Short Shift

I get two Fridays this week. Somehow that still doesn’t make up for the loss of that hour of sleep Sunday morning. So Tired. Will try to keep this one short.

This afternoon (Tuesday) Senator Chris Dodd unveiled his proposal for financial regulatory reform. A full 18 months after the near complete collapse of the global financial system. Sigh. I do not have the vocabulary to express how utterly exasperating it is that almost two years after we found out how throughly Wall Street ripped us off, we still have no agreement on setting up rules to prevent this disaster from happening again. If you have a little time to kill and a rage quotient to fill, read “The Big Short,” by journalist and author Michael Lewis, (perhaps best known as author of “The Blindside”). If you have that much time and need the Cliff Notes version, see the following:

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Apparently there’s going to be some kind of vote in the House on the healthcare reform bill sometime this week. Maybe. You know what? I don’t really care anymore. In the words of one of my favorite columnists; Pass. The Damn. Bill. Wake me up when the voting’s over.

In a related story, this “deem and pass” strategy the House leadership has come up with in an effort to appear as though they are not voting for something they are voting for is absolutely ridiculous. At a time when Democrats’ own constituents are bemoaning all the horse-trading and the back-room deals and the sausage-making process of legislation, the House leadership is considering utilizing a tactic that doesn’t make any sense and that nobody can explain. Do Democrats really think that if they simply declare the bill passed, Republicans will go easy on them and neglect to mention the whole healthcare thing in their election campaigns this fall? What planet are you people living on?

Several weeks ago, Google announced that they were considering shutting down their Chinese operations in response to the hacking of their Gmail service. This week it appears as though Google might actually be serious. Chinese-based employees of the company have begun circulating their resumes and hundreds of advertisers are looking for alternative search engines on which to advertise. Some have signed letters to Google claiming their livelihood depends almost solely upon the company’s presence in China, begging them to stay and work something out with the government. It remains to be seen whether or not Google is listening. But the entire experiment of American-style internet pseudo-freedom in China has allowed for an interesting study in corporate motivation. The reality of government censorship - a complete anathema to everything the internet stands for - was not enough to cause Google to rethink its Chinese operations. Corporate espionage however, that was a whole different story. Once again, money talks. B.S. walks.

Last Friday, the Texas State Board of Education revised its guidelines for statewide social studies curriculum. Among the changes are a new emphasis on the Second Amendment, (amendments one through nine be damned), the removal of the word “democratic” from any description of the federal government, and study of the decline in value of the U.S. dollar in relation to the abandonment of the gold standard. Even Thomas Jefferson failed to make the cut as an influential thinker in the founding of America. The board also declined to include any new references to any contributions from prominent minorities - in a state where if minorities are not currently the majority, they soon will be. Ordinarily, the educational decisions of a single state would be of little to no consequence to the 49 others. But, this is Texas. And together with California, they comprise the two largest school districts in the country, and because of this, very important to the textbook publishing industry. In an industry in which money is scarce, publishers have little interest in printing 50 slightly different versions of the same book. So what they do instead is print only a few versions, based on the standards adopted by the largest school districts, and distribute them across the country. Thus in many respects, as goes Texas, so goes a significant portion of the country. Now, it takes a special kind of crazy to deny that the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence - played a significant roll in the founding of America, or to claim as one board posit as one board member did, that the civil rights movement led to “unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes.” But it would be nice if we could keep this kind of crazy out of the educational system. I know, it’s Texas. It’s hot, and the heat does terrible things to human brains. (Sorry Chris, I kid because I love.) But certainly we owe our kids a better social studies guide than episodes of the Glen Beck show.

Finally, in case you haven’t heard, Tiger Woods is returning to golf. This coming April, Woods will return to the tee at Augusta National in an attempt to capture his fifth Masters Championship. And no one is more excited about his return than the president of CBS. Since Tiger left the tour last year the ratings for golf on television have been abysmal. In no other sport is the absence of a single athlete so detrimental to the game. Oddsmakers have already made him the favorite to win the tournament, after what will by that time will have been a more than six month hiatus from golf. Looks like the head of CBS won’t be the only one rolling in dough the following Monday.