Proposals! With Emphasis!

Oklahoma State Senator Kenneth Corn has proposed a long list of things that Oklahoma politicians, lobbyists and ethics commission officials should have to do, as well as a few things he doesn't want them to do anymore.

Corn says he's proposing "the toughest crackdown in state history on special interests and their hired guns at the Capitol," and he's doing so because: “There's a stench rising from the dome of the Capitol and that stench is choking the voices of average citizens. It is the foul smell of corruption, money and special interests.” 

Leaving aside Senator Corn's somewhat overheated rhetoric -- apparently politicians figure no one will be on their side unless they're involved in a Cause, The Desired Resolution of Which Involves Nothing Less Than the Fate of All That Is Decent, Upright, Honorable and Nice to Kittens -- we can look at his proposals in several different ways. Most of them center on restricting lobbyists' access to legislators. The image of the shady lobbyist offering perks and gifts to lawmakers is an enduring one, with good reason. But lobbyists sometimes represent good things too. Plus, at what point does a person cross the line from speaking out on behalf of a group of which they're a part to being a lobbyist? When the group pays them? What if groups take up a collection to defray their spokespeople's travel expenses? Or cover for them because they took time off work to go to the Capitol and make their case? Does that make them paid lobbyists?

Some people may also look at Sen. Corn's proposals and wonder why he's making them now. Before he was Sen. Corn, he was Representative Corn, and he's served in the Oklahoma legislature since 1998, which means he's had a couple of chances to plant this flag before. But he didn't until term limits required him to leave the legislature, which makes me wonder how many of his soon-to-be-former colleagues might be grumbling, "Thanks a lot, Ken" under their breaths.

The real laugher in all of this comes when we consider how Corn, if he is elected Lieutenant Governor, will bring his proposals before the legislature. Because unless he can get a representative or a senator to put them into a bill, he won't. Oklahoma gives its lieutenant governor absolutely no ability to propose legislation. He or she is the official presiding officer of the State Senate, but only votes in case of a tie. The LG serves on or chairs several state commissions, none of which are the ethics commission. The LG's main job is to wait around for the governor to get sick enough, get convicted enough, get dead enough or get out of town for a long enough time that somebody else has to take over.

In other words, Senator Corn has made a bold commitment, using bold apocalyptic language, to boldly call for bold changes that he can only politely ask someone else to think about making. You might, if you were mean, say that in order for these reforms to be enacted, their supporters will have to...ahem...lobby for them. Now, I personally don't know whom Okie voters should support in the LG's race (our LG election is separate from the gubernatorial one). For all I know Sen. Corn's GOP opponent has said just as many silly as Sen. Corn has. But whichever candidate I wind up voting for, I seriously doubt my pick will come because said candidate staked out a no-brainer position on an issue which he can't really affect all that much.

(H/T The McCarville Report Online)

Real Estate in a Time of Disaster

Not a commentary on the current housing finance crisis (too many numbers hurt my head), but the subject of this week's sermon as Jeremiah is told to buy a piece of land while his city is under siege.

Chippewaaaaahhhhhh!

You might think that, since I have a cousin who attended Central Michigan State University, I would tone down my triumphalism, one-sided game reporting and ridiculously over-the-top, sports-radio-call-in mindset view of the game.

You would be wrong!

Our stalwart heroes sent the Chippewas of CMSU home in a waaambulance Saturday, toying with them by allowing them to come within a touchdown of victory before ruthlessly snuffing an onside kick attempt and keeping the universe in balance with a 30-25 win.

The paragons of virtue began their 'Cat and mouse game early, raising false hopes in the breasts of the Mt. Pleasant crew by missing an extra point following their first touchdown. Then, like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, they continued to allow CMSU to pull close through the first half before storming out to a 30-13 lead in the second. Then, in what some might call cruelty but which actually demonstrated NU's magnanimous nature, Central was allowed two scores to build up their self-esteem and confidence, before the natural order reasserted itself and Chippewa hopes were dashed.

Ethicist and human-rights activist the Dalai Lama commented on how Central fans might feel after the back-and-forth scoring tactic: "It's a hard world. Get used to it."

Next week, conference play begins as Your Mighty Ones journey to the University of Minnesota to make fun of the Golden Gopher's buck teeth.

No. Just, No.

Back in the dim days when plesiosaurs swam the seas and MTV played music videos, they had promo spots for different things, some of them by comedian Denis Leary. In one of them, he argued against racism, saying something like, "Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list."

Apparently some of the folks in London could do with a refresher rant from Mr. Leary, as a racism reporting act in England has required teachers to report "racial incidents or racial abuse" from children as young as 3. Although I suppose it's possible for the racism gland or whatever to become active between the ages of two and three, I am inclined more towards the idea that three-year-olds often use words the meaning of which they do not know. Some of those words, which they hear someone say someplace because they are little tape recorders with feet, might be racial epithets that the big people shouldn't say whether there are three-year-olds present or not, but which hardly merit hanging a scarlet "R" on a preschooler who repeats them without understanding them.

My parents are probably not, by today's standards, very enlightened racially, although compared with the generation that preceded them, they do represent progress. But racial epithets of any kind, especially the so-called "N-word," earned the same kind of attention that the usual suspect four-letter words earned, and it was not pleasant. We were not labeled racists nor required to attend diversity training, but we learned that racial labels were not to be uttered by folks who wanted to behave properly. In time, I believe, we came to understand reasons not to use those words that had nothing to do with the taste of soap or the effect of swift contact of parental palms to the seat of knowledge. And except for a brief time as a teen when I was trying out which boundaries I wanted to transgress, I have not been a user of those words. I, like everyone else, will make a mistake and sometimes prejudge someone according to racial or ethnic stereotypes, but I always try to correct myself when I've done it and not repeat the mistake.

Maybe my folks picked one of the right ways to bring up kids so they harbor as little racism as possible and maybe they didn't. I don't doubt that some other ways probably produced people who do better on this than I do. But I feel certain that any system that requires teachers to report racist language uttered by three-year-olds to local authorities can safely be called one of the wrong ways to do so.

Well, Duh...

Sesame Street has decided that a clip of its character Elmo singing with pop-fluff-of-the-moment Katy Perry will not air on the show. Given that Perry's first big hit was "I Kissed a Girl" and that in describing the thought behind another single, "Waking Up in Vegas," she said, "Vegas gives me that 'what the ****' feeling. It's really close to LA so one night you could be having a beer with your friends and, when you wake up, you're in Vegas," it does not seem surprising that they did so.


Teaching children lessons like that, of course, is reserved for MTV.

Dark and Stormy Nights

Bill Loehfelm may have been best-known so far as a contributor to a book of reporting and one of fiction from post-Katrina New Orleans, and his debut novel Fresh Kills won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2008. Bloodroot uses the same Staten Island location of Kills, Loehfelm's hometown. Kevin Curran is a history instructor at a Staten Island college more or less stuck in a rut in life. His mother's developing Alzheimer's and his own growing professional burnout don't make anything easier. One day, he reunites with his brother Danny, a heroin user who had dropped out of sight several years earlier. Now clean, Danny would like to try to make amends with Kevin and their parents. But Kevin learns that "clean" doesn't necessarily mean Danny is living his life on the right side of the law, and is drawn into his brother's borderline activities, as well as several that cross that border. Looming around the caper into which Danny enlists Kevin is the abandoned Bloodroot Children's Hospital, loosely based on the Willowbrook State School closed by authorities in 1987. Bloodroot is choppy and unfocused, kind of like listening to a song you like on a car radio at the edge of a station's range, when the signal "picket fences," or drops in and out very quickly. Kevin is alternately paralyzingly wistful, stupidly macho, street-savvy or clueless, depending on what the situation calls for. Other characters yo-yo similarly and don't maintain distinct personae long enough to establish themselves, and the ending relies on a series of coincidences that thrust minor characters into suddenly major roles with little or no warning or buildup. Maybe Bloodroot suffers from a sophomore slump, but it's definitely a step down from Fresh Kills.

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Storm Prey returns John Sandford (the pen name of journalist John Camp) to the "Prey" series and the character that he's best known for, investigator Lucas Davenport. Davenport and his team begin investigating a drug theft at a Minneapolis hospital in which one of the pharmacists is killed. But it turns out that Davenport's wife Weather, a surgeon at the hospital,  may have seen the thieves as they were driving away. The thieves have an inside man at the hospital, who quickly learns that Weather did indeed see at least one of the men in the getaway car and police are now working to identify them. Davenport must track down the gang before they make a move to silence Weather, who is in the middle of a series of operations separating Siamese twins joined at the skull. Davenport is his usual tough-guy self, a walking advertisement for anger-management classes and he and his team wise-crack and sleuth their way through a series of leads to find the criminals. Meanwhile, Sandford also follows the gang's story as they try to figure out what to do about Weather -- and about each other, because they are no longer sure they can trust their own associates. That part of the story is almost more interesting, because even though the gang is deadly to several people they encounter, they're basically losers. Sandford spent many years on the police beats in St. Paul and in Miami and knows that, unlike the nefarious masterminds whose intricate plots decorate the television and movie screens, a lot of lawbreakers are none too bright. But even losers can be harmful to those who cross their paths, so Davenport can't waste any time running them down. Storm Prey is neither the best nor the worst of the Prey series, and Sandford's skill keeps things moving and doesn't bog down in clichéd situations or dialogue. "Weather" is still a really dumb name for a character, though.

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Mark of the Assassin is a kind of prequel to Daniel Silva's headliner series about Israeli spy Gabriel Allon. Allon's mentor and boss Ariel Shamron makes a brief appearance, but the protagonist of the story is Michael Osbourne, a CIA case officer drawn into the investigation of a terrorist-downed jetliner that provides at least one body dead with a familiar bullet pattern. An assassin leaving the same mark killed a woman Osbourne loved many years ago, and he wants a chance to catch the man now. At the same time, political operatives throughout Washington want to use the attack to suit their own ends, some of which wouldn't be helped if Osbourne gets his man. Osbourne is distracted by personal matters, as he and his wife are working with doctors to conceive a long-desired child and his wife wonders why other things always take the place of her and the baby they want to have. Silva's writing and characterization skills were already well-developed in this, his second novel. The story rarely, if ever, bogs down to relate details or explain things, but it doesn't need to because Silva knows how to bring a reader from point A to point B without going the long way. The story itself, which relies at one point on a kind of international cabal of shadowy figures, is weaker than the Allon stories will be when it leans on these kinds of tired conventions, but is definitely strong enough to see why Silva keeps selling books.

What Song Is It You Wanna Hear?

One wonders at just exactly what kind of reunion took place when Jacksonville, Fla. gym teacher Leonard Skinner arrived at the Pearly Gates and met there at least one of his former students.

Skinner earned his place in rock and roll history when he sent Robert E. Lee High School student Gary Rossington to the principal's office for his refusal to cut his long hair in the mid-1960s. Although Rossington was far from the only boy so chastised, he and some similarly harassed friends were among those who would form a band that, in 1970, they named Lynyrd Skynyrd in mocking recognition of their former teacher. Skynyrd is known as one of the originators of a combination of blues, rock, soul and more than a little country boogie that's often called "southern rock," and created the classic rock radio staples "Sweet Home Alabama," "Gimme Three Steps," "Saturday Night Special," "That Smell" and a few others. One of them is, of course, the epic "Free Bird," the live version of which features a crowd responding to Van Zant's question -- the title of this post -- with one voice as they all shout, "'Free Bird!'"

As often happens as people age, the dispute between Skinner and his former students mellowed. He introduced one of the later versions of the band at a Jacksonville concert and made certain to use his name prominently on bars he owned after he quit teaching. The Augusta Chronicle story points out that the original hair policy which Skinner enforced banned hair that touched shirt collars. Heaven only knows what he would have had to have done if the mid-70s version of the band, with shoulder-length hair and chest-length beards, had appeared in his class. He first learned of the connection when his son -- also named Leonard Skinner -- was playing one of the band's albums, and a relative heard them explain their name during a radio show. The elder Skinner didn't much like the album and actually never cared much for rock and roll music at all, apparently.

The thing that strikes me as a little interesting is that Skinner was born in 1933. He was barely 30 years old when he was attempting to correct Rossington and his classmates' sartorial deficiencies, even though they probably thought of him as some kind of ancient, out-of-touch relic. Had Ronnie Van Zant not died in a 1977 plane crash, he would be 62 and probably finding a lot more in common with his former teacher than differences.