Goldy

There is a lesson to be learned from a new report exposing the deceptive and unethical practices of for-profit colleges and universities, and it’s a much broader lesson than the narrow, mushy, call for greater “regulatory scrutiny” in today’s Seattle Times.

A scathing report by the influential think tank, Education Trust, offers a damning list of examples. Only 22 percent of students in for-profit colleges’ four-year programs earn degrees within six years. Contrast that with a 55 percent six-year graduation rate at public colleges and a 65 percent rate at private nonprofit schools.

The most egregious example is a 9 percent graduation rate at the University of Phoenix — the nation’s largest for-profit postsecondary education provider as well as the recipient of more than $1 billion in federal Pell Grant aid last year.

While some career colleges have achieved a level of credibility, the business model at far too many appears to be one based on student failure, not success.

The emphasis is mine, and I added it to highlight the inescapable conclusion that so many of our nation’s respectable pundits are too fearful and/or ideologically rigid to admit: there are simply some things that are simply best left outside the profit-driven clutches of the market.

And education—K-12 and beyond—is one of ’em.

This by the way, is one of the reasons why I oppose the charter school movement, which seems to be based on the attractively simple proposition that competition between schools will foster innovation and improvement. You know, sprinkle a little free market pixie dust on our public school systems and the problems and inefficiencies will just sort themselves out on their own. Or perhaps the invisible hand of God will reach in and personally carve lessons on the blackboard. You get the point.

This of course ignores the fact that we’ve had plenty of competition between public schools for, well, forever, and it hasn’t done anything to improve the failing ones. Those parents who could afford to move to neighborhoods with good schools, did so, and those who couldn’t… well… their children got what they got.

Now I know what the knee-jerk, free market apologists are going to say: the problem with for-profit colleges is not the profit-motive but rather the distortion of the market caused by government grants, loans and other education subsidies. If the government would just get out of the higher education business—you know, no financial aid, no community colleges or public universities, no research grants, no nothing—the market would be free to allocate resources efficiently and provide the best and most affordable higher education system possible.

Or, instead of relying on magic, we could as a society, you know, invest more heavily in our community college systems, so that technical and career degrees would be more widely available to qualified students, and from institutions whose primary obligation isn’t to the shareholder.

But for, say, the Seattle Times editors to call for that, would also require them to call for raising more tax revenues to pay for it. So instead they just waste the opportunity by settling for a little stern, finger-wagging.

1 Kings 11:1-3
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.

Discuss.

Yeah, I know, it took me a couple days to get to it, but just when I thought the Seattle Times editorial board couldn’t get any more condescending, of course, they do:

THE rage about body scanners and aggressive pat-downs at airport security has reached a feverish pitch — an absurd one. All it would take is one underpants bomber with explosives buried in his clothing to remind travelers how dicey this situation can be.

Um… a dicey situation for the “underpants bomber” no doubt, who, if memory serves me, succeeded in little more than lighting his own dick on fire. But the real absurdity here is the notion that this single, clumsy, failed crotch-bombing attempt is reason enough to spend $2.4 billion of taxpayer money to treat me and my 13-year-old daughter like criminals, every time we choose to fly.

So perhaps the Times’ editors can explain to me why their lede shouldn’t be dismissed as mere alarmist, fear-mongering bullshit… and lazy, alarmist, fear-mongering bullshit at that?

Recent introduction of body scanners at 69 airports throughout the country — and more thorough pat-downs for those who decline being scanned — are a necessary inconvenience.

Oh, I see… it’s a “necessary inconvenience.”

“Inconvenience,” of course, in this context being the soft-fascist way of describing the forced surrender of our Constitutional right against “unreasonable searches” without “probable cause.” And this exception to the Fourth Amendment is apparently “necessary,” the authoritarian apologists at the Times tell us, because… well… I suppose that brings us back to the crotch-bomber again.

See, forget for a moment that what the crotch-bombing attempt really represented was a massive intelligence failure… that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s own father had gone to the US embassy in Nigeria to warn officials of his son’s worrisome activities, that the National Security Agency had picked up intelligence that Al Qaeda in Yemen planned to use a Nigerian in an attack on the US, and that the NSA had actually intercepted communications between Abdulmutallab himself, and a phone used by Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki… and yet Abdulmutallab still wasn’t marked for extra security screening, even after suspiciously buying a ticket with cash, and checking no luggage on an international flight. And while we’re at it, let’s just totally ignore the fact that even if the TSA’s newly invasive pat-down procedures had been in place at the time, they still wouldn’t have caught Abdulmutallab, because his flight originated in Amsterdam, and thus he never even saw a TSA security line.

No, according to the Times, it’s not improved intelligence that’s needed, or TSA officers trained like their Israeli counterparts to discern the real risks from the frivolous (for example, a cash-paying, baggage-less Nigerian with known terrorist connections, vs., you know, some random 13-year-old girl). Rather, the only way to possibly deter another attempted crotch-bombing, we’re told, is $2.4 billion worth of porno scanners and invasive, junk-grabbing pat-down procedures that were they to occur in the classroom, would amount to sexual assault.

As if the risk of, say, lighting your own dick on fire isn’t deterrence enough. I mean, what’s a martyr to do with 72 virgins, and a burnt off dick?

But the Times goes even further. For not only do they urge us to surrender our civil liberties for the sake of security theater, they actually abuse and belittle those of us who dare to complain about it.

Other travelers, for now, should steer clear of ridiculous opt-out protests and endure security procedures currently in place. A shortsighted protest whereby travelers refuse the scanners on Wednesday, one the busiest days of the year? Who invents such nonsense?

A busy holiday weekend is not a reasonable time to express personal exasperation with the only security program in place. Adjustments will come but you have to be a pretty miserable traveler to wish ill of those working to protect passengers.

So… um… when exactly would the Times propose we stage our protest? During the wee hours of an off-peak travel day? At the TSA’s pleasure? Or maybe we should just limit our efforts to indignant tweets and polite, if pointed, letters to the editor… you know… if that’s not too inconvenient? I mean, do the Times’ editors have any fucking idea of how a protest actually works?

Or perhaps we should just be banned from voicing our disagreement altogether, considering how many innocent lives the porno-scanners have already saved…?

TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird says since the scanners began arriving last March, security officials have found 130 prohibited items artfully concealed under clothing. Aren’t you glad that stuff wasn’t on your latest airplane trip?

What sort of prohibited items? Guns? Knives? Explosives? Live tigers? Or are we just talking about nail clippers, pocket knives, (gasp) bottled water and the other prohibited items that travelers sometimes not so much “artfully conceal,” as forget they’re carrying? Weren’t items like these routinely carried onto plans without incident before the scanners were installed, and dontcha think if the scanners had foiled 130 terrorist attacks since March—as the Times’ wording artfully implies—we might’ve heard something about it before now?

So no, I couldn’t really give a shit whether a fellow passenger managed to sneak aboard one of those notoriously dangerous souvenir snow globes. And no, these new procedures don’t make me feel any safer.

TSA is constantly evaluating and updating screening procedures to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Yeah, like the way they secured cockpit doors after 9/11. And the way they started inspecting shoes after the attempted shoe bombing. And the way they banned liquids and gels after the alleged liquid bombing plot. And the way they started feeling up 13-year-olds after the attempted crotch bombing.

Hey… great job of staying ahead of evolving threats, TSA!

The goal is to employ state-of-the-art procedures to protect the flying public. Passengers who cannot handle these methods are not forced by anyone to travel. They should opt out, all right … of flying.

You know, in the same way that African Americans have the option of not driving through white neighborhoods if they “cannot handle” being stopped for a DWB, or Latino Americans have the option of not driving through Arizona, if they “cannot handle” being arrested for failing to carry their papers.

Don’t like it? Don’t fly, the Times arrogantly suggests. And whatever you do, don’t you dare inconvenience us. To which, the only reasonable, measured response is: fuck you.

And you know what? Nobody’s forcing the Times’ editors to travel either, so if they “cannot handle” people like me exercising our right to protest yet one more post-9/11 indignity, then perhaps it is they who should shut the fuck up and opt out of flying? Yeah, I know, if too many of us refuse the scanners and choose the pat-down, it will only slow down the security lines for everyone else… but for those of us who truly love the Constitution, well, I guess that’s what we might call a necessary inconvenience.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the greater threat to our nation and our way of life is not Abdulmutallab or al-Awlaki or even Osama bin Laden, but rather the quaggy, condescending cowards like those at the Seattle Times who would eagerly surrender the very rights that define America in the name of defending it. And for what? An infinitesimal reduction in our already infinitesimally small chance of being victims of a terrorist attack?

To put this issue in perspective, even if a 9/11 sized attack were to occur on American soil every year, one’s risk of being a victim would still be about 15 times less than being killed in a motor vehicle accident. But of course, history tells us that these—or any—sort of terrorist attacks haven’t occurred every year, or every decade, or even every half-century, suggesting that our actual lifetime risk of being killed by terrorists—less than one in 60,000—lies somewhere between being stung to death by bees, and being struck by lightning.

So tell me, how exactly do these slim odds, combined with a single, failed crotch-bombing attempt, make a virtual strip search or invasive pat-down of my daughter necessary? How much liberty and dignity should we be compelled to yield in order to calm the hyperbolic fears of the caterwauling old cranks at the Times?

I mean, where does it stop?

One would-be terrorist clumsily manages to light his dick on fire on board an international flight, and America responds by suspending the Fourth Amendment and spending $2.4 billion on unproven scanners with unknown health effects. So with this precedent, what happens when, say, the next terrorist succeeds in smuggling explosives onboard by shoving them up his ass? Is the Times ready to run the headline: “Anal cavity searches a necessary inconvenience,” while smugly dissing those of us who object? Are we really prepared to become a nation that denies tens of millions of its citizens access to X-ray scans and colonoscopies at the doctors office, while spending billions of dollars to enforce these same procedures at the airport?

Al Qaeda may yet bring down another airplane or two, and nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t remain vigilant. The threat of terrorist attack does indeed present a real risk to air travelers—as real, if statistically less likely a risk, as pilot error, act of nature or mechanical failure. But no amount of vigilance can eliminate this risk entirely.

So the question is, where do we draw the line? At what point, we must ask ourselves, does the cost in blood, treasure, dignity and personal freedom exceed the marginal return in increased security? And while reasonable people might disagree on the answer, it is far from “absurd,” “ridiculous” or “shortsighted” to suggest that this line has already been crossed.

Busy with stuff, so talk amongst yourselves.

Hey King County Police Officers Guild… if you thought the law and order types on the Seattle Times editorial board would choose public safety over union bashing, well, think again:

With all due respect to the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect residents, union leaders behaved in a shortsighted manner. There is apparently a last hope that if deputies come forward in the next few weeks to forgo the 2011 pay raise, some positions could be saved.

Um, as I told Reagan Dunn… what the fuck did you expect?

Yeah sure, you may put your lives on the line for us and all that, you know… when you’re out on the streets. But once you’re sitting around the negotiating table, you’re just another dirty, public employee union in the eyes of the anti-tax crowd. And as anybody who has read the Seattle Times op/ed pages—and nothing else—knows, it’s the public employee unions who are the real cause of our current budget crisis. (Declining revenues and a tax base that’s steadily shrinking as a percentage of the economy apparently have nothing to do with it.)

The irony of course is that police unions are just about the only public employee unions to reliably endorse Republicans and their anti-tax agenda. I guess ye really do reap what ye sow.

While my daughter and I were spared the indignity of the choosing between the porno-scanners and a TSA groping yesterday morning, according to the comment threads on Slog, other Sea-Tac travellers were not so lucky. Which got me thinking: if safety is really the overriding concern, are the feds bothering to inspect the airplanes as closely as the crotches of passengers?

Well… apparently not, at least judging from my casual inspection of the ubiquitous “tamper seals” on the access panel behind the toilet in the airplane lavatory. It’s hard to see from the photos, but both tamper seals had be plied from the top panel, and were hanging a fraction of an inch in the air.

I’ve seen this before, and I’ve always wondered about the purpose. I don’t know if there’s a regulation, but since all airplane lavatories seem to have these tamper seals across the back panel, I assume there must be some concern about tampering, right? And yet, I routinely find these seals unsealed.

Huh.

Of course, I’ve had other unpleasant experiences with airplane lavatories, like the the time I flew cross country with all of them leaking sweet-smelling, bluish effluent into the aisles. Which brings me to my main point: statistically, by far the largest danger to passengers comes not from crotch or shoe bombers, but from shoddy maintenance. And as I wrote at the time…

If this is the sort of stunning lack of pride the airlines now show in the most visible sections of their aircraft, how can we trust them to maintain the parts we can’t see?

And then of course there are the regional commuter airlines and their poorly-trained/underpaid/overworked pilots, like those responsible for the Continental Connection flight that crashed last year outside Buffalo NY, killing all 49 people onboard, and one on the ground.

But no, the only way to make us safer is to grab my thirteen-year-old daughter’s crotch. Or so the angry trolls keep telling me.

My daughter and I just went through security at Sea-Tac airport, and are relieved to report that while the backscatter scanners have been installed at the A gate, they were not being used. No unwarranted violation of our Fourth Amendment rights, no drama.

So, sorry trolls… I’ve once again managed to make it on to a flight without being cavity searched or shipped off to Gitmo (which I suppose, must be a surprise to folks like the Orb, who think I’m such a danger). Maybe next time.

Deuteronomy 22:23-24
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.

Discuss.

If the state Transportation Commission approves new tolls for the 520 floating bridge or any other roadway, in flagrant violation of I-1053’s supermajority requirement on raising taxes and fees, and initiative profiteer Tim Eyman doesn’t sue to uphold the letter and spirit of his recently passed measure… well, I will.

Because honestly, this might just be our best shot ever at forcing the state Supreme Court to finally rule on the constitutionality of this clearly unconstitutional provision.

It’s not like others haven’t attempted to challenge the constitutionality of previous two-thirds measures, but the popularly elected members of the Supreme Court have so far managed to avoid invalidating a popularly approved initiative by ruling that the issue simply wasn’t ripe, or that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring suit. And since the absence of a tax for fee increase at best raises a hypothetical harm, how does one sue over something lawmakers haven’t done? At least, that has been our Court’s cowardly approach thus far.

And since multiple legislatures and governors have never had the balls to affirmatively violate the two-thirds provision, we’ve never had the opportunity to put its constitutionality to the test.

But if the appointed members of the Transportation Commission were to simply ignore Eyman’s objections, and impose tolls on the 520 bridge and/or other structures without legislative approval, there’s your test case, for once I’m forced to pay this toll, well, I obviously enjoy standing as a “harmed” party, and the issue instantly becomes ripe.

Of course, the Supremes might still try to wiggle out of the underlying constitutional issue by somehow ruling that the Commission’s toll-setting authority falls outside the restrictions imposed by I-1053—get a bunch of clever lawyers in a room together, and anything can happen—but, well, you take the opportunities that come your way. And Eyman’s arrogant bluster over this issue is an opportunity his opponents would be stupid to ignore.

Reagan Dunn gets a Schrammie, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If there’s any lesson to learn from Washington state’s bucking of the Big Red Tide, it’s that a strong ground game may not be sexy, but it still can win, even in the face of overwhelming odds. And so while few journalists pay much attention to what goes on at the local party level, it’s a helluva lot more important than you might think.

That’s why next month’s election of a new King County Democratic Party chair is ultimately so important. And while I don’t generally like to get involved in intra-party politics, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least say a few words in support of one of the candidates, Steve Zemke.

I’ve long described myself as an “accidental activist” having stumbled onto the local political scene with my satirical initiative to proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I knew absolutely nothing about how local politics worked, and had absolutely no connections to the players involved. But Steve did, and so I was very fortunate to have him take me under his wing almost from the start, and serve as a kinda tutor, if not a mentor, during my first couple years of activism.

It was Steve who explained to me how initiatives worked (and how they didn’t), and who first took me down to Olympia to lobby and finagle and implore elected officials and their staff. It was with Steve who I somehow found myself in a conference room in the Fall of 2003, sitting across the table from Frank Chopp and Jim McIntyre… totally oblivious to how remarkable it was for him to have managed to secure us an hour to talk tax restructuring with the Speaker of the House and the Chair of the Finance Committee. And remember… this was before I started blogging… when I was just some crackpot with a joke initiative.

Steve simply knows how things work, knows how to get things done, and sometimes seems to know absolutely everybody in Washington state Democratic political circles. And on the local level, where the ground game is so damn important, I can’t help but feel that that’s the kind of chair we need leading the county party: somebody who will focus on building infrastructure.

Nothing against Steve’s opponent Karl de Jong; he’s a great guy with great values. But Steve, well, he’s kind of a savant when it comes to organizing and running campaigns. So if I were a Democratic PCO, he’d have my vote.

That said, I couldn’t end this post without saying a big thank you to current chair Suzie Sheary, who is retiring after holding the post, well, forever (“forever” being defined as, since I started paying attention to county politics). She was perhaps the first local Democratic official to recognize the role local bloggers like me could play in promoting a progressive message, and I’ve long counted her as a political ally and friend. You’ll be missed, Suzie.

My daughter and I are flying to Philadelphia on Sunday, and I can promise you that we’re most certainly not allowing ourselves to be herded through Sea-Tac’s new X-ray scanners along with the sheeple.

Or at least, I’m not. My daughter’s thirteen now, so I suppose it’s up to her to choose her own humiliation: the unconstitutional invasion of privacy and unknown health risks of the TSA’s porno-scanners, or the intentionally intrusive new crotch-grabbing indignity of allowing a glorified rent-a-cop to pat her down… or as my daughter aptly describes it, “feel her up.”

And just to be clear, I honestly do believe the TSA’s new pat down procedures to be intentionally intrusive, in that the motivation, at least in part, is clearly to discourage travelers from opting out of the scanners by making the alternative as unpalatable as possible. And if a growing wave of opt-outs do succeed in clogging up security lines throughout the nation, dollars to donuts the TSA will only attempt to up the humiliation ante. Or worse.

That’s why I believe that the only effective means of combatting this latest escalation of the TSA’s security theater of the absurd is to humiliate the TSA agents in return, by making pat downs as uncomfortable and embarrassing for them as they are for us. For while regulations require travelers to comply with lawful requests from TSA agents, there’s nothing that says we can’t have a little fun in the process.

For example, it’s certainly possible you might be extremely ticklish — who’s to say you’re not? — so imagine a TSA agent being forced to conduct an intrusive pat down while you’re writhing and giggling and shrieking with uncontrollable laughter. Or perhaps you bruise easily, or are just extremely sensitive; who’s to blame you for screaming in pain at the slightest white-gloved touch, while loudly pleading with the TSA agent to “for the love of Christ, stop hurting me!”…? Or maybe the attentions of a same-sex agent just, I dunno, turn you on, causing you to moan with pleasure at the pat down as you breathlessly encourage the agent to draw their hands further up your inner thighs, before exploding in a When-Harry-Met-Sally-like fake orgasm.

Or how about wearing an adult diaper through security? And filling it. No law against that.

And then imagine having a compatriot capture the entire scene on video, and posting it to YouTube. Think that might go viral?

I’ve discussed all of these options with my daughter, and while she thinks they’re damn funny, she’s forbade me from doing any of them in her presence, and I suppose as a good father, I’ll have to honor that. But the point is, if we really want to send a message to the TSA, it’s time to fight theater with theater.

Otherwise, if we continue to allow the indignity to remain one sided, we can only expect it to get worse.

It’s sheeple like Joni Balter who make the gradual erosion of our constitutional rights possible.

I spent most of the morning speaking to a couple civics classes at Seattle’s Center School, and knowing nothing else about the school except my interaction with these students, I’d happily send my daughter there.

Perhaps the rest of the students are delinquents, and all the other teachers suck, I dunno, but these two classes at least were great. So don’t let anybody tell you it’s impossible to innovate within the public schools.

I’m speaking to a couple high school civics classes this morning, so expect light posting through much of the day. In the meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.