The Try-Works

The profane, prolific and profoundly pulchritudinous folks at RAIMD (aka the Hole in the Wall Gang) have been up in Montana, kicking up a little dust.  It seems the traditional leaders of the Northern Cheyenne have decided to follow the example of the Republic of Lakotah, and they’ve been helping out.

Stay tuned to the new website, Cheyenne Freedom, for updates.

“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” —William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957.

Lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Sex, drugs and high rollers. A former prostitute said all three were in play during wild sex parties at an exclusive Denver social club, reports CBS station KCNC-TV in Denver.

“There was no trying to hide anything that was going on,” the woman, who worked for “Denver Players,” told KCNC-TV report Brian Maass, of the after hours parties she said took place at The Denver Club, 518 17th St., over the last several years. She spoke on the condition her name not be used.

“Basically there was allot of drug use, drinking, almost orgy type stuff going on,” she said of the late night gatherings at the club.

Federal and local law enforcement authorities shut down Denver Players and a second escort company, Denver Sugar, last month. They executed search warrants and seized bank accounts, financial records and other evidence from several locations in Denver. Nobody has been arrested or charged, but a federal grand jury is investigating the prostitution services.

The call girl, who spoke exclusively to KCNC-TV, said that on numerous occasions, women from the prostitution agencies were called to attend late-night parties at The Denver Club, a plush squash and social club located on the top two floors of a downtown skyscraper.

She said the women were paid around $2,000 to have sex with numerous men. Asked who the men were, she said they were “business guys, rich businessmen.” She said participants in the parties snorted cocaine and had sex throughout the club.

The rest.

Just out of curiosity, how the fuck are these dipshits only paying $300 for sex? Jesus, I could afford that. I feel that sort of vague betrayal of taste alike to when I heard that Bush drinks Jim Beam. Or for that matter, when I first saw Monica Lewinski.

Really, is there no reason to be a millionaire politician at all?

Even better, as the always charming Sybil points out in the comments, the University of Colorado’s new president, Bruce Benson, was on the board of directors of the Denver Club once upon a time.

I think it’s a fair bet he’s still a member, don’t you? And, with a membership that doesn’t exceed 100, as I understand it, I think it’s also a fair bet that every member at least knows about the blow and hookers hoedowns, even if they ain’t participating.

Right?

Hell, and here I’ve been talking shit about the dimwitted motherfucker for being an illiterate, under-educated asshole.

Obviously, I’d have been better off trying to get on his email list.

Seems the Senate is pissing down your neck and telling you it’s raining again.  Seems there was an apology to American Indians that sorta kinda happened a couple of days ago.  Or weeks ago.  Hell, who gives a shit?  The following is an excellent article by columnist Susan Greene, who just recently took over for Diane Carman at the Denver Post.

Shannon Francis never sought an apology from a country that yanked her mom and grandma off their reservations, forced them into white foster families and barred them from speaking their native Hopi and Navajo languages.

So the Denver resident was unaware Tuesday that her government had decided to say, “Sorry.”

“I had no clue it was coming,” the 38-year-old mother of six said with a shrug. “So much for making history.”

Like Francis, you probably missed it when the U.S. Senate quietly apologized for centuries of “violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples.”

The unprecedented resolution acknowledges that the government forced indigenous people off their land, stole their assets and was responsible for “official depredations, ill-conceived policies and the breaking of covenants” with tribes.

When Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized two weeks ago for policies that degraded that country’s Aborigines, he blared his pronouncement live on giant screens throughout Australia.

U.S. senators instead buried their “Oops, our bad” in an amendment to a bill for American Indian health care.

Well, that certainly makes up for the Sand Creek Massacre and Wounded Knee.

So much for healing generations.

“White America can’t afford to apologize too seriously because it would threaten their ownership of Indian land,” said Iliff School of Theology Indian cultures professor Tink Tinker.

Tuesday’s resolution came at the urging of Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who reports a “deep resentment” among Native Americans in his state.

His colleagues aren’t so big on apologies. Congress hadn’t formally said “sorry” since apologizing to Native Hawaiians in 1993 for overthrowing their kingdom a century earlier. In 1988, lawmakers apologized and compensated Japanese-Americans interned in World War II detention camps.

Brownback’s resolution does not authorize or settle any claim against the United States.

“We have a government that took our land and our children and physically and emotionally abused them and forced them to assimilate into something that they’re not,” said Francis, an accounting consultant by trade and a longtime activist for American Indian causes. “We — I — live with the pain of that every day. And for this they issue a bunch of words, empty like their treaties, that mean nothing and nobody hears.”

Who is the apology really for, Francis wonders?

Is it for her mother, grandmother and aunties who spent lifetimes trying to forget the federal boarding schools that sought to strip away their culture?

For her brother, plagued like their father and grandfather by poverty and alcoholism?

For her son, who failed a 7th-grade history test when he refused to check the box saying Christopher Columbus discovered America?

Or for Francis herself, who overcame years of shame about her dark skin and accent to learn the ways of her ancestors that her own family had failed to pass on: to honor her kids, hug them and root them deeply in their heritage?

“If our people had been left alone, maybe things would have been different,” she said.

As Francis sees it, Tuesday’s resolution does little to fix a sad sequence of abuses that still is far from over.

“We don’t need any more hollow words,” she says. “What I want is for the country to be honest, really honest, about what it has done and what it continues doing to our people.”

Here’s a concept: how’s about instead of empty apologies these pinheads push the government to actually obey their own fucking laws?

Yeah, novel concept, I know.

Anyway, if this article’s indicative of the sort of work we can expect from Susan Greene, I might have to start reading the Post again.

Peter Michelson, one of the few staunch defenders of Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado (and a damn fine professor, which I can attest from personal experience), has taken on the horseshit flap about Max Karson’s obviously satirical piece in CU’s student paper.  A piece which has now gotten Mr. Karson suspended from the paper.

Mr. Michelson’s dead on, of course.  Right down to his take on Boulder village idiot and hack muckraker, Heath Urie, who drummed up this mess.  The following is the full article from the Daily Camera.

To read the Feb. 21 and 22 Camera articles by Heath Urie on Max Karson, an editor and writer for CU’s Campus Press, one must believe that Mr. Karson is a mad-dog racist advocating that Asian students at CU should be “captured and ‘hogtied’” and “rounded up for a ‘reformation’” because “They hate us all … And I say it’s time we started hating them back.” While all these quoted words do appear in Karson’s now infamous op-ed column, Urie’s description of the piece is so “wrong” that it borders on criminal libel.

Still, Karson’s work not only “infuriated some students and past members of the Campus Press staff” but caught the indignant attention of the university chancellor, “Bud” Peterson, who contended that Karson’s column “was a poor attempt at social satire laden with offensive references, stereotypes, and hateful language” and was moreover “not properly labeled as either satire or commentary.”

The chancellor instructed the dean of the School of Journalism to “consider what steps are appropriate to account for what was published.” Given that the chancellor was careful to note that Karson’s “column is unquestionably protected under the First Amendment,” his charge to the dean was at the very least suggestively vague.

But one doesn’t get appointed to deanships by being slow on the uptake. Dean Paul Voakes promptly announced that in his “humble opinion, the student editors on this Asian piece got it wrong.” Imagine that: a humble dean and students’ getting it wrong! I taught at CU for 30 years and don’t recall meeting a humble dean or students ever getting it wrong. So this was some serious business. And the dean addressed it seriously.

First, as pedagogue, he distinguished between freedom of speech, “including freedom of despicable speech,” and material “so gratuitously offensive that its intention … is missed by the readers.” As teachers of literature know, students often go in the guise of readers, and their engagement with the famous “intentional fallacy” is tricky at best. Accordingly, the dean’s admonition was pertinent. As he put it, he and the student editors needed “to have a chat about that.” That being the acquisition of sufficient “sophistication” to “know where (the) line should be” between freedom of speech and, well, its antithesis.

The “chat” had quick results, where the public witnessed how the dean complemented pedagogy with his functions as scourge of poor attempts at social satire (the chancellor’s judgment), editors “getting it wrong” (the dean’s judgment), and mother superior of “diversity” training: Among other reparations The Campus Press editors “will work with” CU’s diversity coordinator and establish a diversity advisory board and take “a series of diversity awareness workshops,” and adopt a policy of standards of “acceptability” for op-ed pieces.

In the context of education these are plausible punishments. But the real lesson here is that free speech at CU — i.e. speech for which one will not be, as the Chinese have it, “re-educated” — is subject to the literary standards of a not particularly literate chancellor, the offensiveness quotient of a Student Diversity Advisory Board and anonymous “professional journalists of color,” and opinion standards of “experienced opinion editors.” If these journalists and editors of opinion were to include personnel from, say, The Washington Times, The National Review, and the Fox network as well as the tasteful local media, to say nothing of the Camera’s Heath Urie and CU’s own PR department, then the standards of vulgarity, mendacity, incompetence and offensiveness should not set the bar beyond the reach of even such a determinedly errant student writer/editor as Max Karson.

But then, how “wrong” was Mr. Karson? If one goes to the Campus Press Web site, one can read his column. Contrary to the chancellor’s characterization, it is clearly indicated as opinion and commentary, and it is conspicuously obvious as satire. Further, its satirical context reveals how the presumably professional Camera reporter’s description “got it wrong.” So why would the dean of the journalism school ignore the evidence before his eyes, precisely what the Campus Press faculty adviser had seen and apparently approved, and take up the chancellor’s righteously wrong-headed cudgel?

The real issue here is not whether Mr. Karson’s satire is poor or sophomoric. Nor is it an issue of “damage,” as the chancellor claimed. Whatever the resolutions of CU’s Student Union Legislative Council or the public “upset” for which Dean Voakes felt obliged to apologize, Karson’s article could not and has not damaged anyone or thing, including the reputation of the university. The real issue is that the chancellor feared or was told it was “offensive.”

Offensiveness is what accounts for how the reporter, the chancellor and the dean took a shot at Kid Karson’s epistle and “got it wrong.” A cult of offensiveness has developed out of a “feel good’ ethos, whereby everybody is supposed to have the right to feel good. Its ideology thrives on college campuses and even extends to the law. Serious legal scholars have proposed that First Amendment rights be measured by the offensiveness quotient of an utterance, that one’s right to speak be moderated by whether it offends Mrs. Grundy or the ACLU or the Moral Majority or the Muslim community or the Asian community or Chancellor “Bud” Peterson.

It will never be law, however, because the Supreme Court, no matter how conservative or liberal it might be, will never approve its manifest capriciousness, both as law and social policy. But it can weasel its way into practice if people who should know better, people such as Chancellor Peterson and Dean Voakes, validate “offensiveness” as the arbiter of free speech in university discourse. That is the kind of thing that really does do damage.

Looks like Denver’s finest have decided the easiest way to address the approaching DNC protests is to terrorize the protest organizers.  Following is an update on Larry Hales, who, you’ll recall, was attacked by Denver pigs for requesting they close his door while wiping their jackboots all over his Constitutional rights.

On Nov. 30, 2007 African-American police brutality and antiwar activist Larry Hales was arrested after 10 cops illegally busted into his home without a warrant and without permission, physically attacked him and handcuffed his partner to a chair. He is facing frame-up charges of “interfering with the police” and faces extended jail time for being the victim of a police attack.

Hales has been a primary organizer of a number of anti-imperialist and antiracist events in Denver. He is a leader of the youth group FIST–Fight Imperialism, Stand Together; a founder of Colorado United Communities Against Police Brutality; and an organizer with the International Action Center and the Troops Out Now Coalition.

Hales is also a principal organizer in the Recreate 68 Committee, which is planning protests to counter the Democratic National Convention to be held in Denver in August.

At the time of the police attack, Hales and his partner Melissa Kleinman were housing a survivor of police brutality who was on parole. The man had been shot in the back by police and had filed a civil case against the Aurora police department. Hales had previously agreed to house visits by the man’s parole officer, but only when the man was home.

However, when Hales told the police officers at his door on Nov. 30 that the parolee wasn’t home, and asked to see the business cards that because of a city ordinance Denver police must carry and surrender upon request, he had badges stuck in his face and told that they didn’t have to give him their cards. Hales told them that they didn’t have permission to come in, that the parolee was not home and that he wanted their cards. One of them scoffed and pushed the door open and him out of the way.

The cops charged into his apartment and ransacked his house. When Hales expressed concern that his cats would escape, he was shoved. When he asserted his rights, the police told him to shut up and violently attacked him, twisting his arm, grabbing him by the back of the neck, ripping out several of his dreadlocks, throwing him against the wall, and tearing off his shirt. He was pushed down the stairs of his apartment building, against the wall and railings and out into the cold night with a half-ripped shirt, socks and thin sweat pants. One officer squeezed his cuffs and the two had an exchange, where the officer remarked that more could be done and that Hales could end up face down on the ground, then he was hit in the stomach and thrown into the car.

The officers rolled the front windows down, left Hales in the car, told him he looked like he might hurt himself and that he would be booked as a “John Doe” and have to spend 72 hours in jail before anyone could find him. He spent the night in a freezing jail cell.

Police brutality is rampant in Denver, and this attack is part of the ongoing attacks on Black youth, from the Jena 6 to Sean Bell and countless cases of police brutality and repression throughout the country.

In addition, the police violence against such a well-known activist can only be seen as part of a continuing attempt to stifle political dissent. At a press conference in the days following the attack, Denver police brutality activist and survivor Shareef Aleem noted that police were attempting to neutralize activists related to the DNC protests. He stated: “In the last couple of years many of us involved in police accountability work have been attacked by the police and we know that when it happens we all have to stand up.”

Hales now faces a pretrial hearing on February 29 and trial on March 12 on police “interference” charges. During the arraignment, the states’ attorney suggested that more charges from the incident may be pending. For the City Attorney to continue to prosecute these charges would constitute a serious miscarriage of justice and state harassment, standing justice on its head by blaming the victim of police misconduct and brutality. It could be seen as an illegal, politically motivated abuse of process to chill political protest both against police brutality and at the upcoming DNC.

To sign an online petition protesting this outrage, go to:

<www.workers.org/2007/us/denver-1213/index.html>

For further information, contact the National Justice for Larry Hales Committee c/o Solidarity Center, 55 W. 17th St. #5C, NY NY 10011.

(212) 633-6646

<www.justice4larryhales@safewebmail.com>

or

<www.TroopsOutNow.org/larryhales>

After his posting yesterday about why Ward Churchill’s scheduled debate with Victor Davis Hanson at UC Boulder has been so abruptly cancelled, PirateBallerina’s head moonbat Jim Paine seems to have gone to sleep at the switch.

That’s a polite way of saying that he’s neglected to inform the lesser Ballerinas that, by this morning, Mr. Hanson—who, it may be recalled, was Paine’s source on this particular tidbit of “All Things Churchill”—had completely changed his tune.

As Hanson’s website now puts it, his April 2 debate with Churchill “has been canceled at this time and we are working on an upcoming debate. Our apologies to Ward Churchill for misstating the reasons earlier.”

Yeah. Right.

Hanson doesn’t say WHO his “upcoming debate” is intended to be WITH. Nor does he indicate who comprises the “we” that he supposedly has “working on” it.

Most glaring of all, while Hanson admits to having “misstated the reasons” for cancellation of the Churchill debate—and apologizes to the Good Prof for the bogus nature of said mistatement—he offers no hint as to what the real reasons ARE.

Churchill confirms that both Hanson and the self-described “paleoconservative” Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Chad Kifer are actively dodging his requests for an explanation.

Let’s face it, kids. The stench of ACTA’s Hank Brown, Bruce Benson, Michael Poliakof, and Bud Peterson—CU administrative heavies, every one—is getting stronger by the moment.

So, too, the sweet scent of a lawsuit.

Some of you may have noticed Jim Paine’s story on PirateBallerina this morning claiming that an upcoming debate between our own Professor Ward Churchill and the right’s erstwhile “intellectual” icon Victor Davis Hanson, scheduled to occur in CU’s Mackey Auditorium on the evening of April 2, has been canceled.

Why? Because, Paine says, “Churchill unexpectedly pulled out.”

Now that didn’t sound quite right, but Paine attributed the statement to Hanson himself, and provided a link to the man’s website. So we followed up and, sure enough, the quoted verbiage appears thereon.

So, too, the observation that the “cancellation” will last only “until [Hanson] can come up with another opponent.”

At that point, we contacted Churchill, who informed us that there’s a wee bit of a problem with what Hanson’s saying, to wit: It’s a lie.

Better yet, as proof, the Good Prof forwarded us the whole e-mail exchange between himself and a young man named Chad Kifer, Director of Program Advancement and
Collegiate Debates for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a rightwing speakers bureau.

While we now have everything from Kifer’s original overture to Churchill on the idea of debating Hanson, to their discussion(s) of the topic to be debated, to the contractual arrangements involved, the following e-mail, received by the Good Prof last Thursday, shows very clearly that the debate was NOT cancelled because Churchill “pulled out” (”unexpectedly,” or otherwise).

What follows is Mr. Kifer’s message, in full:

Dear Ward,

I am writing to regretfully inform you that we have had to cancel the debate for April 2, 2008 at UC Boulder. This is due largely to matters outside our control. I am grateful for your willingness to participate in the program and I hope that we can find another forum that would be more suitable for this dialogue.

Thank you again and I will be in touch with future prospects as they  become available.

Most sincerely,

Chad G. Kifer
Director of Program Advancement and Collegiate Debates
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
800-526-7022
www.isi.org

Churchill also informs us—and has provided a copy of his reply to back up what he’s saying—that he strenuously objected to the cancellation and demanded a detailed explanation as to the grounds upon which the debate was canceled and who, exactly, did the canceling.

He also states unequivocally, in the same e-mail to Kifer, that he himself is ready to proceed with the event, as scheduled, and implies that he is prepared to assert his contractual rights in the matter.

Finally, Churchill says that he’s got several calls in to both Kifer and Hanson, neither of whom have as yet replied.

Stay tuned, guys and gals, because this one’s shaping up to look like more than the usual measure of fun.

There’s an askance eyebrow arching all the way to the East Coast about the University of Colorado’s selection of oil-millionaire illiterate, Bruce Benson, for its president.  The following is from Stanley Fish, writing for the New York Times.  In full, as it’s rather delicious.  Mr. Fish leads with the obvious irony.  (An irony which has, not unexpectedly, entirely escaped the local media.)

In one of those ironies that make life interesting, the University of Colorado, which dismissed controversial professor Ward Churchill because of doubts about his academic qualifications, has appointed a president who doesn’t have any. (The final vote was taken on Feb. 20.)

Bruce Benson is an oilman, Republican activist, failed candidate for governor, co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s (now ended) campaign, successful fund raiser, donor to the university, former chairman of the Metropolitan State College Denver Board and chair of a blue-ribbon panel on higher education. Obviously he has a strong interest in education, but his highest degree is a B.A., and he has never been a member of a faculty or engaged in research or published papers in a learned journal. In short, he is no way an academic, and yet he is about become the president of an academic institution, and not any old institution, but a state university ranked 11th among public universities and 34th among universities overall.

Not surprisingly, the announcement a short while ago that he was the only candidate being put forward by the 17-person search committee drew protests from faculty, students and some alumni. The faculty assembly voted 40-4 against him. A group called ProgressNow gathered signatures for an “oppose Benson” petition. The House Majority leader, Democrat Alice Madden, said that when she heard the news, she though it was a “really bad” joke; she added that “he will be the least educated president ever considered in modern history.”

Maybe in Colorado. But some people in West Virginia believe that they have a candidate for the “least educated president” prize. Like Benson, Michael Garrison has no advanced degrees in an academic subject (although he does at least have a law degree), and his appointment, in April of last year, was opposed by the Faculty Senate.

Again like Benson, Garrison has a long-term interest in higher education – he was chairman of the state’s Higher Education Policy Committee – but his main career work has been first as a chief of staff to a former governor and subsequently as a lobbyist. In recent months he has become involved in a rather murky controversy. A daughter of the present governor (a Democrat and a political ally) had claimed a degree on her resume that apparently was never awarded. When apprised of this fact, a university spokesperson said that a clerical error had been made and that the degree had indeed been earned.
But some inside and outside the university claim that the record had been re-written after the story broke. The university has now established a panel to review the matter, and Garrison has denied that he did anything wrong, or did anything at all: “The president does not award degrees.” The affair has revived suspicions that Garrison’s appointment was politically motivated.

Two different states, two different political parties, but the same concerns about the academic credentials of an academic leader, about the integrity of the search that led to his appointment and about the corruption of a supposedly academic process by partisan interests.

These concerns, however, should be separated and distinguished. It is mostly faculty members who focus on the process questions – was it a genuine search? were member of the committee acting as political agents? was the fix in? – and assume that the wrong answers (no, yes and yes) would be enough to invalidate the search. But this only demonstrates how little they understand about the world of senior administrative searches. While it would be wrong to take into account the political affiliations or business connections or wealth of a candidate for a faculty position, it would be wrong not to take these things into account when choosing a president.

The reason is obvious: the political and financial profile of a faculty candidate are irrelevant to what you want him or her to do. But the political and financial profile of an administrative candidate are altogether relevant because what you want him or her to do is not produce scholarship or teach inspiring classes (although both would be welcome bonuses), but interact successfully with a number of external constituencies including regents, legislators, governors, the press and donors – to name a few. The search for such a person cannot be purely academic, because the responsibilities of the office are not purely academic.

By the same reasoning, it is unrealistic and even unwise to expect a search of this kind to be open in the sense that you cast your net as widely as possible and just see what turns up. If the qualifications for the job include the ability to win friends and influence the right people, it would be good to have spotted some types who fill that bill in advance, and then make sure that the rails are a little greased for them.

The truth is that there are no perfectly straightforward senior administrative searches. They are all a bit cooked, and often they serve more as window dressing than as genuinely deliberative processes. Indeed, given that search committees are always advisory, those asked to serve on them should be aware that the work they do will quite possibly be to no effect, either because a decision had been made before the process ever began or because the ball is taken away and given to someone else just as the goal is approached. (The phrase “university service” takes on new meaning for those who agree to participate in this piece of theater.) That’s just the way it is, and it’s not a matter of blame, but a consequence of a process that straddles two worlds, the world of teaching and scholarship and the world of high-stakes finance and politics. Those who complained about that process in Colorado wanted it to be confined to only one on those worlds, forgetting that executive leadership requires skills most faculty members neither possess nor appreciate.

But a parallel mistake is made from the other direction by those who dismiss the importance of academic skills. Their argument (which I heard at dinner last week when I was in Boulder) is that academic credentials are not that necessary because management skills, like those Benson is presumed to have, are transferable from activity to activity. Someone who can manage an oil company will be able to manage the enterprise of a university.

The reasoning, however, is specious. It is no doubt true that an experienced executive will quickly learn the ropes of an industry new to him. The product may be different, but the tasks will be basically the same: assess market share, learn the routes of distribution, fine-tune the relationship between inventory and demand, increase efficiency perhaps by downsizing the workforce.

But in the academy there is no product except knowledge, and that may take decades to develop, if it develops at all. The concept of market share is inapposite; efficiency is not a goal; and there is no inventory to put on the shelves. Instead the norms are endless deliberations, explorations that may go nowhere, problems that only five people in the world even understand, lifetime employment that is not taken away even when nothing is achieved, expensively labor-intensive practices and no bottom line. What is an outsider to make of that?

Not much, because he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don’t learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don’t have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all.

Benson is not embedded in the practices of the academy, and no crash course will yield the tacit knowledge that would make him a knowledgeable and informed steward of the university’s fortunes. Of course, this liability might be finessed if he leaves the academic side of things to the chancellors of the system’s campuses, as he has suggested he will, but it seems somewhat odd to hire a CEO and then hope that he will stay away from the store.

Nevertheless, the appointment does make a kind of sense in Colorado, where the percentage of state funding of the university’s operations has fallen to 7 (in what sense, exactly, is this a state university?), and further cuts are feared. It is the hope that Benson, well connected as he is, may be able to shake money out of trees that have become increasingly bare. By supporting and pushing Benson, the powers that be in the state are saying, We’ve taken your funding away and now you’ll have to hire one of us if you want to have a chance to get some of it back; and, in the bargain, you’d better be careful to run your affairs in the manner we approve and dictate.

It’s the classic pincer move: first we starve you and then we revive you, but on our terms, and one of them is Bruce Benson.

Who knows, it may work out. The financial situation may improve, and the academic enterprise may flourish if Benson really does keep hands off. But a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that. Nor is it necessary, even in the straitened circumstances (hardly unique to Colorado) the university faces. There is another way, and Michael Carrigan, one of the three (Democratic) regents to vote against Benson, pointed to it when he told me, “I can’t believe that there are no candidates out there with both business acumen and academic credentials.”

He is right. Those candidates were out there and they still are. Perhaps the next university tempted to go this route will take the trouble to look for them.

Part one, here.  We may have to make this a regular feature at the rate the Clintonites are moving.  Fucking nary a week goes by that they don’t don their collective hood, light up the old cross, and go out appealing to the baser instincts of their constituency.

Racist motherfuckers.  If there’s a fucking voter on Earth that can’t see through these bigot peckerwoods they oughtta have their ears checked for brain matter on the assumption they’re leaking somewhere.

As Senator Barack Obama has risen in the polls and extended his string of primary victories, he has taken rhetorical mortar shots from all sides in the political war. They continued unabated on Monday.

A flap erupted when some Internet sites on Monday posted a photo of Obama in Somalian garb, including a white turban. When the Obama campaign charged that Clinton aides had leaked the photo - taken during a 2006 trip to Africa - the Clinton campaign manager, Maggie Williams, tried to turn the matter back at the Obama team, even though her camp has not denied any role in distributing the photo.

“If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed,” Williams said in a statement. “Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.”

The rest.

Max Karson, a Try-Works favorite, has struck again, penning an obviously satirical opinion piece about racial tension at CU entitled, “If It’s War The Asians Want . . .” Unless I’m missing something, the gist of the piece seems pretty clear: that peoples who still retain their own non-homogenized cultures will assuredly get them wiped out by exposure to the University of Colorado. The piece plays on stereotypes, but Karson rather unambiguously makes the point that CU will do its damnedest to reduce folks to the stereotypes held by the overwhelmingly white student body; not that said stereotypes represent inherent attributes of the targeted parties.

It ain’t nearly as funny as it should be, but the reaction sure as hell has been. It being CU, the irony-challenged administration and student body have been tsk-tsking like, well, a Boulderite at a William S. Burroughs reading. And even more delicious, the entire staff of the Campus Press has been ordered to undergo diversity training.

So, what started all the fucking fuss about an obviously satirical opinion piece penned in a student newspaper? Well, it turns out it was misreporting of my old pal, Heath Urie. This from the indispensable Michael Roberts:

The ball got rolling with a February 20 piece in the Boulder Daily Camera by staffer Heath Urie. The article had a few flaws: As noted in a subsequent correction, Urie improperly identified the column as an editorial representing the opinion of the Campus Press as a whole and misstated the tenure of past Press editor Stephanie Clary, who remarked negatively about Karson’s attempt at generating yuks. Nonetheless, the report was quickly picked up by other media outlets — among them the Denver Post, Channel 4, the Rocky Mountain News, and even FoxNews.com.

The rest.

Let me repeat that: “Urie improperly identified the column as an editorial representing the opinion of the Campus Press as a whole.”

Let me rephrase that: Heath Urie, a journalist gainfully employed by a respected mid-market newspaper, ACTUALLY THOUGHT AN ARTICLE THAT PROPOSED KIDNAPPING ALL ASIANS AND MAKING THEM EAT BAD SUSHI WAS THE OFFICIAL EDITORIAL STANCE OF CU’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER!

Now, I knew Mr. Urie was a beer or two shy of a six-pack upon meeting him, but after this I’m starting to wonder that he hasn’t accidentally lobotomized himself with his nose-picking finger. One has to wonder how many times the Daily Camera’s gonna let this barely literate little asshole embarrass them.

A half-literate, undereducated, neoconservative, oil millionaire for president, selected in one of the most obvious displays of dipshit cronyism to take place this side of the Bush administration.

I can’t decide who deserves it more: the cowardly, sell-out faculty or the pampered, illiterate clones who make up the majority of the student body.  (And, yeah, I’m an alumni and a part-time faculty member.)

Frankly, I don’t give a shit.  Rename the fucking thing Colorado Tech and call it what it is: a glorified trade school where suburban kids can get fucked up on cheap beer while coasting their way to their chosen cubicle farm.

The second semester of Ward Churchill’s student-sponsored lectures will take place as follows:

2/26/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 199
3/4/2008     7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
3/11/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
3/18/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/1/2008     7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/22/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/29/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252

I’ll be out of commission and offline for a few days.  Play nice.

Gertrude brings up a wonderful point in the comments here.

I like that. Most upper-middle class have a BA, but no graduate degree. These are the exact people who like to kick out the ladder, and strongly oppose affirmative action. They’ll call requests for full evaluations of students’ potential based on multiple criteria unrigorous, and demand that SATs and grades function fine despite vastly different high schools. Yet, when it comes to people who went further in the same system than they did, the perspective changes. They now want merit judged on completed projects and potential (because they know they could have gone further if they wanted to waste their life on getting some degree), rather than rewarding a nerdy record of actually going through school.

Yeah, I love how all the rightwing assholes who were going purple in the face with righteous anger over Ward Churchill’s lack of a doctorate, are now equally empurpled at the idea of anyone questioning Bruce Benson’s lack of any advanced degree whatsoever.

But, shit, this is affirmative action.  Another millionaire bigot getting a high-paid, high-profile position based on dipshit cronyism, and nothing else.

Y’know, just like this kind of affirmative action — which is never named as such — always seems to work.

Well, time to call off the Bruce Benson controversy, Patty Limerick has weighed in.  She was on the University of Colorado’s Presidential Search Committee, and she’ll have you know that Mr. Benson was chosen because “his service to the cause of education in this state is unmatched.”

Furthermore, “the very habits of expression that make some faculty and students wince when they listen to Benson are exactly the habits that could persuade a majority of Coloradans to appreciate CU and recognize its need for greater financial support.”

Really?  That seemed a rather odd point to bring up.  The only context I could find for it was in Max Karson’s run-down of the odder statements made by Mr. Benson in the open student forum from which Mr. Karson was ejected.  Y’know, about “handicaps”, “big-time gays”, and my personal favorite, a plantation era claim of an ability to figure out how the minds of minorities work.  As Mr. Karson remembers, “several people in the audience winced. Others, myself included, laughed openly.”

So, to translate, Ms. Limerick likes Mr. Benson because, being an asshole bigot millionaire, he’ll be able to better relate to other asshole bigot millionaires.

Lovely.

I recently came across one possible reason for Ms. Limerick’s devotion to Mr. Benson, by the way.  It was left in the comments to this wonderful post penned by Ann M. Little, a history professor at CSU.  (And do read the comments.  Amongst other things, Ms. Little and historian pals would like to know if Ms. Limerick has published fucking anything since her monstrously over-rated The Legacy of Conquest.)

If you go to the Center for the American West website, you’ll see that Bruce Benson is not only a board member, but a supporter of Limerick’s endowed chair! And she was on the search committee that chose him. Seems like a conflict of interest to me.

And sure enough, there the motherfucker is.

Yeah, the usual dipshit cronyism at its finest.  But at least we know why there weren’t any other finalists for the job.  After all, how many dipshits could there be in the world lacking in self respect enough to grease Patty Limerick’s wheels, for Christ’s sake.

Can be found here.

Max Karson getting the microphone yanked for his perfectly appropriate question comes at 38:15.

I have it on good authority that the following was sent to all the Boulder/Denver dailies just moments ago. (And, yeah, it seems the Friend of Pigasus II are the kind to recycle unfunny, desperate content in hopes of a cheap laugh until it’s worn thinner than Bruce Benson’s pigshit concern for academic freedom. Go fucking figure.)

Dear Editor:

Many have been opining that for all those who criticize rightwing oil whore Bruce Benson’s selection as sole finalist for the position of University of Colorado President, none have offered a better choice.

As such, and acknowledging this fair point, we, the Friends of Pigasus II, demand the CU regents consider a new direction for the CU presidency.

We propose a candidate for the position who we think easily matches the integrity and commitment to academic principles of Mr. Benson. (Or, for that matter, current CU president and rightwing ACTA whore, Hank Brown.)

Our candidate?

Pigasus II.

Some will protest that being a 220 pound market hog should preclude one from serving as President of Colorado’s flagship university. We ask you to consider the following:

Both Bruce Benson and Pigasus II have served an equal number of years in higher education. Likewise, both Bruce Benson and Pigasus II have received an equal number of advanced degrees.

Pigasus II will be as content as Bruce Benson to swallow the sewage spoonfed him by rightwing interest groups. Moreover, whereas Bruce Benson can only metaphorically spew feces all over the vestiges of academic freedom and intellectual honesty remaining at the University of Colorado, Pigasus II will be happy to do so quite literally.

Furthermore, unlike Bruce Benson, Pigasus II has never, to our knowledge, driven while drunk. Nor has Pigasus II ever threatened the life of a spouse.

Granted, he has, from time to time, consumed the corpses of his offspring, but we think any amount of meditation on Bruce Benson’s political career will disclose that the difference between the two creatures’ behavior is not so very great.

Viva academic freedom! Viva Pigasus!

Sign our petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/pigasus/

Yours truly,
The Friends of Pigasus II