The Radical Middle

(Light-Up) Notes From a Friday Afternoon

Chad — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:53:00 GMT

(sparkling the season of my mind)

For your consideration: another curious collection of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn’t make it into a full-length post this week...

• First, a Programming Note: Part 4 of the Let’s Talk About the Students So We Don’t Have to Talk About Our Own Budgets Money Series — this one digging even deeper into the billion-dollar war chests of two of our local, (ahem) not-for-profit universities — will appear here Tuesday. That way you’ll have at least two full days after reading it to regain your appetites in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

• If you want to review or need to catch up, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

• Some interesting thoughts in the comment thread for yesterday’s post about political posturing on both sides of the aisle — or is that both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue? — over the upcoming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. More interesting thoughts arrived via email, including this one: We had friends over for dinner recently who live and die by the First Amendment. Talking to them really made me think about those freedoms and my interpretation of them in a new way. That is to say you can only define yourself as truly American when you accept the responsibility of the freedom to dedicate your entire life to screaming against and defeating [pick any side of an issue here], but when you allow your opponent the same dedication [and the same screaming] as his constitutional right.

• Though it would be nice if we could stop short of the screaming every once in a while, that last sentence absolutely nails it. And reminds us what a shame it is that so much of our time in America seems lately spent on attempts to silence, or marginalize, or demonize our political opponents, rather than to engage them head-on and, whether with a scream or even with a whisper, stick to the issues at stake.

• After Wednesday’s Ribbon Abuse Awareness Ribbon post, two different readers emailed to call my attention to this recent Onion item in which December is named National Awareness Month. It was kind of funny, I suppose. (The American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things made me smile.) But I thought it was even funnier when we made the same joke over at Carbolic Smoke Ball six months ago.

• Does anyone know what Sarah Palin is up to these days? I haven’t seen or heard anything about her in the news.

• Another day, another Swine Flu vaccine trouble/shortage/distribution failure story. I feel a full-length post on this subject coming on soon, but for now... We've had months' worth of lead time to prepare for this pandemic poseur of a Piggy Pox, and we still can't do anything right. If we ever get hit with a real, honest-to-goodness, spreads-like-wildfire strain of a deadly pandemic virus, we're toast.

• This will surely be part of that future post too, but as long as we're on the subject... The Bush Administration had a couple of days to prepare, couldn't get ice to New Orleans, and was (rightly) crucified for its failures and incompetencies. The Obama Administration had months to prepare, still seems to have no adequate plan for distributing the H1N1 vaccine to people who do not work on Wall Street, and no one's making a peep. Where all the Katrina criers are now? If this failure had occurred under President Bush, we never would have heard the end of it. And rightly so.

• Though I was trying not to pay attention to the annual, inevitable stories about Light Up Night Preparations — KDKA News: You Could Set Your Watch, or Your Calendar, By Us! — I couldn’t help but look up from the laptop last night when one of the event’s organizers declared that people won’t want to miss Santa’s Fireballs. Which will be followed, no doubt, by Rudloph’s Tracer Fire and Mrs. Claus’s Mushroom Cloud.

• You know, because nothing quite says Christmas like flaming artillery fired at trees hung from downtown office buildings.

• If Osama bin Laden really wants to attack another U.S. city, he or one of his minions should sneak into the country and try to get the gig as next year’s Light Up Night Santa. They could rocket-launch at least two or three missiles at downtown buildings before anyone caught on.

• While we’re on the subject of fireballs and Christmas trees... This week’s best bit of Useless Information: The bark of a redwood tree is fireproof. Fires that occur in a redwood forest take place inside the trees.

• Is there a more durable video game franchise — or any kind of franchise, for that matter — than Super Mario Bros.? The series that sold over 175 million games and helped sell more than 200 million game systems is back and (almost) as good as ever with New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The boys and I have been playing it for five days, were hooked after the first five minutes, and will likely still be playing it after five years. As Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Vary rightly observes: It’s a testimony to the Mario formula’s sturdy construction that after Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario 64 DS, New Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Galaxy, and now New Super Mario Bros. Wii, saving the princess and breaking bricks with your fist still hasn’t lost its charm.

• And that’s not even mentioning the Super Mario Kart series, which may be the most compulsively playable — or at least the most compulsively re-playable — video games ever.

• Lord knows I’ll be longing for a few of those power-ups, and at least a red shell or two, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike tomorrow. I’ll be heading East for a couple of days, but I’m taking my laptop with me. So if there’s anything interesting to report, I’ll be sure to post it here. Until then — keep an eye out for Santa’s Smart Bombs Tomahawks Fireballs...

Khalid and the Kangaroo Court

Chad — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:25:00 GMT

(not when, but if )

There are some mornings when I read a news item and make it through a paragraph or two, and then a couple of lines leap off the page or the screen, bury themselves into my brain, and do not uproot until I write about them. An idea, a quotation, a quotidian leap of logic. Something that stands out from the sense or the reason or the order and demands to be set straight.

And then there are mornings like this one, when I read a news item and don’t even make it through a sentence, much less a paragraph, before those little burrs take hold. And then I keep reading, and the thoughts and the wonders and the outrages just keep coming, cascading one after the other, from all sides and in all sizes, until I can barely believe what I’m reading. Before long, it feels like a Twilight Zone episode, filtered through The Matrix, mashed-up on Meet the Press. And there I sit, alone at my kitchen table, hoping that Rod Serling or Laurence Fishburne or Tim Russert will show up, pour some black milk into a white cup, and tell me that I have, indeed, entered another dimension.

Like this one...

Republican senators confronted Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday over his decision to try the Sept. 11 terrorism suspects in civilian court.

Republican senators opposing a Democratic Attorney General makes sense, of course, but that last bit — the opposition to trying men accused of plotting to commit murder on American soil in an American court — portends trouble.

Where else should we try them? In The People’s Court? Or in a kangaroo court, perhaps?

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, expressed certainty that they will be found guilty and executed.

I had to read that one three times.

The first time I got to the end of the sentence, I had to go back to the beginning to make sure it said President Barack Obama, not President George W. Bush.

The second time I got to the end of the sentence, I went back to the beginning again, just to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally conflated two sentences, or that my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, or that I hadn’t come down with some sort of political or ideological dyslexia.

By the third time I got to the end of the sentence, I was confident that I’d read it correctly. Even as I was trying in vain to wrap my head around the notion that the President of the United States, a scholar and professor of constitutional law who earlier this year — twice, in fact, thanks to Justice Stuttering John Roberts — had placed his hand upon a Bible and sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and by extension all the legal protections for which it provides the bedrock foundation, was declaring that people who had not yet gone to trial, who had not yet set one foot in a courtroom nor heard one word spoken either in their prosecution or in their defense, would surely be found guilty. And then executed. For crimes they have so far only been accused of committing.

I decided that President Obama must surely have been misrepresented, or at least unfortunately paraphrased, and so found the strength to carry on.

Mr. Holder did not go as far as Mr. Obama did in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, though the nation's top prosecutor said he was confident that justice would be delivered to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

I would expect Mr. Holder, as the nation’s top prosecutor, to express confidence in the case and especially in the prospects of justice, no matter the outcome, being served to the accused plotters. Of course, I would also expect the President to respect the notions of a fair trial and of innocence until proven guilt. So bravo, on principle, to Mr. Holder.

"I think you've made a fundamental mistake here," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a military lawyer who has served active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Mr. Holder. "You have taken a wartime model that will allow flexibility when it comes to intelligence gathering, and you have compromised this country's ability to deal with people at war with us, by interjecting into the system the possibility that they may be given the same constitutional rights as any American citizen," he said.

Now we have a United States Senator, also a military lawyer, complaining that men accused of a crime in the United States of America might actually be afforded the rights provided by the United States Constitution and all the laws that follow upon it. We also have the spectacle, by now all-too-familiar, of a Republican (so-called) defender of the constitution defending only the parts of it he likes, and applying them only to the people he likes. Which is, of course, just what our Founding Fathers intended.

(No, really. The penultimate draft of the Preamble actually read: ...secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, as long as our Posterity is cool and agrees with our own Political positions, do ordain and establish...)

Also submerged in that cocktail of irony and hypocrisy is the notion, as capricious as it is untenable, that our Senators can declare war the same way our Mayor declares taxable privilege: at any time, and always to our own narrow advantage. It is a cheap rhetorical trick, turned to ill effect by charlatans and tin patriots who would have us believe that a war is little more than a conspiracy of attackers, and even less than a legal objection.

Mr. Holder said he foresaw no judicial obstacles to convicting the five terrorism suspects and putting them to death, though he acknowledged that prosecutors will have to persuade jurors. "I do not see any legal impediments to our seeking the death penalty," the attorney general said. "We will obviously have to convince a jury of 12 people that the death penalty is appropriate."

More points to Mr. Holder, whose steadfast grip on the principles of American jurisprudence were the only parts of this article preventing me from setting fire to my morning paper, and to my copy of the Constitution, and setting out for the Canadian border.

When the president was asked whether he understood why some people might take offense at the decision [to hold a federal trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], which Mr. Holder announced last week, Mr. Obama told NBC News: "I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him."

So much for the misrepresentation. Or the unfortunate paraphrase. And so much for the strength to carry on.

Because here, in a direct quotation, is a President of the United States not named George W. Bush, sounding an awful lot like a President named George W. Bush, declaring conviction and execution for a trial that has not yet begun in untoward whens, not uncertain ifs.

Mr. Obama hasn't shown this much confidence in the uncompleted, nor this much concern for an empty court, since he filled out his NCAA Tournament bracket. Tyler Hansbrough and the rest of his Tar Heel co-conspirators had little problem with their execution last March, but at least they were expected to earn it.

Mr. Obama, a former law professor, appeared to realize immediately that such a statement risks harming the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial. "What I said was people will not be offended if that's the outcome," he added. "I'm not prejudging" the verdict.

Here again, I had to double-check, just to be sure that I was, in fact, reading about President Obama, and not about his immediate predecessor.

President Bush, you’ll recall, often seemed to forget that such things as audio and video recording devices, including the ones aimed perpetually at him, exist. And that, when properly applied, they can even be used to verify whether you actually said the things you claim to have said. Mr. Obama, who has made a chief, and chiefly wise, tenet of his presidency that it should run as far as possible away from the unfortunate legacy of his predecessor, would do well to look once more over his shoulder, or at least into the cameras ahead of him, and learn this valuable lesson.

Because what he said he said is not what he said.

I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him

is not the same as, nor able to be mistaken for

People will not be offended if that’s the outcome.

Just as two wrongs do not make a right, two whens surely do not make an if. Either way — and so in both ways — President Obama is in the wrong. And should be reminded.

Just as he should be reminded that another of his immediate predecessor’s most constant and discordant failings was an inability to admit, and then a steadfast refusal to apologize for, any of the mistakes he made or said. If Mr. Obama misspoke in that first instance — and I, as well as Rod Serling, Laurence Fishburne, Tim Russert, and all the Founding Fathers now halfway to rolling over in their graves do fervently hope — he should have acknowledged it. And then made amends for it.

A busy, over-burdened President who misspoke on a core tenet of his country’s belief system is surely preferable to a prickly, under-critical President who can not admit his own mistake. And both are preferable to a President, or to a Senator, or to anyone else for whom whens are greater than ifs, guilt comes before innocence, and trials, even of (alleged, but likely) homicidal sociopaths, serve the cogs of political posturing before the wheels of criminal justice.

Cry Me a Ribbon

Chad — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:53:00 GMT

(or three)

While we’re on the subject of the suspect advertisement of even more suspect causes...

...a Facebook Friend and regular TRM Reader got fired up and fired off a status update this morning that laments the grating, garrulous ubiquity of magnetic cause ribbons. The impetus was a fully festooned SUV he’d seen on his way home from work yesterday — his favorite pair: If You Ain’t a Steelers Fan, You Ain’t **** (synonym for feces, rhymes with wit) and Choose Life! — but the whole, long-since cliched phenomenon came in for heavy, and deserving, dose of scorn.

Because I thought the rant was funny, and because I tend to be extra cheeky when sitting alone at a computer screen just after 7am, I suggested what seemed to me an ideal protest: The Ribbon Abuse Awareness Ribbon.

Moved by the notion and rallied to the cause, he took me up on it. I incorporated some commenters’ feedback, modified the design, and...

...voila! The best cause-ribbon I’ve ever seen. (Well, except for this one.)

And I think we’re on to something here. This could be the start of a whole new counter-movement. In fact, I can already see the signs:

END THE RIBBON ABUSE RALLY.

No, wait...

The Rallying Cry

Chad — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:50:00 GMT

(and the editors weep)

As I was driving through Oakland this afternoon, I saw a flyer with a headline that read:

END THE FEDERAL RESERVE RALLY

And it made me wonder: are they holding a rally to end the Federal Reserve, or a rally to end the rally to end the Federal Reserve?

I’m not sure I could support either one. But I might be down with a rally to end the rally to end the rally to end the Federal Reserve. And I would most definitely support an End the Indeterminate Syntax Rally.

No matter how you read it.

Self-Flame-Out

Chad — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:15:00 GMT

(policing the scanners)

The folks who designed and oversee the self-checkout system at Giant Eagle could surely learn a thing or three from the people who designed and oversee the self-checkout system at Home Depot.

Even if I'm only buying a couple of things at the Eagle, it takes me five minutes to get through the process, thanks to technology that is apparently powered by a souped-down combination of old 386s and gerbils on exercise wheels. If I only have a couple of items at Home Depot, I'm in and out so fast the security cameras have barely had time to register my existence.

And don't even get me started on the accuracy and efficiency of the scales. I can mix and match a couple of two-by-fours, a can of paint, and a two-penny nail, and the Home Depot sensors pick 'em all up and send me on my merry way in seconds. But try to buy a bottle of soda and a couple of sprigs of rosemary at Giant Eagle, and you'll be in line for six weeks, waiting for a slack-jawed customer-service-tron to come back from the break room and reset your checkout screen half a dozen times.

I bought three items at Giant Eagle last week, and it took almost four minutes to complete the transaction; I once bought a three-foot fluorescent light bulb at Home Depot, used my check card, got cash back, and was walking through the parking lot in less than 45 seconds.

It's obvious that the folks who designed the Giant Eagle technology cared about, even as they did not perfect, the programming behind it. It's equally obvious that the folks who designed the Home Depot technology cared about, and then set out to accommodate, the people who use it. The difference between the two makes me nuts.

It’s almost enough to make me forgo eating and just do lots of home improvement projects instead.

Money, Pt. 3

Chad — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:42:00 GMT

(share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie)

Just to recap: The Mayor, needing to fill a $15 million hole in a city budget he has for two-years touted as structurally balanced, decides to go after the non-profits by going after the universities. He decides to go after the universities, at least two of which have amassed endowments somewhere between the GDPs of Guyana and Suriname, by going after their students. And he does so with his now-trademark mix of impudent bluster and frat-boy dismissiveness.

In the process, however — just as, my grandfather assured me, a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while — The Mayor does manage to make one good point:

"There isn't an institution in this city in the last five years that hasn't raised tuition, and in each and every case, the tuition hike has been far greater than 1 percent...

...Mr. Ravenstahl later presented charts showing annual 4 to 6 percent tuition hikes and fee increases.

"If that increase, that $1,000 increase [this year] at Carlow and $1,300 increase at Carnegie Mellon University, didn't ruin education in Pittsburgh, certainly our 1 percent tax won't ruin education in Pittsburgh," he said.

The last line is inelegant at best. More sarcastic condescension from an administration that, like all third-rate bullies, prefers to wisecrack and run in the face of a real challenge, then content itself with beating up on people who have neither the power nor the political will to resist, much less to fight back.

Still, that line cuts a rather sharp contrast to the defense, mounted by the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education, that The Mayor’s Student Tax undercuts local schools’ selfless devotion to cost-containment:

"We're all about helping the students to receive affordable, accessible education," said Dr. Hines, after a news conference of college and university leaders. What would be the first tuition levy in the nation, "takes away our competitive advantage in attracting students to this area."

I’ve already noted the rank absurdity of this claim, especially when it comes to Carnegie Mellon, the Council’s most prestigious and expensive member: an extra $430 is really going to be the deal-breaker, the financial straw that breaks the Tartans’ back, for a university that draws students to the area with the promise of a $53,660 annual bill?

Is that extra $135 a year really going to take away the competitive advantage that Pitt’s $22,000 a year price tag now provides?

Is an additional cost between $135 and $430 a year really going to jeopardize the affordability and accessibility of higher education in Pittsburgh? Really?

Of course not. But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that it will. Let’s pretend that an extra $100 to $450 per year will change everything, and that we really have reached the tipping point of higher ed affordability in Pittsburgh.

How do you think we got here? Through an escalating series of public sector taxes and fees and city government opportunism? Or through an escalating series of tuition hikes and endowment cries and room-and-board increases from the only institutions in America less willing to cut costs and control spending than the federal government?

Consider Carnegie Mellon for a moment.

Back in February, the university issued a press release that positively crowed about its smallest [tuition] increase in 34 years, and its noble efforts to help ease the recession’s effect on families. That increase, Carnegie Mellon’s lowest since 1975, was 2.94%.

That’s not even counting the concurrent 2.89% increase in room and board. (In a stunningly bad bit of double-speak, the university declared: Costs of room and board were contained at a rate of 2.89 percent. Only to bureaucrats, PR flacks, and particularly absurd M*A*S*H characters could containment mean adding three percent.)

One more time, just for the hell of it: a 2.94% tuition increase was the university’s SMALLEST. IN THIRTY-FOUR YEARS.

The University of Pittsburgh this year raised out-of-state tuition by 2.5%, in-state tuition by 4%. During this challenging period of financial stress nationwide and particularly in the Commonwealth, we at Pitt are especially mindful of the difficulties faced by our students and their families in setting tuition levels this year, said Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg. Which makes you shudder to think what the increases might have been if not for this challenging period of financial stress nationwide and particularly in the Commonwealth but apparently not in the homes of tuition-paying parents.

Tuition at Carlow University, presided over by the same Dr. Hines who fretted so much about affordability, accessibility, and Pittsburgh’s competitive advantage, rose a full 5% this year. Room and board also rose a full 5%.

That 1% isn’t looking too bad now, is it?

Well, okay. It’s still looking bad. It’s still looking like an easy, lazy, cowardly idea. But it’s looking and sound no worse than the equally easy, lazy, hypocritical response the universities have bubbled forth in its wake.

If our local universities are all about affordable, accessible education, then what are they doing, really, to hold the line on their own tuition?

Carnegie Mellon wants to fight the city over $430 next year, but it had no problem raising — and, in fact, bragging about raising — its students’ tuition by $1,150 this year. Carlow is suddenly incensed about its students being charged an extra $200 next year, but had no problem charging them an extra $996 this year. Pitt’s worried about its students paying an extra $135 next year, but jacking their tuition an extra $512 (for in-state students) and $562 (for out-of-state students) this year was perfectly fine.

Anyone think the universities will forgo more increases like that next year, whether or not The Mayor's tax comes to pass? Affordability and accessibility are important, I suppose, as long as their own ledgers are full.

Anyone else rankled, or at least mildly agitated, by that so-naked-and-slimy-it-may-as-well-be-a-newborn-baby hypocrisy? I suppose it’s the higher ed equivalent of Nobody hits my brother but me: Nobody fleeces our students but us.

If the universities really are worried about affordability and accessibility, shouldn't they be worrying a little more about their own bottom lines and the ever-growing expenses that pad them? And if they’re really worried about their Pittsburgh’s competitive advantage, couldn't they just step up and offer a 1% tuition credit, or rebate, or Pittsburgh Privilege Bonus Bucks Refund, or however the hell they want to brand it, to offset this onerous tax?

What our university administrators could do, instead of hiding behind the amount of taxes they collect and pass through to the city without actually paying, is full well admit that they don’t pay anywhere near their fair share, and then step up and agree to pay the 1% tax themselves. Or at least agree to make some sort of stepped-up, voluntary contribution. They would, in one fell swoop, look like heroes in the eyes of the city, their current students, and their prospective students. And The Mayor and his administration would still look like the villains.

It would plug the hole in the budget. It would set a nice precedent for increased participation from Pittsburgh’s non-profits. And it would spare us all any more nauseating spins on the hypocrisy-go-round.

(In B.S. college counseling speak, that would be what's known as a win-win-win. )

Yeah, I know. The universities would still pass the cost on to their students — just as they’ve been doing with every other inflated, excessive, too-precious-to-cut-or-make-accountable cost they’ve amassed in the past couple of decades. And so it would just be more business-as-usual on the campuses of University, Inc.

Unless, of course, the universities finally decided to get serious about their own runaway budgets. Or unless a couple of them happened to be sitting on billions of profits dollars for which the only real and practical purpose is their own gluttonous accumulation.

More on that, and a few other equally maddening tidbits, in our fourth (and final?) installment later this week...

Olly Olly Oxen Free

Chad — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:30:00 GMT

(for a day)

Since the home office put up the pay wall and launched the premium site a couple of months ago, I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen — including my patrons and colleagues on the far end of the Boulevard of the Allies — that PG+ needed to do two things: add more content, and offer a free day. All along, they’ve been doing the former. Today, they do the latter.

If you haven’t yet plunked down the cash for a year (or a month) of the Plus Side, here’s your chance to check it out and see what you’ve been missing. Kick the tires. Look under the hood. Take it for a test drive and don’t come back until long after dark.

Here are a few sites you might want to see along the way:

Mackenzie Carpenter’s Omnivore
I’ve plugged this feature many a time already here at TRM, because it’s one of the site’s best and most interesting features, and because Mackenzie has been cheeky enough to make me a recurring guest on the show.

I recommend every droll and entertaining episode, but epecially the one on September 16th, when PG legends Brian O’Neill and John Allison (outfitted for battle and for biking!) debate yet another renovation of Market Square. And, of course, the four times I pop up to complain about one thing or another:

Today’s Edition: The Driving While Texting Rant

November 11th: The Gun Debate Rant

October 21st: The Wild Thing Theater Rant

September 9th: The News Anchor Panel Discussion

Dennis Roddy’s Journal
I said it earlier this week, and I’ll say it again: if you miss Dennis Roddy’s column(s) as much as I do, then this feature alone is the worth the PG+ price of admission. Blog entries, essays, photos, videos and more — all from the best writer and observer in Pittsburgh.

The Feed
The catch-all blog on the main page, this feature gets updated constantly and creatively. It serves as a kind of directory for what else is hot and happening behind the pay wall, but it’s at its best when it’s calling your attention to, and then gently riffing on, the cultural artifacts of the day.

There’s plenty of other good stuff at PG+ — insider sports, rough drafts of political cartoons by the great Rob Rogers, Entertainment-Book-style perks for members — but I’ll let you poke around and discover other gems for yourself.

There’s no doubt that the Pluse Side is a work in progress, but it’s come a long way in the first two months. I’ve gone from checking in once or twice a week (at most) to checking in once or twice a day (at least). If the folks in charge keep adding talent and features apace, the site could blossom into something truly great and special.

For the rest of the day, for free, you can see how they’re doing so far. And that it's already worth paying for.

De Doo Doo Doo

Chad — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:28:00 GMT

(is all i want to give to you)

Spotted on the shelf of a gift store at the Grove City outlets:

I'd say this gives whole new meaning to the term gag gift.

Notes From a Friday (the 13th) Afternoon (Part 3)

Chad — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:25:00 GMT

(terrorizing the teenagers of my mind)

For your consideration: another curious collection of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn’t make it into a full-length post this week...

• That's right, folks. For the third time this year, the Notes fall on a Friday the 13th. I’m still trying to decide whether to be pleased or frightened. Either way, I survived the first two, which is more than can be said for any character in the history of that eternal, and now eternally suffering, horror film franchise. (Well, except for one.)

• Quick programming note: Part 3 of the Student Tax posts — this one digging deeper into the shameful, and often intellectually dishonest, response by some of our local universities — will appear here Monday. (If you want or need to catch up, see Part 1 and Part 2.)

• In the comment thread for Part 2, an exchange I had with reader CP made me realize, in a startling moment of both moral clarity and political perversion, that The Mayor’s Student Tax proposal does not go nearly as far as it should. I mean, why stop at college kids? Why not extend the Fair Share Shakedown Tax to high schoolers, middle schoolers, elementary schoolers? Hell, why not go after all those little tax delinquents and financial miscreants in daycare too? What are they paying for the services they receive from the city?

• Take my boys, for example. They both take advantage of the privilege of getting an education in Pittsburgh, they both reap the benefits of many city services, yet — damn those child labor laws! — neither one is old enough to work or, therefore, pay taxes of their own. I mean, sure, Wendy and I pay taxes, but so do our next door neighbors, and they don’t have any kids. Which means that they’re essentially helping to subsidize our freeloading offspring. Shouldn’t Adam and Ethan pay their fair share too?

• Note to Yarone Zober: When you’re done going after the college kids, tax the kids at Linden and Allderdice next!

• And don’t even get me started on all those brats who go to private school...

• One of my most fervent hopes for the week is that someone, anyone, videotaped last night's Time Person of the Year discussion. I’d love to see footage of The Mayor defending his choices of Ted Kennedy (because he died?), Michelle Obama (because he got to meet her?), and Dan Rooney (well, duh).

• The intrepid and always-plugged-in Bram Reichbaum reports this morning that The Mayor, via his brand-spanking-new Twitter feed, reports that two leading contenders for the Time (ahem) award are the unemployed American worker and Twitter. The former sounds like an interesting choice. The latter would make President Obama’s Nobel look like a wise and well-considered decision by comparison. And it would somehow manage to be an even bigger joke than that time three years ago when they gave it to me.

• Though I did look kind of cool on the cover.

• In fairness to the Mayor, I should point out that this news report makes it seem as if he were the most thoughtful and sensible person on the panel. When the competition includes Barbara Walters, Dr. Oz, and the Top Chef guy, that’s not exactly high praise, of course. But it’s still good to see.

• It is rare that I agree with Tom Sokolowski, and rarer still that I would want to agree with Jimmy Kimmel, but on the subject of the North Shore’s new pumice stone of a Fred Rogers statue, they are both spot-on. Mr. Sokolowski thinks the statue is neither beckoning nor warm, and therefore a poor representation of its subject. Mr. Kimmel says it makes the nicest man in the world look like a mud monster. Those two comments encapsulate everything I hate — and I do mean hate — about the statue. A tribute to Mr. Rogers, who had not the slightest hint of a hard edge to him, should not be rough and craggly and abrasive. Nor should it look like it might, when you’re not looking, rise up and eat your children.

• For just one dramatic study in contrast, compare the Mr. Rogers statue to the statue of Jim Henson at the University of Maryland College Park...

...which manages to be warm and inviting and welcoming to children (of all ages), capture the charm and essence and gentility of the man (and his Muppet), and also avoid the temptation, still uncomprehended by this writer, to make him the sculptural equivalent of a blowfish.

•

• (Yes, I left that last note intentionally blank. If hotels and office buildings can do it, so can I.)

• In the space of six days last week, my teams lost to Luke Ravenstahl, the New York Yankees, and the Dallas Cowboys. If Al Qaeda had come and attacked Squirrel Hill, the indignity would have been complete.

• The TRM Facebook Status of the Week (and Quite Possibly the Month) Award goes to the author — and he knows who he is — of this little gem: [Chad’s Friend] declares a war on bumper stickers. I don't care where some unknown driver vacations, how smart her kid or dog are, or for whom he voted in the last election. Now, if people begin to put bumper stickers on their cars that warn me that they often talk on their cell phones while they drive, or that they inexplicably prefer to drive in the passing lane and not pass anyone, then I am amenable to an armistice.

• The TRM Clairvoyant, But Not Quite Courageous Enough in His Predication Award goes to reader and commenter CP (also mentioned above), who, in the comment thread for the first installment of the Friday the 13th Notes, responded to the lowest point of the Pens' season, the late implosion against the Maple Leafs that sealed Michel Therrien's fate, thusly: Or we might look back three months from now and point to the Toronto loss as a catalyst that springboarded the team into a dominating stretch run. Doubt it, though. There is, as Lanny Frattare used to say, and as Dan Bylsma helped to prove, no doubt about it anymore.

• Ever wondered what Neil Young might sound like if he were covered by the Talking Heads? I never did either, even though I'm a huge fan of both artists. An online video I discovered this week of David Byrne doing a live, solo rendition of "Rockin' in the Free World" provides the answer: it would sound pretty darned good.

• And, finally... Another programming note: On Monday, the PG plans to drain the moat, lay down the drawbridge, and throw open the gates to the Plus Side. That means that, for One Day Only, you get to explore all the cool stuff behind the pay-wall — including my not-nearly-as-embarrassing-as-they-could-be appearances on Mackenzie Carpenter's Omnivore webcast. On Monday morning, I'll offer up links to all of the TRM cameo appearances, and at least a couple of other suggestions on what you'll want to check out. Stay tuned...

Money, Pt. 2

Chad — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:55:00 GMT

(grab that cash with both hands and make a stash)

On Tuesday, Part 1 of this series on the Dark Side of the Grant Street Moon considered one particularly shameless and laughable response from our local universities to The Mayor’s equally shameless and lamentable money grab from the wallets and pockets of their students. I’ll have much more to say about the universities’ lack of shame, lack of perspective, and lack of institutional (to say nothing of financial) self-awareness in Part 3, but for now, I want to focus on The Mayor’s lack of shame, lack of perspective, and lack of institutional (to say nothing of financial) self-awareness.

(Anyone detecting a pattern here...?)

As Rich Lord reports:

Mr. Ravenstahl, though, said the tax isn't just legal and fair, but essential.

"There is a tremendous amount of service that we provide already to these college students -- police protection, fire protection, building inspectors," Mr. Ravenstahl said, and it's time they helped pay for it.

If the tax is so essential, why wasn’t it necessary before now? You know, long before that magical $15 million hole suddenly appeared in the city’s budget? Wasn’t the city providing that tremendous amount of service to those college students last year? Or the year before? Or the decade before that? Did the city only just now begin providing police and fire protection to its college students?

And am I the only one who sees the irony in The Mayor’s solemn invocation of the city’s building inspectors, whose jobs would be a whole hell of a lot easier, and a whole hell of a lot more productive, had he not effectively gutted the Bureau of Building Inspection during his time in office. (See the City Controller’s December Audit and the State Board’s criticism this past June, after one year of inaction on its own report.)

The mayor's message to students and tuition-paying parents: "You have a role to play, and this is rather insignificant, in the grand scheme of what you pay.”

This is true, of course — $430 is but a drop in Carnegie Mellon’s $53,000-a-year bucket — but the condescension, the rank and sneering disregard for anyone who dare oppose his administration’s pronouncements, is typical, and also lamentable, of The Mayor’s approach to governance. From an office that works best with nuanced, empathetic authority, we get little but impudent bluster and frat-boy dismissiveness.

"I would ask those parents to look at the bills that they're currently paying, and ask those institutions where the fees are going for security, safety, transportation, orientation, initiation," he said, implying schools should roll back those "questionable" fees.

Speaking of frat-boy dismissiveness...

...don’t you just love that he attributes initiation fees to university administrators? If his general demeanor and lack of critical thinking have not been enough to convince you that his college experience extended little beyond the football field and the frat house, this conflation of joining a fraternity and matriculating at a university ought to bring you around.

It’s a small wonder he did not lament dues and kegger fees too.

And someone might want to remind The Mayor that helping to pay for your orientation program, your Campus Police presence, and your campus escort and shuttle bus service hardly seems questionable to the students — which is to say, all students — who benefit from those services. It isdebatable whether every Duquesne University student will somehow be served by the city's fire department. It is indisuptable that Duquesne's first-year students will be served by its orientation program.

The city's proposed addition to the school bill "falls right in line with orientation fees, with transportation and security fees, with lab fees" and more nebulous charges that colleges could reconsider, he said.

This from the chief executive of a city that charges a fee of $52 when a business wants to repair or alter a sign. That charges $41 a day for a community group to hold a carnival or a street fair. That charges $132 a year for a dance hall license, and then $35 for every dance it holds. That charges $242 a year for an establishment to house a jukebox. That charges $282 for an establishment to house a pool table. That...

...oh, you get the idea.

Now. To be fair to The Mayor, we should note that he does, in the midst of all this self-righteous silliness, make one mighty fine point:

"There isn't an institution in this city in the last five years that hasn't raised tuition, and in each and every case, the tuition hike has been far greater than 1 percent," Mr. Ravenstahl said.

Leave it to a guy well-versed in the hypocrisy of bogus political stances to be able to puncture someone else’s when he sees it. But puncture it he does.

I’ll blow it — and a whole lot of other university hypocrisy — wide open in Part 3 of this series. Stay tuned...