because of the report’s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements - the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more of it?

A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. Not thinking that President Reagan’s rule (’if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002.

I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.

Full article.

Keep it in mind next time you're presented with the secular version of Pascal's Wager. (That is, the "Hey, if it turns out we're wrong about the decline and fall of X, all we did was take enlightened action Y" line of argument, which usually precedes the "It's time to stop talking about X and just do something!" argument, and frequently ends up with "Hey, problem X seems to have solved itself, but now what do we do about all these Zs we've created?")

Maybe I'm more broken up than most about the death of Charlton Heston, but it seems to me one of Heston's most important achievements has been missing from the appreciations of his half-century-long career: At an age when most men are sliding into paunch and griping about their bad backs, in an era when barrel-chested Victor Mature types had not yet yielded the stage to more sinewy men, Heston brought the hardbody to America.

This is not to say Heston was the only actor of his time who bothered to stay in shape, but the references in our obit to his "lean-hipped" look and nude scene in Planet of the Apes raise an important question: How many 45-year-olds, then or now, would be comfortable showing that much skin on a giant movie screen? More important, how many would look that good? If you check out the other top box office performers of 1968, you'll find even the svelte Steve McQueen and John Cassavetes letting none of it all hang out, and the rest of the list is filled with lumpish leading men like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Say what you will about Heston's unpopular politics or (allegedly) wooden acting; but you could do your laundry on those abs.

Nor is this just a tour of my own homoerotic inner mind. I'd like to stand up for the trilogy of dystopian science fiction of which Planet of the Apes is merely the first part. The New York Times doesn't even mention Soylent Green or The Omega Man in its obit, and our own coverage is pretty dismissive of both. (Planet of the Apes is now canonical enough that highbrows belittle it at their own risk.) I'd argue that both those movies are touched by greatness and live on for, if nothing else, the insights they provide into the culture of their time.

The Omega Man — which opens with Heston tooling around an empty, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles (the city where the world was meant to end, damn it!) and, in a brilliant touch, watching, over and over again, the only movie still playing, Woodstock — is as full an examination of the relationship between the establishment and the counterculture as any film of its time. It's an olive branch from Heston to the hippies, with the hero repulsed, fascinated by and ultimately in love with the groovy kids he recognizes as the only future for mankind. Who else but Heston could have been at the same time hip enough and square enough to share a hot makeout scene with the late Rosalind Cash, and have that actually mean something? Who else could have rocked that ascot-and-Sgt.-Pepper-jacket look? That Anthony Zerbe's black-robed zombie inquisitor puts a face of intolerance and anti-rationality onto the rhetoric of progress ("Forget the old ways, brother, all the old hatreds") just shows that even when Heston put a hand out to the flower children, he did so recognizing that they shared a common enemy in unreason.

This post was updated at 11:48 am Thursday. See below:

From that great city to the north comes news that some art is so shocking even San Francisco hipsters will censor it. An exhibition by the French artist Adel Abdessemed at the spectacularly located S.F. Art Institute has been shut down following an outcry and threats from pro-animal activists. Kenneth Baker's review in the Chronicle describes the show and notes that complaints also were lodged by folks who in other circumstances might be the ones looking to épater le bourgeois:

The animal rights protesters were inflamed by Abdessemed's six very brief video loops, played on separate monitors, each showing an animal - a horse, a pig, a goat, an ox, a deer and a sheep - being killed, apparently without bloodshed, by a quick hammer blow to the head. Abdessemed shot the videos himself in rural Mexico, merely documenting passages in the town's customary food production.

But text accompanying the videos' presentation at SFAI left Abdessemed's role ambiguous.* A viewer had to wonder whether his hand wielded the hammer rather than the camera, whether he shot the video or merely commissioned it, and whether he commissioned the animals' execution.

The shock of the protest lies not only in its vehemence but also in the fact that it involves the rare spectacle of artists, including many SFAI faculty members, advocating censorship.

You could argue that censorship isn't the proper word here, since the objection raised by Eagle Rock's own Diana Thater and apparently others was to the killing of the animals, not necessarily to the art itself. But Thater herself gives that game away by denouncing the show as a "sick exhibit" that "represents the very worst impulses of the human imagination," fails to "raise people's consciousness"  and "will encourage them to accept animal abuse." Those are objections to expression of ideas, not to the acts themselves. (Whether the strict argument against killing the animals holds up is also open to question, since by general agreement these were all feed animals that were going to be done in whether there was a hoity-toity conceptual artist present or not.) *

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of teasing my long-ago piece "Artists for censorship." Sez me, artists are no more or less censorious than anybody else. Writers and musicians have always believed some ideas needed to be suppressed. The urge to censor is particularly strong when the objectionable ideas show up in a medium other than your own (surprise, surprise). And there may even be some value in the impulse to "take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them."

* According to an SFAI representative, the ambiguity Baker refers to is at most a red herring: the artist merely documented an existing procedure. "These pictures were taken by him in an abattoir and not staged," she says, "and he did not participate in slaughtering the animals." If true, this would eliminate the argument over the welfare of the animals (though you might be able to craft a case that the individual animal has a death-with-dignity right that would protect it from non-consensual documentation of the killing), and leave us only with the argument over expression. It may be helpful at this time to reiterate that the show was closed due to threats of violence against the institute, not due to the objections we've been discussing.

This post updated as of 12:10pm Thursday. See below:

I'm a fan of vestigial cultural survivals, but even I reacted to news of the shutdown of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio Orchestra with an incredulous "There are still radio orchestras?" To give some perspective, the legendary Arturo Toscanini-conducted NBC Radio Orchestra was disbanded way back in 1954, and there may be a reason that the Vancouver-based CBC outfit has long held the dubious distinction of being the sole extant radio orchestra in North America. *

Now the life of a working musician is tough, though arguably no tougher now than it's been for the past, say, 10,000 years. And I get the impression that a belief, realistic or not, that Canada's cultural attainment is high has always been a favorite bragging point for our friends to the north. So a little expression of regret is understandable. But take a look at the protests that followed the announcement of the orchestra's closing and you may ask what eon these people are living in. CBC has a little coverage, with video, and the Globe and Mail gives more detail. "No Kitsch! No Philistines! Don't Mess With Our Music!" reads one protester's sign. A music teacher brags of having canceled her class with the following message to her students: "I said this is the most important assignment you could possibly have; to rescue the great culture of your country."

California Democrats who aren't already some kind of super-duper delegate have until Wednesday at 5 p.m. to apply to become one of 241 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25-28. Despite claims from both the Clinton and Obama camps that their side has the whole thing wrapped up, it is looking increasingly likely that any old off-the-street Democrat who scores a spot at the convention just may have some real power.

The district-level delegates are distributed among California's 53 congressional districts, with 134 going to Hillary Clinton (because she won 42 congressional districts on Feb. 5) and 107 going to Barack Obama (11 congressional districts). Delegates are divided by gender, as well; check here for the numbers.

So with all those Democrats who are sure to apply, who decides who gets to go to Denver? Democrats do -- any registered California Democrat can vote on Sunday, April 13 in caucuses held in each district. Separate caucuses for Hillary people and Barack people, of course.

Keep up to date with elections big and small at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

According to Roman Catholic doctrine, a baptism is valid even if it is performed by a layperson and even if it takes place in private. My sainted mother remembered that when she administered a "kitchen baptism" (head under the spigot) to a grandson she wasn't sure would be dipped by his parents.

So why did Pope Benedict XVI have to baptize Magdi Allam, a journalist from a Muslim background, not just in public but at a televised Easter Vigil service at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome? Was the pope offensively flaunting a prized conversion and giving credence to Osama bin Laden's taunt that Benedict was playing a "large and lengthy role" in a "new Crusade" against Islam? Was this an another affont, intended or not, from a pope who raised Muslim hackles in 2006 when, during a lecture in Germany, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who accused the Prophet Muhammad of commanding that Islam be "spread by the sword"?

I don't think so. First, Allam was one of seven people received into the fold by Benedict, Second, the  baptism of new Christians is an Easter Vigil tradition. In 2005, the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, baptized five new Christians at the vigil, filling in for the ailing Pope John Paul II. Third, even if Allam was chosen because of his prominence, there is nothing new about Christians (or adherents of other faiths) trumpeting the admission of a high-profile convert. Certainly Buddhists take pride in the fact that Richard Gere is one of them. Fourth and most important, Allam's conspicuous conversion was a matter of his own choice, a choice the Roman Catholic Church would have been bound by a decree of the Second Vatican Council to respect even if he had decided to become a devout Muslim.

It wasn't always thus. You don't have to be Osama bin Laden to recognize that Christianity also has been "spread by the sword" or that in the past the Vatican operated on the assumption that "error has no rights." And Allam's voluntary conversion contrasts dramatically with the 19th century case of the kidnapping and Christianization of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna who was seized from his parents by papal police after the local Inquisition discovered that he had been baptized as an infant by a Christian servant girl. Pope Pius IX (whose humongous miter Benedict recently wore) rejected appeals that the boy be returned to his family. Edgardo later was ordained a Catholic priest. (The Catholic League on its website offers a tortured defense of Pio Nono's conduct in this case.)

Intolerance is an occupational hazard for believers of all kinds.   But the Catholic Church of which Allam is now a member eventually joined other Christian bodies in recognizing that belief cannot be compelled and that, in the words of Vatican II, "the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature." It's too much to hope that Osama bin Laden will accept this teaching, but other Muslims do. An increase in their numbers is the best insurance against the "clash of civilzations" between Christians and Muslims.

If you're looking for a little countertonality in the choir of angels praising Barack Obama's anti-disownment speech, Washington Post columnist and former G.W. Bush administration speechwriter Mike Gerson belts it out for you:

The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor...

This accusation [that the government invented HIV as a means of genocide against people of color] does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man...

And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama's speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama's grandmother, which Obama said made him "cringe" -- both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference....

What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

I don't like columns that ask rhetorical questions, then answer them, then invite me to congratulate myself on agreeing with the answer. I have at least one family member who believes the U.S. Government is up to all manner of criminal and murderous activity. And I object to the political prophylactic of denouncing and excommunicating non-violent zealots — in fact I find all attempts to police the borders of acceptable conversation to be self-serving, authoritarian and worst of all boring. So I'm the worst possible judge of this column.

But if there is some theonomist politician out there, considering whether to make a run: You have not yet lost my vote. The odds are you will lose it. (It's not just you; it happens to most guys!) But if you're offering me something good (or better, not offering me anything at all), I won't pull somebody else's lever just because you have some crazy ideas.

Can you shoot spitballs in home school? If so, Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer had better watch out, because home schoolers are fuming about their recent Blowback "Regulating home schoolers."  Commenters are all over the story — you can add your own two cents in the message board — and several readers were motivated to break out the old stone table and send an old-fashioned letter to the editor. Some samples:

Homeschooling Works Well Without State Oversight

As a homeschooling mom I am so encouraged by the many who choose to show their support for homeschooling and  those of us who choose to do so. However, I am surprised by how many of those who think that a proven method of teaching would be "improved" by state oversight.

If one does not wish to to consider the successful people both in history as well as those who are walking among us in workplaces and colleges that were homeschooled, perhaps you might want to consider your pocketbook. 

Regulating Homeschools would cost you big money in taxes that this state cannot afford right now. Do we really need a new section in the department of education to fund?

Wouldn't it make more sense to use all available money on the children currently in public schools?

In January, Education Week's comprehensive report card gave California a grade of "D+" when it comes to funding our schools, a "C-" on the teaching profession, and a "D" on K-12 achievement. Taken along with the California high school drop-out rate I find it odd that so many are calling for homeschoolers to be regulated now.

Do your research! Homeschooling works best without heavy regulation!

Angie Weaver
Garberville

---

Editors,

What a shame authors Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer hadn't yet shared their self-professed insights into the motives and intentions of home schoolers some 20 years ago when I began homeschooling for a number of years.  Maybe if they had my homeschooled kid would have been able to know some academic success in her life instead of graduating from UCLA.

Dana Strunk
U.H.S.P. (Uncredentialed Home Schooling Parent) Redlands

---

Dear Editor,

In reference to “Regulating Homeschoolers,” Op-Ed page, 3/13/08: To borrow a phrase, “there has always been something decidedly…anti-democratic in” traditional schooling. What could possibly be less democratic than top-down curriculum aimed almost wholly at raising test scores to keep the funds coming in? Ask any public school teacher who has a principal or district curriculum heavy breathing down her neck to make sure that she is on the right page in the language arts text book or is reading from the script in her teacher’s manual. In terms of the students, public school classrooms are at best benevolent dictatorships. With state standards and benchmarks to keep time with how could you possibly let students choose their own course of study? I imagine that the authors would also say that the bullying and teasing that goes on in traditional schools is character building and homeschooled children are missing out on that important part of growing up in a democracy. The fact is, state regulations have put a stranglehold on the public schools. The result is a disaffected populace. I think that Coombs and Shaffer would do well to check with their colleagues, college professors who look forward to having homeschooled students in their classes because those students have not had their passion bulldozed out of them, still can think for themselves, and are self-directed learners. Those, in my opinion, are the kinds of citizens we want in a democracy.

-Susie Stonefield Miller
Sebastopol,

---

It seems to me that Coombs and Shaffer protest too much. Although our older child was public schooled, we chose to educate our younger child at home. We have been able to teach him at the rate and level that fits him. He is ahead of his peers in all subjects, but one, where he we are taking extra time with him.

When my older child with similar abilities was in second grade the teacher told us that she was sorry he was bored; we should provide advanced work for him ourselves at home. We provide a secular education, sans TV, and are both scientists. There are many like us. Just as credentialed public school teachers regularly make the news for various abuses, there are abuses that occur and make the news among all groups of people. This cannot be defended, but neither can it be regulated away.

Our tax dollars pay do not support the schooling of our younger child - they go to the public schools. These same California public schools provide a popular program, abbreviated CAVA, which provides school at home. The children learn from a computer program and their parents.

Please do not promote misunderstanding through stereotypes, professors. There are many, many secular home schoolers who provide top-notch educations to their children. Studies conclude that home schooled children are better educated than their public schooled peers. Public schools admit they are having trouble teaching the children they already have. What would they do with over 166,000 more?

Lisa Whelan
Goleta

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As a secular homeschooler I strongly resent Professors Coombs & Shafffer's attempt to pigeonhole all homeschoolers as some kind of religious nut cases who leave the education of their children to television. My six year-old daughter is studying American history, geography, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, cursive handwriting, literature, mathematics, and science. In addition she takes ballet and art lessons and has more friends than I am able to keep track of. A child's education, like a child's upbringing ought to be a parent's responsibility and prerogative. In the absence of specific evidence of abuse or neglect the state has no right to interfere.

Gideon Reich
Aliso Viejo

What a two-week punch it's been for New Jersey. First Wall native Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Kristen, proved to be the only sensible character in the Empire State's Spitzer farce. Now the ashes of Dina Matos McGreevey's divorce from former N.J. Gov. James McGreevey have returned to blue, hot life with revelations from an actual graduate of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

By way of both praise for truth-seeking and caution about evaluating claims made by adultery correspondents, please take a look at Andrew Strickler's piece highlighting the sharp dissonance between Kristen's unflattering description of the Jersey Shore and the awesome, awesome awesomeness of the actual Jersey Shore. I don't believe Dupré should feel compelled to deflect or soften or in any way defend her personal reputation, and I wish her hard work and success in whatever path she chooses to take. But just because the bluenoses are ganging up on you is no excuse for dumping on the Garden State.

Theodore Pedersen, the Scarlet Knight now at the center of the toothache-probingly annoying-but-compelling McGreevey saga, emerges as a 29-year-old philosopher. As he tells America's finest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger:

"[Dina Matos McGreevey]'s trying to make this a payday for herself. She should have told the truth about the three of us." Pedersen did not say if he was gay or bisexual and only described having contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts. He also said he never knew for sure if McGreevey was gay.

"I had heard the rumors in circles outside of work," he said. "In hindsight, there might have been light interest (in me), but it didn't seem like he was gay. It did enhance their sexual relationship having me be a part of it."

Even casual Savage Love readers will recognize that the tripartite alignment alluded to here does not dispose of the question of any participant's permanent sexual orientation, if permanent sexual orientation does in fact exist. The Star-Ledger quotes a four-sentence passage from Matos McGreevey's book which is equally nebulous on the matter:

In her memoir, Matos McGreevey says little about the sex life she had with her husband, except to say that it never gave her any reason to doubt he was straight.

"The sex was good," Matos McGreevey wrote.

It's worth noting that both Matos McGreevey and Pedersen could both be telling the truth (at least as quoted here; I have not read Silent Partner, so I don't know if she makes any falsifiable claims about specific romantic activities). In fact, more credit to Matos McGreevey if it is true, for trying to make the most of her mate's special interests — though others may take a less tolerant view than I do, particularly when full custody of a child is at issue. At Matos McGreevey's request, Pedersen has given a sealed deposition in the McGreeveys' divorce case, reports the Star Ledger, which also quotes Pedersen's useful seduction tips:

"The more we spend time with each other, the more we begin to trust each other with non-professional things," he said. "That relationship