Everything I know about the Clintons, I learned in high school

On May 6, 2008 I voted in my local school board election. This was the first WCS board of education election in which I participated, since becoming a resident of the Warren Community Schools district in 1996. I suppose that makes me something of a slacker of among voters. Not to defend my inactions, but the school board elections in this community have at times been referred to in the local press at “stealth elections” because of their being scheduled “off the beaten path,” if you will, of August primaries and November general elections where virtually all other political questions of this jurisdiction are resolved. Combine the offbeat scheduling with the fact of the nonpartisan ballot, the dearth of press coverage of school board meetings and votes, and the normally miniscule level of participation in such elections, and I am a little informationally intimidated. The candidates are inevitably people I’ve never heard of. Since I’m (proud to be) child free, my social world rarely intersects the K-12 education community. One result is that I feel like an outsider when it comes to local public schools.

My participation this year is no doubt part of an abnormally high turnout due to the piggybacking of a Macomb County charter proposal to the Stealth Election Day agenda. I heard about this proposal in the local media only three days prior to the election. The local polity seems to have a penchant for slipping things other the rug.

In the alternative and lefty press, mostly during the halcyon 1990’s, I have also heard school board elections referred to as “stealth elections.” Among that faction of editorial opinion, it has been alleged that the careers of so-called “religious right” politicians are often launched in local school boards precisely because of the under-the-radar way in which these elections are administered in many school districts in many parts of America. I was always at least a little bit skeptical about such claims, but my experience Tuesday begs certain questions.

My polling place is C. S. Mott High School. Normally the voting takes place in a large room that appears to be either a gymnasium or a lunchroom. This time it was in the school library. Between the library entrance and the voter processing station was the ‘biography’ section of the library, which of course I browsed while waiting for my wife to finish voting. The following list represents the school library’s entire biographical holdings (barring possible books in circulation) on Bill Clinton:

Brown, Slick Willie;
Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton;
Coulter, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton;
Timper, Lake and Triplett, Year of the Rat;
Oakley, On the Make;
Tyrrell, Boy Clinton;
Lowry, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years;
Coulter, High Crimes and Misdemeanors;
Morris, Because He Could;
Tyrrell and anon., The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton

Here’s the entire biographical holdings on his wife:

Limbacher, Hillary’s Scheme;
Milton, The First Partner;
Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham;
Anderson, American Evita

I’m not a big fan of the Clintons, but I’m critical of them from the left. Neither that perspective, nor anything in the way of positive portrayals, appears to be available in this library. Certainly a school library would not be providing students with a representative sampling of the marketplace of ideas without featuring authors such as Ann Coulter, Dick Morris and the pre-enlightenment David Brock. That being said, the starkly monotone range of available perspectives on a particular subject suggests that a clique with an ideological agenda may have captured the school library acquisitions process here. It remains for me to research whether this results from a development in school board politics, patterns in the donation of books, voter and/or parent demands, or any of the other plausible means of stacking the library stacks.

“Without the proletarian Bad Cop of the USSR, the proletarian Good Cop of Social Democracy is doomed.”–JVS

“A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy–a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper–has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.”–Malcolm Gladwell

“I think it’s pretty healthy to be somewhat skeptical of government power, but only because it’s healthy to be somewhat skeptical of the power of any person, institution, or organization which has it in significant amounts.”–Sportin’ Life

“‘Terrorism’ has become a proprietary brand and the US government holds the copyright.”–War in Context

“Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false.”–Dale Carrico

“We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.”–John Perry Barlow, quoted by Cedwyn

“…the official definition of recession has become delinked from peoples’ actual experience. Right now, we’re in an economy with deteriorating employment and incomes, collapsing home prices, and business retrenchment. Is it also an economy in recession? Who cares?”–Paul Krugman, quoted by Jay Stevens

“On the other hand, as tens of millions of Chinese and Indians annually join Americans and Europeans in wanting their steaks and wines – and perhaps a bit of $4 gasohol from food crops to get them to the supermarket and back – the orders of magnitude start agreeing. What we are looking at is not an example of government meddling ruining a free market, as this is generally characterized. What we are seeing is a fundamental principal [sic] of any market at work – when you don’t have money, no one wants to sell you shit.”–the editors of The Poor Man

“As you no doubt remember, Cingular was co-owned by BellSouth and SBC, which had been Southwestern Bell and Ameritech, which before that had been Illinois Bell, Wisconsin Bell, Michigan Bell, Ohio Bell, and Indiana Bell. … A couple of years ago Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and renamed it Cingular, but then SBC bought AT&T and changed its own name to AT&T. Then that new AT&T bought BellSouth, changing its name to AT&T, making it only logical to change Cingular into AT&T.”–Stephen Colbert, quoted by Onnesha Roychoudhuri

“And like those vassals of old, we accept to be fleeced time and again for the betterment of those who already have more than plenty – piously accepting the lie that if the rich get richer, everybody else will benefit somehow in such prosperity.”–Mentarch, a. k. a. Pierre

“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”–Desmond Tutu, quoted by Elizabeth Schmitz

“If someone doesn’t have a job, they can’t pay their insurance. If they can’t pay their insurance, they lose their ability to register the car and their right to drive. If you can’t drive, in most places in the U.S., you’re really screwed in finding a job, because the public transit systems here generally suck.”–Skippus

“Any time believing a certain way is important, in my opinion, you’re dealing with brainwashing. And if it’s so important that, unless you have the correct beliefs, you’re going to hell, the stakes are raised considerably and the brainwashing is commensurably increased.”–John E. Lawrence

“Even the name ‘rational choice’ seems to have been run through a machine to soften the harshness of this science. When we realize that gamesmanship is still such a great part of game theory, by whatever name, then such choices may not seem so rational.”–WillSea

“I’ve said more than once that America’s most profound strategic casualty in the woebegone war on terror has been its information environment.”–Jeff Huber

“I’ve come to believe that January 2009 will resemble not so much a new beginning as it will a giant hangover, an empty wallet, and angry creditors not far behind.”–Mori Dinauer

“The cost in IMMOBILITY of our emphasis on personal (auto)mobility is rarely figured into calculations about standard of living/quality of life, maybe because the immobilized constituencies are so invisible in our society.”–Rachel May

“but this returns to the power problem: you have to have power to have a voice and in order to get power, your voice must be inline with all of the other powerful voices.”–Danah Boyd

I thought the past tense of “lead” was spelled “led.” In my recent offline reading of online content, I’ve noticed a tendency toward uses of “led” in this context being outnumbered by uses of “lead” by, let’s say, ten to one. Now I even see the “lead” spelling used utterly consistently (as if by editorial policy) at Progressive Historians, a website purporting to include folks with Ph.D.’s among its contributors.

This being said, the article linked from the above paragraph makes it plain that the Canadian government lead [sic] by S. J. Harper makes good on the promises implied by taking the “P” out of “PC.” It’s reminiscent of the purge of the moderates from the GOP in connection with the so-called Reagan Revolution.

Quotations with links

“They have to flatten the economy for the world to be flat.”–antu

“The trouble with the American Left is that it’s American.”–ddjango

“I have no problem with spy cameras or those who watch them. They have provided me an excellent opportunity to keep up my marksmanship skills.”–anon.

“If a cis woman’s life is completely opaque to me as a trans woman, then I fail to see how a cis woman could possibly understand my life.”–Lisa Harney

“In Westernspeak, the West nuking other countries does not qualify as the use of weapons of mass destruction.”–Paul Craig Roberts

“But wait you say, who cares about ‘idealism’ and ‘litmus tests’, you’ll vote for any democrat just so long as they can beat the repugs? (go blue team go! We’ll win the meaningless trophy of hollow authority this year!)”–R. Mildred

“You know those ‘Reagan Democrats’ we keep being told we have to move to the right to get back? Well, like Digby says, They Aren’t Democrats.”–Avedon Carol

“Sounds like the people at the DOJ didn’t get past the first chapter in their economics textbooks, to the part where it explains how barriers to entry are one of the primary impediments to a healthy market.”–David Alpert

“What’s all the fuss about this ‘digital rights management’ stuff? It’s about copyright holders making you into the ‘adversary’, and trying to control your use of products even after you’ve bought them, through technological means — backed up by laws and ‘inter-industry negotiations’:”–Seth David Schoen

“This video supports my long-held belief that political figures should be allowed in the media only when the clips are a minimum of five or ten minutes, unedited. Soundbites would be outlawed.”–Michael J.

“For Facebook or equivalent to really monetize beyond CPM (which has already proven to be weak) it will end up being an online equivalent to Amway and then people will quickly see that being pestered by tons of ‘friendly’ sales people is not a good bargain for having some basic communicaton tools.”–Bernard Lunn

“Why give away our secrets? Because if they stay secrets, we’re fucked.”–CrimethInc

“If I felt that someone else was mapping my conversions and the relationships they represented – and wasn’t prepared to have the same done to them, I would soon stop talking.”–Euan Semple

“What sesame street teaches is how to watch sesame street.”–Juliet Schor

“The second workshop on status was structured as a game where we were given gems that we had to trade to work our way up the status latter. It quickly became clear that some were born wealthier than others. I was a member of the poverty class. Realizing we would never win by getting money and realizing that whenever a member of our group did well, they were shipped off to another group, our group decided to aim for bottom, maximize happiness and conversation, and laugh at the other groups going crazy. The wealthier classes were much more invested in succeeding and one of the members from the upper-middle class nearly went ballistic over how the game was rigged and she wasn’t able to win. Gotta love a room full of Type A personalities. Anyhow, this provoked a fun conversation and my table got to talking about the status structures of badges (not unlike those at tech companies where there are permanents and contractors and temps and whatnot).”–Danah Boyd

Quotations with links

“The use of clustering parallels the rise of the relatively homogeneous suburbs. Government policies that created tight communities of like-minded people suddenly made it possible to corral voters who for all practical purposes resembled sheep in statistical holding pens. They could then be led to large concrete boxes that painlessly relieved them of their votes and allowed them to emerge as transformed as if from a shearing. In essence the suburbanization with its geographic sorting of races, income levels and tastes intersected with the rise of the computers that make cluster analysis possible.”–Ralph Brauer

“In order to be a ‘support-based hierarchy’ (which still seems like an oxymoron to me), wouldn’t the one who commands everyone else from the top of the hierarchy be the one who supports the most–not the one who is most supported?”–Jef Godesky

“We need more viable political viewpoints in the debate than merely “I’m for big biz and weathy” vs “I’m for big biz and wealthy but the poor folks don’t have to starve”.”–REkzkaRZ

“Right now, our choices are Right Wing and Supersized Right Wing with Extra Fries, and they only have to compete with each other. Any third party trying to move in on their territory can currently be banished by invoking the spectres of Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.”–Max Kaehn

“If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being.”–Barbara Ehrenreich

Quotations with links

“Economic Democracy is not just about capital that is technically owned by workers, it is not a form of worker capitalism over another group of workers.”–Tom Vouloumanos

“The only thing it takes to make a person disabled, after all, is a social expectation that some other kind of person is normal.”–abfh

“Taxes and unions got us out of the depression. Redistribution of income. Taxes on the rich, the money used to build infrastructure and provide good jobs, and unions to force the corporations to give raises and benefits. In a consumer economy you want more money in the hands of the consumers – not the rich. DUH!”–Dave Johnson

“Republicans only want schools to graduate young people ready to work, not to think critically and they have so denigrated public education for so long that it could be decades before the system recovers.”–Charles 2

“But something’s worth saying plainly that gets downplayed by Wall Street and other neo-liberal free-trade fans: Just as water seeks its own level, Indian foundry workers and other semi-skilled professions will enjoy a slow increase in wages and opportunities over the next 40 or so years as they approach some kind of parity with the West. We, on the other hand, will have to see a more precipitous drop in living standards in order to contribute to that journey to equilibrium point. When we get there, here will feel more like India than India will seem more like us.”–fouro

Quotations with links

“Before we turn all of America into a gated community, with a 700 mile steel fence running along the southern border, we should consider the mixed history of exclusionary walls.”–Barbara Ehrenreich

“…anarchists reject both privatisation and nationalisation.”–Anarcho

“Tired of Poll-Driven News Coverage of Elections, Instead of Issue-Driven News Coverage? Lie to a Pollster.”–Rex Frankel

“So, when my sweetie tells the Big Phone Company that his [sic] going to the Big Cable Company for Internet service, I just had to laugh. (Behind his back, of course. He’s pretty irritated.) I wish him luck on that one.”–Happy Chyck

“As far as state welfare goes, anarchists do not place it high on the list of things we are struggling against (once the welfare state for the rich has been abolished, then, perhaps, we will reconsider that).”–from the Anarchist FAQ

“I’ll believe ‘transhumanists’ who claim to advocate consensual therapeutic multiculture as I do when more of them show anything like real concern about the ways in which savagely unequal distributions of authority, resources, reliable information, and legal redress duress the actually existing scene of consent in the present.”–Dale Carrico

“In recent years, ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘national unity’ have usually meant meeting the GOP halfway, regardless of how far right it veers, with agreement an end in itself.”–Reg

“The poor are made to feel guilty and ashamed of their poverty, their illness and their unemployment, when they should be angry.”–Dave Pollard

“Shopping malls are full of security cameras, but many have signs at the entrance telling customers that no photography or video recording is allowed.”–David Brin

“The quadrennial political puppet show, highlighting not opposition but its appearance, is essential to keeping the captive-taking war machine running and to inoculating the American people from the viral knowledge that they themselves were first to be captured.”–James Carroll

“Thus, ‘economic freedom’ would mean freedom from the economy–from being controlled by economic forces and relationships.”–Herbert Marcuse, quoted by Jack Saturday

via seeking academia

Bold the statements that are true. Seen it everywhere…. Though this list is not all encompassing, it is still relevant

1. Father went to college (one semester)
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 (no really long-term lessons)
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child (dad’s an amateur artist)
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child (2-kid, 2-bedroom house, but part of childhood spent in makeshift bedroom in basement due to incompatibilities)
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course (high school curriculum, of course, was teaching to the test)
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school (at times I had garbage picked TV’s that worked)
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (still an air travel virgin at age 42)
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (mom involved us kids in family bookkeeping, we were aware of all the bills)

12/34

“… a long time ago I decided that there is no privacy in anything digital (which is both a beautiful and a terrifying thing, depending on how much you know about technology). Knowing a bit myself, but not quite enough, I’ve decided to try and flood the network with as much information about myself as possible in the naive and desperate hope that by creating more positive and truthful information I can counter whatever lies may someday be advanced against what I’m really up to.”–Chris Messina quoted by Brian C. Russell

“To the non-expert there seems to be an alarming freeness among economists to rather arbitrarily hold some things to be totally fixed and others to be totally elastic while a willingness to overlook that a lot of life is sticky, and no place more perhaps than in price.”–Bruce Webb

“9/11–the bad cop’s best friend (and it turns out there are a lot of bad cops.)”–Randolph Fritz

“Of course Aristide has been ‘polarizing’. That is like saying that two men kissing on the quad at Oral Roberts University is polarizing. If you don’t want to be polarizing figure in Haiti, just accept the continued super-exploitation of 95 percent of the population with equanimity. Despite being a priest, Aristide would have none of that.
“–Louis Proyect

“Just look at average nation-to-nation trade talks. ‘Cooperate to remain competitive’ ‘Remain competitive in a cooperative manner’ ???? That’s not going to work. Smashmouth competition is really not conducive to loving cooperation.”–Wingnut – MaStars

“I’m paraphrasing Bruce Sterling here, but if you give a totalitarian government a hammer, they’ll beat you on the head with it. If you distribute hammers to the population of a relatively free society, they’ll build houses. Modern information technologies are the hammers and we all have them (the digital divide notwithstanding) and so does the government. We need to be realistic about that and get on with the house-building.”–Bill Simmon

“A rough definition of money is ‘the ability to make other people work’.”–Borisas Cimbleris

“Another thing that the ‘local God’ learned to teach his disciples… is to ‘frown-down-upon’ layers BELOW any given layer… and think of those lower layers… as ‘lessers’ and ‘servants to your layer’. And… KEEP LAYERS BELOW YOURS BROKE AND SCRAMBLING FOR BUX… (good for dutifulness) and… MAKE THEM BLAME/FIGHT-WITH EACH OTHER ON THEIR OWN LAYER over the problem(s). “–Wingnut – MaStars

“The relationship between God and humanity is that of omniscient father and obedient child. Those personalities who broke out of that and displayed intellectual curiosity (Eve) or a certain brassy chutzpah (Lucifer) which I think of as indispensable qualities of a revolutionary (to say nothing of a sense of humor), certainly did not advance very far in God’s system.”–Stacia

“It’s hard to understand all this right-wing fury at the friggin’ CIA, for god’s sake. But throughout history, insane evil leaders have spent most of their time being insanely angry at the people who share the same evil goals but want to go about it in a more rational manner.”–Jonathan Schwarz