You spend a lot of time on the couch with the baby during maternity leave, and you have to entertain yourself somehow. Here’s a quick collection of the most absurd news items I took in while I was out:
• That Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat and majority leader of the Senate, referred to Barack Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” during last year’s presidential campaign was shocking, since Reid and the six remaining members of the Klan are apparently the only people left in America who use this kind of language.
But the truly jaw-dropping part was when high-ranking NAACP leaders fanned out among the cable networks to unapologetically defend him. Hosts liberal and conservative alike who were looking for at least a mild condemnation of Reid almost uniformly got nada from the NAACPers and the white Democrats they interviewed. The reason? Reid was needed to help ram through the health care bill that the majority of Americans don’t want, the Democrats and NAACP functionaries explained.
Reid, who was given a pass denied to everyone from Trent Lott to Dog the Bounty Hunter, inadvertently wrote a new chapter on American political correctness in the process. Attempt to socialize something and apparently you can now run around in white bed sheets on the weekend for all the political and media elite in this country care. You won’t be forced to resign no matter what you said.
The American people, who were told for weeks that Reid didn’t actually say anything racist, know better. Here are, in order, the top four Google searches that now come up when you type in Reid’s name: “harry reid senator,” “harry reid racist comments,” “harry reid comments” and “harry reid racist.” That pretty much sums up the whole affair.
• This year’s city tax increase prequel has begun. Jan. 25: Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton announced he had miraculously “found” $24 million lying around in various city funds that could be used to pay for the starter line for the half-billion-dollar streetcar. Feb. 4: Walton, who knows no one will remember what he did the week before, announced a “tight” budget year, with an expected general fund “shortfall” of $9 million. That means that, among other things, police won’t get the raises they were promised when they were hired. Next: Look for the oh-so-broke shuffle to begin as city leaders spend months whining about how they have no money to close their budget gap without a tax increase. After that: They’ll claim they had to raise taxes to pay for police or sidewalks or just to make ends meet while the streetcar project buzzes along on fast-forward.
• Confused callers to my radio show routinely insist that the schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system with the highest poverty rates and lowest test scores receive the least resources. When I inform them the opposite is true, they insist I must be wrong. The Charlotte Observer settled that score on Jan. 24 when it reported that the system spends about twice as much on low-income students as it does on those who don’t qualify as poor. At Shamrock Elementary, that works out to about $11,000 per student versus about $4,700 at most middle-income suburban schools.
What is truly shocking is that the system still manages to fail these kids. We could send 1.3 kids from high poverty Shamrock Gardens to a Catholic elementary (at the non-practicing Catholic rate of $7,571) in Charlotte for what Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools spends to send one of them to the lowest scoring schools in the district. Spend just a little bit more and we could send them to Charlotte Latin or Country Day.
• Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued a new directive that troops in Afghanistan walk away from fights rather than risk killing civilians earlier this year.
McClatchy reports that in an effort to end civilian casualties, we’ve stopped dropping bombs on areas with buildings or people in Afghanistan. Now we mostly drop them on places that can be “heard and felt” by the enemy, but won’t actually hurt them, like open mountain ranges.
Among the new alternative uses of air power are “buzzing enemy positions in a show of force” and “shooting flares,” McClatchy reports.
The news service says ground troops claim that the restraint is putting them in greater danger, and so far, they aren’t seeing results. Well, not good ones, anyway. By the end of the summer, the military was racking up the highest monthly casualty rates among American service members since the war started. And McClatchy and The Wall Street Journal now report that the Taliban, who apparently aren’t afraid of flares, have expanded their hold on the country to nearly every Afghan province. McClatchy reports that this has resulted in “complicity and fear” among law-abiding Afghans who aren’t eager to talk to American soldiers who can’t protect themselves, much less anyone else.
At this rate, we should ship the soldiers and the bombs back home and occasionally shoot off a package of fireworks or two from a drone. It would accomplish the same thing, wouldn’t it?
tara.servatius@creativeloafing.com
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2010.
