Via DailyKos, we learn that Robin Carnahan has made the hit list of FRC Action (the “legislative action” arm of the Family Research Council) at the Values Voters Summit.  The Christofacists think that she might be vulnerable in her bid for the Senate because groups that support keeping a woman’s right to choose legal also donate heavily to her campaign.  I’m betting that Missourians aren’t really that backward — particularly when the opposition is that well-known purveyer of “monkey” humor and anti-Medicare crusader, Roy Blunt.  

Speaking of Blunt, FRC Action is also polling its membership over the issue of which particularly inept Republicans need special help the most; guess which Missourian is included on the list:

…FRC Action asks attendees which of four incumbent Republicans it should “save” from the Left: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.), and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the last of whom is running for Senate.

I have to say that Blunt has found his rightful place in this august company — although even he might have to strain a bit to merit comparison to the main luminary in this bundle of crazy, Michele Bachmann. She, after all, is the real thing, whereas Blunt seems just a tad more cynical, a plodding, corporate-owned drudge putting in some overtime as a wannabe comedian in order to jolly up the fringe loonies that now constitute almost the entire Republican party membership.

I was recently visiting in the San Francisco Bay area where I came across this op-ed about the “evils” of the public option in the San Francisco Chronicle.  All I can say is when you are at a loss for words at the stupidity of the wingers, just reduce ad absurdam. One could, of course, try this exercise and substitute fire departments, etc. for libraries.

So-called “populist” anger egged on by some of our ignorant media can be a volatile mix with serious consequences for the functionality of our institutions and their usefulness to the people they serve. One such cautionary tale in our present fragile economic environment is continuing at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg.

Our previous coverage on January 25, 2008: Three steps behind, and to the right

Add into this mix an effective administrator hamstrung by a majority of the institution’s governing board which was appointed by the previous Governor and which has an agenda that appears to be more concerned about ancillary programs (intercollegiate athletics) and appeasing a vocal minority. Sounds like our current universe, doesn’t it?

Our story continues.

Last week, in a short time frame before the university’s Board of Governors meeting, tenured faculty circulated a petition to other tenured faculty for presentation to the board [Note: I signed and helped circulate the petition]:

Petition to Renew the Contract of President Podolefsky

We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep concern about the ongoing inaction of the Board of Governors regarding the renewal of President Podolefsky’s contract and planning for the future of the university.  At this critical time in determining the future shape of the institution, losing a dynamic leader like Dr. Podolefsky would have drastic repercussions.  By every measurable indicator, he has executed his duties to the highest standards, and we are extremely dismayed that the Board has chosen to jeopardize the university’s success by neglecting to issue a contract extension in spite of his performance.   In order that we may remain confident in the Board’s stewardship of the institution, we ask that it extend Dr. Podolefsky’s contract with all due haste.

Sincerely,

[signed by 126 tenured faculty]

The active participation of 126 tenured faculty, as anyone who understands the culture of academic institutions would know, is remarkable in itself.

The ad-hoc committee also submitted this cover letter to the board of Governors:

9/15/2009

To: The Honorable Members of the UCM Board of Governors

From: The Ad Hoc Committee for the Petition to Renew the Contract of President Podolefsky

Please find attached a petition and list of 126 names of tenured faculty members who signed copies of this document.  (This represents roughly one-half of tenured faculty at UCM.)

Deeply concerned about the uncertain future of the university, several UCM faculty members formed an ad hoc committee and recently began circulating this petition.  The tenured faculty members to whom we spoke were overwhelmingly in agreement.  We gathered these signatures in less than 3 days and, with very little effort, we met our goal of obtaining 100 signatures.  We believe this is ample evidence that our concerns are indeed shared by a very considerable percentage of UCM faculty.

We understand that you have already received evidence of faculty support for President Podolefsky in the form of a Faculty Senate resolution (see attached motion). Passed on January 14, 2009, the Faculty Senate approved a letter supporting the President’s leadership by a 72 percent vote.  Last spring, a poll conducted by the Daily Star Journal found that support of the president in the community surpassed 70 percent.  Based on the success of our petition and the support for President Podolefsky by the Faculty Senate and the community poll, representatives of the ad hoc committee will be meeting this Thursday (September 17) with Commissioner of Higher Education Robert Stein.  We will be seeking his advice on how to move forward when so many of the members of the faculty are in disagreement with the lack of action by the Board of Governors in renewing President Podolefsky’s contract.

Like you, we wish only the best for the University of Central Missouri, and we respectfully ask that you give our petition your fullest attention and consideration.

Sincerely,

Members of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Petition to Renew the Contract of President Podolefsky:

Michael Bersin

Karen Bradley

Davie Davis

Kathleen Desmond

Mary Kelly

Mick Luehrman

Mike Sawyer

James Staab

Sue Sundberg

Don Wallace

Bob Yates

So, you may ask, “Who cares?”

The Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal covered the story:

9/17/2009 11:38:00 AM

UCM faculty speaking out for President Podolefsky

Jack Miles

Editor

Warrensburg – In a matter of a few hours, nearly half of the tenured faculty at the University of Central Missouri signed a petition asking the Board of Governors to retain President Aaron Podolefsky…

The student newspaper covered the story:

Petition circulates to renew President’s contract

Lora Powell: Muleskinner

Issue date: 9/17/09 Section: News

With UCM President Aaron Podolefsky’s contract months from expiration, a group of concerned faculty members have decided to tell the Board of Governors how they feel about the group’s “inaction” regarding the decision to renew his contract….

And then then, in an anonymous editorial posted on their website, the local radio station weighed in [their links are kind of hinky, you may have to search for it]:

9/17/09 – Stop The Spin

…And how many people were intimidated when they voted? How would you like to have someone come up to you at your place of work and ask you to sign a petition that says your boss is doing a good job? I bet that makes for a good work environment.

The bottom line is this: The University is a major employer in our community and is the most recognizable asset our community has. If it begins to fail then our community will begin to fail, so leadership at the top must be exceptional. Who that leader should be is for the Board of Directors to decide. The hierarchy in a perfect world is the faculty teach classes and educate our youth, the professional staff lead their departments, and support staff do things that make the university strong. It is up to the Board of Governors to decide who is best to lead the University…

Stupidity may be inherited, but ignorance is a personal choice.

Where to start?

Tenured faculty, by virtue of their status, have a right and obligation to speak out about the institution they serve. Tenure is not employment for life, it only means that tenured faculty are not employed at will. That is, the institution has to show cause why a tenured faculty member should be dismissed. Administrators and support staff are employed at will and can be dismissed at will.

Tenured faculty tend to have longer careers at a particular institution (uh, it takes a while to get tenure) than academic administrators and many support staff. And tenured faculty are a part of the institution long after the terms of governing board members have passed and gone. Tenured faculty are the one constituency that has to live with the long term consequences of the decisions and actions of others affecting the institution. You had better believe they’ll weigh in when they feel it’s warranted.

Is it possible that non-tenured faculty were not solicited because tenured faculty, who have a say in their tenure, did not want to be accused of “intimidating” junior faculty into signing? That’s probably too subtle for our anonymous radio station editorialist.

The bottom line is that an editorial, unsigned by its writer and resplendent in its ignorance, purports to express the populist will and the define the proper role of faculty as serfs. Big mistake. Big. Huge.

And that, in a nutshell, is a microcosm of our present universe.

Three steps behind and to the right, indeed.

Post-Dispatch columnist, Bill McClellan, has given up on bi-partisanship. In his own quirky, good humored way, he concedes that we are a house divided and that maybe we need to take Texas Gov. Rick Perry up on his notion of secession and let the other Southern states follow suit.

He had thought Obama’s hope of uniting us would change the political picture, but on inauguration day, he tuned in to Rush Limbaugh and realized his mistake:

[Rush] was outraged, of course, and the target of his outrage was the Rev. Joseph Lowery, whose benediction had included a riff about a day when “black will not be asked to get back … and white will embrace what is right.” That riff brought forth a vein-popping fury that I found chilling – 50,000 watts of hate pulsating out of One Memorial Drive in downtown St. Louis. And not just St. Louis, and not just Limbaugh, and not just at that moment. Different cities, different times, different people, but all with variations on the same theme.

You can’t blame this all on the conservatives. Had McCain won, the left would have been pouring hate on Sarah Palin. You can’t blame the radio stations. Sex sells and hate sells, and you can’t do sex on the radio.

McClellan tries to live and let live, so he sees the two nations that might result this way:

I’m hopeful (that’s my nature) that we can remain on good terms even though we will be very different countries. We’ll have health care reform with a role for government, and you’ll have rugged individualism. You can pass a Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, and we’ll muddle along without one. (I’m celebrating my 30th anniversary this December.) You can make English your official language, and we’ll put up with a babble of voices. You can teach creationism or intelligent design in your schools, and we’ll teach evolution. You can deregulate the bankers and regulate the scientists, and we’ll regulate the bankers and deregulate the scientists. You’ll have Memphis and Dallas, and we’ll have New York and San Francisco. With unfettered scientists and Silicon Valley, we’ll have medical research and computer sciences, but you’ll have great barbecue and Tex-Mex. Hey, I’ll keep my passport current.

I suppose it’s curmudgeonly of me to light into McClellan for his vision of an amicable divorce. After all, he’s just trying to jolly people into getting along, without laying excessive blame on either party. But like so many journalists, McClellan considers a false equivalence to be the same as balanced objectivity. Me, I think you can’t equate right wing fury with left wing temper. I have to agree instead–full disclosure, here: I am a left winger, therefore biased–with Leonard Pitts that the ire and rancor on the left is but a pale imitation of the rage and malice from the right. Pitts describes, for example, an analysis from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“Terror From the Right” is a listing of bombers, killers, would-be assassins and insurrectionists motivated by anger over abortion, gays, taxes, blacks, Muslims and illegal immigrants.

Which raises an obvious fair and balanced question: What about terror from the left? The SPLC’s Mark Potok says left-wing terror essentially means eco-terrorists, e.g., animal rights extremists. The death toll from their work, he says, is zero.

By contrast, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people because he was angry at the government, brothers Matthew and Tyler Williams shot two men to death for being gay, James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian for being an abortion provider, and dozens of other men have been indicted for dozens of other plots to kill thousands of other people with whom they had political disagreements.

It’s one thing to read these stories in isolation and another to see them collected, and thereby connected, here, one extremist plot after another in the 14 years since Oklahoma City. It gives you a sense that – apologies to Buffalo Springfield – there’s something happening here and what it is is all too clear. The report provides troubling context for the outrageous behavior that has attended the election of our first African-American president.

And if hate characterizes the right more than the left, so does fear. We’re entering a new McCarthy era, with accusations of communism and socialism bandied about without proof to scare the livin’ bejeebus out of anybody gullible enough to listen.

So, yes, Bill, I do despise Sarah Palin.  There have been times when I could enjoy her antics, figuring who needs Tina Fey when you can laugh at the real McCoy. But then Palin lied about death panels and ceased to be cute in any way. Her callous disregard for the truth, if it succeeded in deep sixing health care reform, would end up keeping tens of millions of us from getting health care. Call me cranky, but stuff like that annoys me.

In fact, anger is the only normal response sometimes.

Civil discourse is fine, but when the other side is fighting dirty, you should get angry. Don’t let the bully kick sand in your face. The White House should have impaled death panel malarkey as soon as it came up.

By the time the president got feisty in a speech on Monday, the inmates had taken over cable TV, much like the spooky spirits swarming up over Bald Mountain in “Fantasia.”

As far as I’m concerned, right wingers are mad as hell and they’re not going to take their meds anymore. And that scares me. I’m grateful that I decided to pick a screen name when we started this blog, because the right is getting uglier by the day.

We need bodies on the sidewalk. We need to demonstrate our passion about health care reform and the public option. Help get out the progressive message: take part in a demonstration Tuesday, Sept. 22 at noon across from Union Station, in front of the WellPoint offices.

Let’s challenge WellPoint’s near monopoly in five Missouri cities.

If you live in St. Louis, finagle an extra long lunch hour and show up. Don’t bother bringing a sign. HCAN is supplying them. They prefer a sea of large, easy to read signs and a consistent message.

The HCAN memo about this rally says:

Let the public know that if big insurance wins, then the people lose big-time!

WellPoint is a huge insurance company. It is the largest member of the Alliance Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. The corporation in 2008 was number 33 in the Fortune 500 and can tout one in nine Americans as customers in fourteen states–including Missouri. WellPoint, like Cigna and United Health Care, is an example of profit-driven health insurance worst practices. And since January 2008, WellPoint, just like its corporate insurance counterparts, spent about $7 million on federal lobbyists to spoil insurance reform.

WellPoint rewards its employees for dropping members’ health care coverage. The Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee revealed WellPoint “evaluated employee performance based in part on the amount of money its employees saved the company through retroactive rescissions of health insurance policies. According to documents obtained by the committee, one WellPoint official was awarded a perfect score of five for exceptional performance, based on having saved the company nearly $10 million through rescissions.” [House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, 6/16/09]

The lady’s sign says it: “Insurance profits are bad for my health.”

According to the News-Leader, Republican committee members nominated Branson-area realtor Nita Jane Ayres by a 10-9 margin to be their nominee in the February 2nd, 2010 special election to replace Dennis Wood in the “Republican for almost 150 years” 62nd district. [Update: Further tweets reveal that Ayres cast the deciding vote for herself.]

Ayres is a resident of Branson West in Stone County. Branson West was known as Linchpin until 1992 when they decided to change their name to Branson West. I am pointing this information out because some may not be aware that there is a Branson West or that Branson is now large enough to have a “Branson-area”

Barring some unforseen intraparty squabble, the nomination of a really good horse veterinarian, or a surge of Democratic popularity in a part of the state that voted for Hulshof and Hubbard, the Republicans will hold this seat and people who wanted to run in 2010 to succeed Wood will find something else to do with their time.

But it should be closer than Mizzou v. Furman.

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) has been posting on health care reform via Twitter today:

Still hope we can get some public OPTION or non profit coop. Also must make sure private can compete so gov doesn’t swallow competition. about 2 hours ago from UberTwitter

Jay Akroyd at Atrios’ place writes:

When did preserving insurance companies who have abused customers become a policy objective?

The comments are biting:

The Senate’s new Hippocratic Oath:

First, do no harm to insurance company shareholders and management.

Uh… what?

The only way a public option could ‘swallow competition’ is if it’s clearly superior to private insurance.

And if that turns out to be the case, what’s the problem?….

…I guess we should have kept the buggy makers, the wagon makers, the steam locomotive makers, the radio tube makers, the door to door ice delivery businesses, the quill pen makers … in business….

Senator McCaskill also posted:

Now is the starting gate,not the finish line for health ins reform.Hard work remains. I’m betting we don’t get done til Rudolph ready to fly about 2 hours ago from UberTwitter

Why the wait? Last Sunday Senator Tom Harkin (D), Chair of the Senate HELP Committee, showed why we can’t wait:

….we’ll do the health care bill. We’ll get that done. People will immediately, immediately know how they’re being helped with our health care bill. Because as soon as our bill is passed and signed by President Obama no longer will they be able to exclude you from pre-existing conditions, no longer will there be any kind of lifetime caps, no longer can an insurance company drop you if you get sick. People who have health insurance [wind noise] will see an immediate change in their lives when we pass this bill…

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for August 2009:

…In August, the West reported the highest regional jobless rate, 10.6 percent, followed by the Midwest, 10.0 percent. The Northeast recorded the lowest rate, 9.0 percent, and was the only region with a statistically significant over-the-month rate change (+0.3 percentage point). All four regions experienced significant unemployment rate increases from August 2008, the largest of which was in the West (+4.1 percentage points)…..

The percentage unemployment for Missouri, compared to a year ago:

Missouri

August 2008 – 6.2%

August 2009 (preliminary) – 9.5%

Over-the-year rate change (preliminary) – 3.3%

[emphasis added]

The actual numbers (seasonally adjusted):

Missouri

Civilian labor force (Numbers in thousands)

August 2008 – 3,009.9

June 2009 – 2,995.9

July 2009 – 3,003.3

August 2009 (preliminary) – 3,009.3

Unemployed (Numbers in thousands)

August 2008 – 186.9

June 2009 – 278.0

July 2009 – 279.1

August 2009 (preliminary) – 285.7

Unemployed (Percent of labor force)

August 2008 – 6.2%

June 2009 – 9.3%

July 2009 – 9.3%

August 2009 (preliminary) – 9.5%

[emphasis added]