Joe Doakes, perhaps in a bit of a blank verse mood, emails:

Some parents aren’t competent to pick their own children’s lunch menus

So their kids are fat

And develop health problems

Which the parents can’t afford to pay to treat

And which society isn’t willing to leave untreated

Because children shouldn’t suffer for their parents incompetence

So we treat the children

And we pay for it

And it costs a lot

Which runs up the deficit

Which we should prevent

By reducing spending on sick kids

By reducing the number of fat kids

By stopping kids from getting fat

By picking their lunch menus for them

Using union public employee lunch menu pickers

Who receive wages and health insurance benefits

Which cost a lot

Which runs up the deficit

Until the money runs out

And society collapses

So we go back to letting parents set their own kids’ lunch menus

And some kids get fat

And they develop health problems

But their parents can’t afford to pay for treatment

Because society has collapsed

Because we ran up the deficit

By hiring union public employee lunch menu pickers

Instead of letting parents pick their kids lunch menus

And letting children suffer because for their parents incompetence

The way they’ll have to suffer

When society has collapsed

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Joe should read this at a poetry slam sometime soon.

…that while everyone knows Mary Franson (GOP HD8B) supports the Marriage Amendment…

…that her opponent, retired school teacher and endorsed DFL challenger for the seat Bob Cunniff, hasn’t made his opinion on this bill public yet.  His website and facebook page are silent on the subject.

Just in the interest of free inquiry, it might be good for people to ask Mr. Cunniff what he thinks about this intensely fractious issue.

(Or try to.  His campaign website includes no way of contacting the campaign or the candidate, other than the ‘Volunteer!” page.  You might have to persevere a bit).

If you get an answer, by all means leave a note in the comments.

UPDATE:  Welp, here’;s a real profile in courage (via commenter Jay McCue):

He winds up and gives that issue a 55-yard kick down the road.  “It’s up to the voters”.  Right, that’s correct.  But how do you stand on it?

As I started writing on Monday, I went to “Won’t Back Down” over the weekend.  I was literally too tired to finish the post on Sunday – and Monday and yesterday, things got just a little bit crazy.

As I noted at the time, I generally hate teacher movies.  I’m a teacher’s kid, grandkid, older brother and, for that matter, a former teacher, more or less, myself.

But more than either of those, school choice is a hot topic for me, since the Saint Paul Public Schools ranged between worthless and toxic to my children.  So while I’m not big into “heroic teacher” fable films, I’m more than ready for a movie about school choice.

Anyway – I saw the trailer for Won’t Back Down a few weeks back, and I thought I more or less figured it out.  The trailer featured…:

• The Magic Protected Classes:  you know the drill.  The wise old black matron is always the wisest person in the movie, except for Morgan Freeman.  Every single mother oozes dignity.  White middle-class people are impacted and defective.
• A Cartoonish Enemy:  a facetless, single-dimension kick toy for all that is wrong in the school in quextion.  Usually localized, usually beyond any of the locals’ control.
• A Sympathetic but challenging love interest: usually improbably virtuous.
• Some Cartoonish Side-Villains:  The husband, or ex-husband, or (white male) boss of any of the protagonists is usually fair game. .
• A Heart-Warming Denouement:  There is usually a triumphant final scene, usually in the school gym.

And all of these button-pushing cliches are present in heaping portion in Won’t Back Down.  And it’d be easy to write the movie off there.

And it’d be a huge mistake – because woven in and among the “Teacher Movie” cliches is a really excellent movie and, perhaps more importantly, a movie that makes a fairly honest accounting of a very complex issue.

This movie is complicated.   And that’s a good thing.

The Magic PC People

The movie’s marquee protagonist, an overextended but supernaturally cute single-mom bartender and car-saleswoman played by Maggie Gyllenhall, chews on the scenery like Phil Niekro attacking a can of Skoal.  Rebuffed by a clock-punching principal when trying to get a better teacher for her dyslexic daughter at her run-down failing school, I half expected to see the Spice Girls jump out and start dancing as she hammered out her big applause line (“You know those women who lift cars off their children? They’ve got nothing on me!”) like a steam press stamping out door panels.  Improbably, the only scene where Gyllenhall doesn’t feel like she’s trying to orate is the one where her character is, well, trying to orate – speaking at a rally of parents she and her plucky teaching compatriot managed to organize.  Suddenly, she’s subdued.  Go figure.

We’ve seen this character before – Julia Roberts played the same lady in “Erin Brockovich”, and did it a whole lot more believably.    Gyllenhall’s most effectve scene – when she and her daughter learn they’ve been passed over for a seat at a charter school – is the only one where she says absolutely nothing.   The camera lingers on the two as they stare, dazed, as the focus swirls about them in a brilliantly innovative bit of cinematography that, along with Gyllenhall’s silent face, says more than the script possibly could have.

Viola Davis, on the other hand, playing a teacher with a crumbling marriage and a creeping case of professional burnout, is brilliant.  Her part is tailor-made to be turned into a tired cliche.  Her marriage (to Lance Reddick) is failing fast, and in the movie’s first scenes, it’s hard to tell which of the burned-out teachers is going to be the movie’s real villain.  Davis – with a couple of Tony awards and an Oscar nomination under her belt – plays a role that is historically liable to drift into melodrama – but plays it with nuance and style, and all of the subtlety that Gyllenhall lacks.

The Enemy

The bad guy in “teacher movies” is usually a cartoon.  And that’s usually not the worst part.

“The Enemy” in teacher movies is generally one of two things; an administration motivated by some melodramatic, impersonal inertial brought about either by some personal perfidy (sort of the education versions of John Lithgow’s character in “Footloose”) or some generalized social ill that’s beyond anyone’s human control.  The antagonist is, thus, either an easily-dismissed cartoon or some pathology so big that no real person – only “the system” is to blame.

The enemy in Won’t Back Down is a little bit of both.  Gyllenhall’s daughter’s teacher is a bovine, burned-out waste, a woman punching the clock until her pension kicks in (who only seems like a caricature if you haven’t had kids in the public schools lately), who is protected by the teacher’s union.

Now, teachers’ unions have been up in arms over Won’t Back Down, which is just further evidence that many of ’em shouldn’t be teaching your kids without supervision.  The movie presented as balanced a picture of unions as I can recall in a recent move; no less than three major characters – the “Sympathetic But Challenging Love Interest”, the Greasy Unsympathetic White Guy who runs the union, and his organizer, filling the “Enemy With A Heart Of Gold” role (played by Holly Hunter) testify more or less eloquently on why we have unions and why they can be a very good thing.  I doubt I’ve ever seen a movie ever spell out the positive case for teachers unions, at least on an idealistic level.

The movie is fair, but it doesn’t chicken out; ideals notwithstanding, the unions fight dirty to try to keep the parents from taking over and converting the school to a non-union charter school.

As to side-villains?  That was a huge surprise; the dissolution of Viola Davis’ character’s marriage, in a lesser movie, would give it a cheesy side-villain.  It seems the movie is setting Reddick’s character – a black yuppie who builds model World War 2 fighter planes for a hobby – up to be that venal little distraction.  Again, it doesn’t take the easy way out.

The Big Finish

These movies always end with the big finish – the math meet, the writing context, the basketball game, the ultimate court hearing, whatever.  In this case, it’s the big Pittsburgh School Board meeting where the board votes on the proposal to (near as I can tell) pull the school out of the public system and become a self-governed charter school.

I won’t spoil it – not that you can’t probably figure it out yourself – although I will point out (pursuant to the “Magic Protected Classes” part of the formula), that the wise black and elderly female Jewish vote does unite against the clenched WASP contingent in the final vote.  Which is pretty much de rigeur these days.

At any rate – the movie is not immune from the ravages of the Hollywood formula.  Somehow – more or less miraculously, I think – they managed include the better part of a pretty good, sometimes challenging movie in there.  It’s the first significant move I’ve seen to address school choice – and in between the odd bits of Hollywood, it did a decent job, without oversimplifying (at least in Hollywood terms, and the inevitable shorthand that has to go into fitting a topic as old as the hills, and which has been in the headlines for a couple of decades now, into two hours.

They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.

And they were right:

“Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,” he begins, “there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.”

“Now here’s the thing,” Obama continues, “when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’”

That’s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” Obama shouts, angry now. “Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

It’s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West’s famous claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.

Even if you are a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?

Obama guts the Clinton-era “Work for Welfare” requirements.

Romney calls Obama on it.

Clinton lies about it from the podium at the DNC.

And America’s “fact-check” industry lines up behind Obama, no matter how they need to forcibly bugger “fact” to do it:

PolitiFact did link to [welfare expert and former Clinton staffer Robert Rector, who was one of the co-authors of Clinton’s original bipartisan welfare reform law]’s blog post—but only to dismiss him. “Robert Rector, a welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it could ultimately allow ‘state bureaucrats’ to count activities that aren’t really work. We should point out that those concerns are at odds with the policy’s stated goal of encouraging employment.” In other words, PolitiFact said his concerns should be dismissed for no other reason than they are at odds with the Obama administration’s spin. PolitiFact didn’t even address the fact that Rector—who’s quoted in Romney’s ad—was the source of the charge the Obama administration is gutting welfare reform or that he helped write the welfare reform law. (They did reference an article Rector wrote for National Review Online and concluded that he made “a noteworthy point” when he argued that the Obama administration doesn’t have the legal authority to waive the work requirements.)

Rather than engage in any critical discussion about the issue, PolitiFact regurgitated the HHS memo for the sole purpose of making the waivers sound benign.

And yet again, reality imitates my hyperbolic fiction; Berg’s Fourteenth Law (“The more strenuously a media organization identifies itself as “fact-checkers”, the more completely their “fact checking” will actually be checking statement for congruency with liberal conventional wisdom”) has come vividly to life.

I said “vividly”:

Let’s take that last example of accommodating workers with disabilities—please. It’s a classic bit of bureaucratic misdirection intended to make exemptions that undercut welfare work requirements sound reasonable. “There’s no one on TANF that’s disabled. If you’re disabled, you’re on another program called Supplemental Security Income,” Rector tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “In TANF, you should be able to work—but what the left likes to do is to create a nebulous category of TANF recipients who are disabled with these very cloudy, fuzzy definitions, and then the state can chunk essentially an unlimited part of its [welfare] population into an exempt category. That has twofold consequences—now the state doesn’t have to do anything [to steer the exempted recipients into the workforce], but it can still maintain it has a high participation rate [in workfare programs]. If you have a 30 percent participation rate, and you exempt half the caseload, all of a sudden you can make it look like your participation rate went up.”

Read the whole thing.

And if you’re in the mainstream media, imagine how much less revulsion the general public would feel for you if you actually checked facts, rather than ran to the local Democrat spin doctor for further instructions.

LL at Lady Logician – a former Minnesota blogger who transplanted to Utah, and didn’t skip a beat – notes that the simultaneous Democrat drive for low-information voters and their war on conservative minorities and women have all come together against Mia Love, who has come from behind to lead in the polls for her Utah US House seat.

LL quotes a Mother Jones hit piece on Love:

 Though a child of immigrants, Love has embraced much of her party’s tough stance on immigration. She has implied that she would back deporting the US-born children of illegal immigrants so as not to reward “bad behavior.” Yet by Love’s own account, she is what Republicans derisively call an “anchor baby”— someone born to immigrant parents specifically to game the immigration system and secure legal status for family members.

Love doesn’t talk about this aspect of her family’s immigration story now that she’s running for Congress, but she once said in a little-noticed interview that her birth on US soil helped bring her siblings to America. In January 2011, Love told the Deseret News that her parents, Jean Maxime and Marie Bourdeau, came to New York in the 1970s, fleeing poverty and looking for a better life. Love said that her parents immigrated legally, but were forced to leave their two young children behind in Haiti because their visa didn’t allow them to bring the kids.

Mother Jones (which, I have to confess, I thought went out of business in the late eighties) calls Love an “anchor baby”.

See a problem with this “reasoning?”

LL does:

The rest of the agenda media has dutifully lined up to run with the story that “anti-immigration immigrant” Mia Love is some an anchor baby – knowing full well that the term stems from the practice of ILLEGAL Immigrants who come to the US for the express purpose of giving birth on US Soil so that their citizen child will not be sent home. Mayor Love’s parents did not come here illegally. They didn’t need an anchor, they had their visas and they certainly could – in time – have filed for their children to join them here legally and without having another child.

So the accusation lies out there – Love lied about her family history.

And that’s really all that matters.  I’m pretty convinced that the  mainstream and liberal media know that the smart people can see past this fairly transparent untruth.  But it’s not the smart people that they’re aiming for.

…that if I voted for John McCain, a woman’s worth would be measured purely by their sex organs.

And they were right.

This blog doesn’t really have a mission, per se.  For ten and a half years now, it’s been more or less my stream of consciousness, mostly but by no means all political.

But if I had to pick a mission, it’d most likely be “convince people to verify the media on everything.  I shrink from saying “distrust the media” in as many words, but I’m somewhere close to that.

And it’s just a little gratifying to see the American people are starting to get that message, at least in re this year’s presidential polling:

 A plurality of Americans and more than seven in 10 Republicans say pollsters are intentionally skewing results to benefit President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

Some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU believe pollsters were manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That’s evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president’s early lead.

I’m not saying there aren’t journalists, and even organizations, that try to do a good, detached (not “objective” – that’s a myth), fair and clear job of reporting the news.

I am saying that at the highest levels in this extremely hierarchical industry, the publishers and editors and executive producers for the major newspapers, broadcasts, cablecasts and public media, the adage “power corrupts” is as true as anywhere else.  There is power in the mainstream media – and for many in the higher ranks of the business, the urge to use that power to make sure American politics redounds to their advantage has got to be irresistible.

And I’m suggesting that this year’s polls, and the ever-more-leftward revealed bent of the media’s “fact check” industry, is evidence that they’re resisting the urge less and less.

And, maybe, people are starting to realize this.

The Minnesota left has spent this entire year cycling through one rationalization after another to try to inveigle voters into spiking the Voter ID Amendment – which I’m predicting will pass by 60-40, if not 66-33, this fall.

The latest? “It’s going to harm veterans”.

Dave Thul – who’s served heaven only knows how many tours overseas – is back to blogging, and with style.  He’s back into the game with a flensing of this “issue” over at True North – Part One and Part Two.

In part one, Thul’s debunking of Secretary of State Ritchie is complete and comprehensive; I’m not going to try to pick and choose pull-quotes.  I’ll give you the conclusion…:

Secretary Ritchie’s outrageous claim that military voters will be prevented from voting is based on false propaganda (address required on the Photo ID), assumes the worst interpretation of ‘substantially equivalent’ even though that is not in line with the spirit or intent of the law, and then posits the concept that NCO’s and officers in uniform will be complicit in preventing military voters from casting their ballot by refusing to attest to their identity. The fact that Secretary Ritchie can repeat this claim with a straight face would be laughable if it wasn’t so insulting to the intelligence of Minnesota voters. But the fact that Sec Ritchie has singled out military families and veterans groups to make this claim to is over the top partisan political campaigning, and it has started a backlash.

…and charge you to go read the whole thing.

He promised a backlash; that comes in part two; Secretary Ritchie has been using state resources to campaign against Voter ID with Veterans and Gold Star groups:

Last week, the Gold Star Mothers of Minnesota brought to light a disturbing situation; Secretary of State Mark Ritchie using state resources to actively campaign against the Voter ID amendment. But it wasn’t just an isolated incident, Sec Ritchie also used his office to make false claims about military voters being prevented from voting to another group- The Minnesota Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The Minnesota VFW puts out a quarterly newsletter called the Gopher Oversea’r. Mailed out in a newspaper format, it includes messages from the state commander and ladies auxiliary president, news and events around the state of interest to veterans, and a short OpEd section with letters and commentary. The last issue included a commentary from SecState Ritchie that was so outrageous and over the top, it drew a firestorm of criticism from VFW members around the state. In response, the editor of the newsletter sent an email to all VFW post commanders and officers that included an apology as well as several letters representative of the angry response. This email was important because the next issue of the Gopher Oversea’r will not be published until after the election.

That the Secretary of State feels compelled to run roughshod over state law and ethics to try to fight against Voter ID is a tell to the disingenuity of their protests about how much the amendment will supposedly cost or who it’ll “disenfranchise”.  The DFL has never cared about squandering tax money, and they don’t care about rights.   But Voter ID will gut a key source of their votes – duplicate, fictional and illegal voters.

And when that’s at stake, the law and ethics take a back seat.

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again – Sally Jo Sorenson of the outstate-MN blog Bluestem Prairie is one of the Minnesota leftybloggers that doesn’t deserve to be under police surveillance.

But every once in a while, Sorenson – usually a capable reporter and observer – lets her inner snarkmeister romp and play a bit too much.

Sorenson jumped on a bit in my piece yesterday on the rhubarb between Rep. Mary Franson and some of her critics. Sorenson wrote:

We’ll get to what Franson actually said about feeding people on food stamps in a bit. But this passage is puzzling:

“the freshman conservative from Alexandria is most famous for the teapot-tempest that blew up last year about her video noting – from the perspective of someone who’d been there – that welfare treats people “like animals”.”

A reasonable reader would conclude upon reading “from the perspective of someone who’d been there” that Berg means that Mary Franson had at one time been on “welfare.”

But only if the “reasonable person” was hovering over the story looking for stray bits of chaff to yank out of context.  And yank.  And yank.

My line “from one who’s been there” was not implying that Franson had been on welfare.  It was a sloppy reference to a bit of Franson’s own bio that has popped up in many of her own statements on the issue.  .

And here’s where Sorenson’s thoroughness as a reporter saves the day for me – and sort of makes me wonder why she reached the conclusion she did; she obligingly includes one of Franson’s tellings of her own story, which helped form her views on welfare and dependency.  Sally Jo even provided the money quote:

It would have been very easy for me to get on to the system, enroll in all the various social programs, but I decided I wanted a better future for myself and for my future children, so I made up my mind that no matter what, I was going to succeed.

And that’s what happened, I succeeded. Obstacles came in my way and I pursued and I persevered. My successes didn’t come easy though but they were well worth it. I pray everyone in this state and in this country to have the same desire to succeed and be self-reliant.

There is pride in never letting yourself fall into the trap of dependence.

It was to this bit of Franson’s autobiography – which Rep. Franson has told a time or two over the past few years – that I was referring.

A “reasonable person” – the same one Sorenson conjured up when jumping to her conclusion – might think that, in fact, was what I was aiming for.  That would, in fact, be the truth.

I regret any confusion – although to be fair, I think the sloppiness of my statement was more than matched by the amount of gratuitous, unfounded assumption that Sorenson jammed into my mouth.

I also regret that Sally Jo Sorenson apparently felt the need to make such a very, very tenuous reach to try to dig up a rhetorical “gotcha”.  If I wrote a sloppy rhetorical check, Sorenson grabbed it out of the mail and tried to write a zero at the end of the amount.

While I left an editorial loose end, it was an unsupportable cheap shot.  We usually expect better.

Earlier this year I got an IPhone.  Yeah, yeah, I don’t care, I got a great deal, and since I design software, and Apple software is one of the gold standards of User Experience work, I figured I should get familiar with what they do and how).

The first seven months?  Pretty dang good.  The killer apps for me?  “You Need A Budget”, a budget-and-cash-flow app that lets me track spending as I go and fits it into a coherent household budget.  I figure it’s paid for the cost of the app and the IPhone several times over.

And Google Maps, especially the “Show Traffic” feature, which allows you to see the Googlemap traffic reports for roads…pretty much anywhere.  And I do mean anywhere.  During the State Fair, it showed the traffic not only on I94, and not only on Snelling, but on Hamline and Como and University and Larpenteur!   It wasn’t perfectly real-time, but it was more than good enough to tell you where the major jams and viable alternates were.

Last week, my phone updated itself to IOS6 – the latest version of the phone’s operating system.  And with it, the IOS5 GoogleMaps app was replaced by Apple Maps.

And they are terrible.

Not only do they only cover traffic on major freeways, but they cover it very badly, even after the minute or two it seems to take to load the results at all.  And for all the three decades of experience Apple’s UX shop has with designing usable user interfaces, you’d think they could have come up with a way to show the results where people who don’t have eyes like hawks (anymore) could actually easily tell the difference between red (jam!) and tan (no results yet).

It’s so bad Apple has apologized and urged people to try another Map app.

And unlike most technowhining, I may actually take them up on it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

From this weekend’s DFL door hanger in support of Gay Marriage:

Love

Commitment

Working together

Bettering the community

Raising children

Growing old together

Marry the person you love

Value and support strong families

Welcoming environment for all families to thrive

When Achmed, Miriam and Fatima want a marriage license based on the above reasons, will those be sufficient to say NO?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Well, yeah – if three people love each other, who are we to say no?

What are you – a bigot?

No, this is not on the level of “what’s next, marrying  goats?”; goats can’t sign contracts.  But groups of people (of legal majority)?  They sure can.

So who are we to limit polygamy?   We don’t vote on peoples’ rights, dammit!  Except we did…

I went to “Won’t Back Down” over the weekend.

I’ll come back to that.

———-

A couple of bits of background before we get to the review:

I’m A Teacher’s Kid:  My dad and my mother’s parents were all teachers.  So’s my sister, more or less.  I’m not ignorant of what a teacher’s life is like.  Or was like, really, years ago and in a much smaller place beset by a level of common sense that’d be subject to Department of Justice litigation today.

I Hate “Teacher” Movies:  Almost always, anyway.  They always, always, inevitably seem to follow a template; plucky teacher dumped into failing school by uncaring system seems group of struggling, troubled or apathetic kids – usually minorities – and has an idea on how to each ’em.  Uncaring system tries to beat plucky teacher down.  Plucky teacher tries, but soon teeters on the brink of losing the fight – until some event gives them a blinding flash of epiphany, leading them to the solution that leaves the uncaring system nodding its head in sage belief and the struggling, troubled or apathetic kids changed forever, and the plucky teacher filled with that saintly glow of superhuman accomplishment.  The movies – whether Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Mr. Hoilland’s Opus or any of a slew of others (heck, even School of Rock) – are all different and yet, it seems, all the same; they pound the problems of not just teaching kids, but of teaching scads of different kids, into a too-cheap-and-easy Hollywood resolution.

They make my skin crawl.   In part because – oh, one more thing…

I’ve Had My Own Battles With The School System:  We’ll come back to that one.

———-

I saw the trailer for Won’t Back Down, and I pretty much figured it out.  I thought I spotted the usually 21st Century Hollywood film story crutches:

• The Magic Protected Classes:  Whether the “Magic Negro” (coined by David Ehrenstein in the LATimes in 2007) – the preternaturally wise Afro-American plot premise perfected by Morgan Freeman – or the newer crutch, the Magic Single Mother, the trailers set off the warning sirens;  this was going to be a PC sacred cattle crossing.
• A Cartoonish Enemy:  Hollywood is left of center.  And so they’ve had to engage in some political gymnastics to go after that leftest-of-center institution, public education, over the years.  They way they’ve done this, traditionally, is to portray the parts of public education that are failing as isolated blocs of misery – usually as symptoms of urban decay.  The failed system is local; the overall idea never gets touched.
• Some Cartoonish Side-Villains:  One of the protagonists’ marriages fail.  When marriages fail in Hollywood movies, the non-protagonist’s motivations and reactions usually come off a little like the title character in the Dixie Chicks’ classic sociological examination “Goodbye Earl”.
• A Heart-Warming Denouement:  There is usually a triumphant final scene, usually in the school gym.

But this movie had one thing that no other movie in the genre had;  it was the trailer for the first movie I’ve seen to try to tackle School Choice as anything but a cartoon.

So how did it do?

More tomorrow.

There’s been some interesting follow-up from last week’s series on the Minnesota Poll.

More tomorrow.  Hopefully.

UPDATE:  Welcome “Bluestem Prairie” readers (via Politics In MN)!  Hey, I’m a big fan of Sally Jo – but her article linking to this piece was a huuuuuuuge, unsupportable reach, as I pointed out in this piece here.

Just saying.

———-

A couple bits of background here:

The American Left is banking its future on “demographics”.  The theory is, as America becomes less white and as American women bring home more of the nation’s gross domestic product, it will inevitably vote more Democrat.

But if they didn’t?

Berg’s Eighth Law states “American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder“.   I originally wrote the law in response to the left’s ongoing case of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome.   It works a little something like this; liberals see women, minorities and gays as their electoral property.  Indeed, in the upcoming presidential election they are just about the only sure bets that President Obama has.   And when minorities and women see that there are other viable electoral options?  Well, that’s a knife aimed at liberalism’s heart.

Because without mindless, robotic electoral obeisance from women, minorities and gays, the left’s “demographic” future and the Democrat party are both finished.

Which explains, in large part, why the American left are so utterly demented around female and minority conservatives.

———-

I once noted that if politicians like Norm Coleman or Tim Walz are like engineers – making sure everything they say and do is as perfectly calibrated as a bridge gusset plate before they put it in front of the public – then Michele Bachmann is like a jazz saxophone player, winging it and improvising and going with what sounds right.  In the past it’s made her flub-prone – but she’s also a politician who wears her heart refreshingly on her sleeve.

It’d be fair to call Mary Franson a little Bachmann-like.  While she’s been the target of an almost Bachmann-like frenzy of dementia from central Minnesota’s leftyblog community ever since she took office, the freshman conservative from Alexandria is most famous for the teapot-tempest that blew up last year about her video noting that welfare treats people “like animals”.  While Franson fairly clearly meant that welfare treats people like livestock or pets, dependent on their owner or master the government, the optics weren’t polished to a fine enough sheen to prevent the left’s noise machine from braying “Franson calls welfare recipients animals”.

They were wrong, she was right – but in the war for the low-information voter that is the DFL’s campaign this year, the headline is all that matters.

Franson is running for re-election in the new House District 8B.  Her re-election doesn’t seem to be in too much danger – 8B is conservative enough that her opponent, Bob Cuniff, doesn’t even talk about his teachers’ union endorsement.

That doesn’t stop them from trying to make hay, of course.

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Vikings punter, musician, alt-media poitical dabbler and media celeb Chris Kluwe has been an outspoken supporter of gay marriage.  As such, he takes a little flak.

He tweeted about some of that flak he’s taken – including a fairly nasty, if stupid, little cartoon. 

Aaron Ley is a DFL activist and leader of the “North Star Project”, a McPAC funneling money into central MN campaigns.  He’s also the son of Carol Wenner, who was an unsuccessful candidate for the DFL bid to run against Franson, and is currently running for County Commission up there.  He chimed in, responding to Kluwe:

The link (let’s forget the unfounded accusation – which is Ley’s style, but like Ley, it’s of no real consequence) is to a piece that points out that Franson, like most conservative Christians, shockingly, opposes same sex marriage.  Like most social conservatives, Franson refers to the “traditional values” involved in the current definition of marriage.

That brought Kluwe back into the, er, “fray”:

“Basically, I was pointing out the fact that it is very hypocritical of her to ask for a return to traditional values, when traditional values say she should have been in the kitchen, and not in office,” Kluwe told City Pages yesterday. “Traditional values doesn’t just mean what you want it to mean. It can also mean some pretty bad stuff.”

Now, by Kluwe’s logic, support for the enumerated powers clause of the Tenth Amendment means you also have to support slavery – because values, apparently, are tied to mores at various points in time, not the idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.

Kluwe says he’s been talking to Minnesotans for Equality — a group opposing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage — about organizing a debate between him and Franson.

Yeah, I suspect Mary Franson’s busy on the campaign trail.  Retail politics has a pretty crowded agenda this time of year, and debating media dilettantes doesn’t make the cut.

But hey!  I’m a media dilettante! And I could scare up some free time!

So I’ll tell you what, Chris Kluwe – if you want a debate about the Marriage Amendment, let’s go!  I’ll even spot you a couple of points.  Read my writing on the subject if you don’t know what I mean.

Have your people call my people.   By the way, I am my people.

Speaking of your people?  You might wanna have a word with some of the people on your side of this thing.  Eepy-cray.

More on that later.

UPDATE:  I edited a bit of sloppy writing that left at least one leftyblogger enough wiggle room to make a real doozy of a leap.  That’ll teach me to write before I’ve had coffee.