Local Foolishness, Part 2

"Part 2" looks strange above "Part 1," doesn't it? Bad planning on my part; if part 2 is posted after part 1, it shows up first. I should've remembered.

Speaking of remembering: life is strange; every play that's cast in this county draws from the same short list of actors; and do you remember Ms. Amy Sorrell? The Official First Amendment Martyr? If you live here, you probably do; she's the high-school journalism teacher who, as all right-thinking folk know, was cruelly harassed by the Neanderthals of East Allen County Schools over a small difference in opinion about how a school newspaper should be run, and whether a teacher should be required to teach what she was hired to teach. As it turned out, EACS didn't fire her, as I suspect they should have; instead, they reassigned her to a different high school and a different subject area, for a while at least.

To my surprise, though, Ms. Sorrell will indeed be teaching journalism this school year -- for a different employer: Keystone Schools, which is the former Fort Wayne Christian School. The reason that it's the "former" is that Fort Wayne Christian School, sick with debt, was taken over in what amounted to bankruptcy by a Mr. Don Willis, who is one of Mr. Kelty's two wealthy friends from the post below which should have been the post above, which is where we came in. See? Different play ... same players. Mostly, anyway.

Based on her quote from the news story, Ms. Sorrell may have a brief but intense career at Keystone. Still, as the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "It's a full life, and a merry one." I think he was being a little bit sarcastic ... as am I.

Local Foolishness, Part 1

I live in the Fort Wayne (Indiana) area, but not within the city itself. So, I've mostly ignored their upcoming mayoral election -- after all, it's not as if I'm in any danger of voting in the exercise-in-futility, and it's also not as if there were a dog in that fight [pace, Michael Vick] for whom I could cheer. These days, though, it's pretty hard to ignore, if you're within 50 miles or so. It seems that the GOP candidate, Mr. Matthew Kelty, was made to do the perp walk yesterday. Not to go into the (ho, hum!) dreadful details, he was indicted for fraudulent campaign finance reporting, for recklessly commingling funds, and for perjury. What it boils down to is that Mr. Kelty reported having lent money to his own primary campaign, when it turns out that the money that was lent had just been lent to him by a couple of his wealthy friends (or maybe just one of them -- I'm not sure, and seriously don't care).

Now, it seems to me that, especially in the past decade or so, the primary difference between Allen County, Indiana and Cook County, Illinois is simply one of scale. The county of my residence seems to be honeycombed with regulatory boards whose members are relatives of prominent businessfolk being regulated by said boards, with booster campaigns for questionable local projects manned equally by our noble public servants and by the contractors who stand to reap the swag, by those who purchase property on behalf of the city in secret and only afterward even discuss whether the property is objectively worth any significant fraction of the price paid. In short, it stinks like a 'possum that was hit by a car a week ago on a county road in the August heat, swelled up like a leather balloon, and went BANG in the noonday sun.

Mr. Kelty's primary opponent was a fellow who's operated for a long time in this dirty environment, and his general-election opponent is another such. Not that I'm suggesting that Mr. Kelty was a prospective breath-of-fresh-air; my tentative reading of him is an outsider who wants to be an insider, not a principled warrior who's come to lay siege to the Den of Evil. He spoke against the current corrupt boondoggle (Harrison Square, for those who know what that is), but went on to speak favorably of alternative local boondoggles. He seemed to know that private individuals who own bars should be able to decide whether smoking inside such places is congenial or not, but he also vaguely threatened a great cover-it-up crusade against the local mammary bars, something for which I criticized him here. He's said to be "pro-life" ... but if he was getting arrested around here back in 1989-90 with me and others, I don't remember seeing him. In summary: not someone in whom I detect consistent principles that I share.

Still, his current troubles are instructive in a couple of ways. First, I think we're seeing how the corrupt-on-a-small-scale machine in this county 'splains to an outsider that he's going to stay an outsider. If being hauled off to the county lockup in bracelets don't convince youse, Kelty, we might hafta get rough wit' ya, and don't nobody want none-a dat, OK? Secondly, when anyone is charged with "fraudulent campaign finance reporting," or "recklessly commingling funds," we see how far divorced the concepts of "wrong" and "illegal" have become. The idea that the same thief class who are robbing the taxpayers of the county by bulldozing the practically-new existing baseball stadium only to toss up another in a different part of town are accusing someone else of impropriety involving money freely given to him ... well, it boggles the mind.

Be sure to vote, now, you good Fort Wayne takaru. Voting changes things, you know.

What Do Rats Do About Sinking Ships?

They, uh, let's see ... they ... man the pumps? Patch the holes? See that the women and children are safe?

No, it's none of those. I'm trying to remember ...

Oh, that's right! They jump off!

Well, see you later, Turd Blossom. Don't let the doorknob molest your fundament on the way out.

Maybe We Should Rethink This

I seem to recall advertising in the late 1960s for the film "Rosemary's Baby" in which the announcer told us: "There's something wrong with Rosemary's baby ... it's ALIVE."

Well, I see that the nightmare golem that haunts the U.S. Naval Observatory, along with various other undisclosed locations, remains unquiet:

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn't clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

The murderous chickenhawk stirs again. It makes me wonder whether all of today's allegedly miraculous medical technology is really an entirely good idea. Take the pacemaker/defibrillator, for example. If not for that gadget, the world might be a much safer place today.

Revisiting the Days of My Misspent Youth

It's Friday evening ... how about a little soothing and completely nonpolitical musical art? Relax, and enjoy with me one of the very best things that happened in the 1970s ...

Meet the New Boss ... Same As the Old Boss

As if any were needed, more evidence of the bipartisan nature of the War Party:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama found himself embroiled in a new foreign policy flap with rival Hillary Clinton on Thursday, this time over the use of nuclear weapons.

Obama ruled out the use of nuclear weapons to go after al Qaeda or Taliban targets in Afghanistan or Pakistan, prompting Clinton to say presidents never take the nuclear option off the table, and extending their feud over whether Obama has enough experience to be elected president in November 2008.

So, we see that Mrs. Clinton has her imperial bona fides in order: it would clearly be naive and irresponsible to assure anyone that the tasty little morsels of flaming hell we're offering to chuck into Pakistan will be limited to temperatures less than, say, 5000 Kelvins or so. Now let's check in with her chief rival, the post-racial darling of progressives everywhere:

That position came a day after Obama vowed he would be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan with or without the approval of the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Obama struck the tough tone after Clinton accused him of being naive and irresponsible for saying in a debate last week he would be willing to meet without preconditions the leaders of hostile nations Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela in his first year in office.

[ ... ]

"If we had actionable intelligence about the existence of high-level al Qaeda targets like Osama bin Laden, Senator Obama would act and is confident that conventional means would be sufficient to take the target down," [Obama spokeswoman Jen] Psaki said. "Frankly we're surprised that others would disagree."

Even in the late summer of 2007, Sen. Obama is declaring in public, with great big grownups watching and listening, that he's at least as much a cowboy as Dubya ever pretended to be. Of course, it's a safe bet that he, like Dubya, will "lead" from the rear -- from that cozy little firebase on the Potomac.

Keep in mind that the Conventional Wisdom assures us that one of these appalling clowns will be the forty-fourth president of this used-to-be republic. At this point, it appears likely that either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama will oppose the swaggering crossdresser Rudy Giuliani for that office a year from now. And the Conventional Wisdom also tells us that the mushmouthed and cowardly weasel G.W. Bush has probably seen to it that no one who bears the GOP affiliation is likely to be elected to anything more significant than a rural county commission anytime soon. And, even if we grant Gotham's Transvestite Tyrant a realistic chance, then the next Decider will be one of three wannabe warmongers whose "positions" (they have, I am sure, no actual beliefs or convictions) on America's conduct in the world are mutually indistinguishable.

Don't forget: voting changes things. You can't complain if you don't vote. And Santa Claus is comin' to town, too.