Tag Archives: Ilhan Omar

The Number of White Teachers About to Get Fired is Exactly … Zero.

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Anytime there’s a school or teacher flap in the news it helps to have an expert right here on the premises. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you The Lovely Mrs., a veteran of 37 years teaching senior high English in the great state of Minnesota.

If you have a Trumper in your social orbit you no doubt heard bone-on-bone caterwauling the other day about the Minneapolis school district going “full woke radical” and laying off white teachers regardless of seniority. I certainly did, without quite understanding what ignited the outrage that was built into the new contract language months ago.

But lordy, lordy! A quick Google search of “Minneapolis … white teachers … fired first” found more than 30 “news reports”, the most-trafficked from Murdoch-owned operations howling about the blatant “racism” in the radical socialist hell hole we know as Minneapolis. (Gotta love the sources for their reporting.) And if you need video, there were selected black folks on Sean Hannity’s show railing against the injustice to … mmmm … white folks. Teachers, to be specific.

Color me very confused.

i ask you, “Who in the hell is getting fired? Or laid off? Or in the coagulated verbiage of the Teachers Union’s contract, “If excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population’.” (“Excessing?” … for chrissake, who writes shit like that?)

The short answer to the question of which Minneapolis teachers are getting canned and forced to work at the Wendy’s drive-through is … exactly … no body.

That’s because every day there are a half dozen other stories reporting the 200, 300, pick-a-scary number of teachers the Minneapolis district needs to … hire … right now … in order to have enough to educate our little savants this coming school year. So no. The answer to the Pop Quiz: “How many patriotic white men and women are going to be cruelly axed to satisfy woke liberals?” is … zero. Certainly today and for as far into the future as any actual education expert can predict.

But, you know, when you’re in the outrage business, woke liberal blue state racists destroying the careers of decent white people is absolutely irresistible. Get it in the “A” block and sell it!

But back to The Lovely Mrs, who has no end of horror stories of incompetent faculty colleagues and incompetent school administrators. The latter being guilty of failing to do their job, which includes culling out the lazy, lazier and laziest regardless of color or seniority. The crowd as she often says who “laminated their lesson plans 20 years ago and haven’t updated anything since.”

This unfortunately connects to stories of administrators perpetually conniving to run off people who they simply took a personal disliking to.

Human nature. It’s a bitch.

But, no. Just no. Exactly like the outrages over Critical Race Theory (get a furious Trumper to even explain what he thinks it is), the IRS kicking down the door of your trailer to collect back taxes or Ilhan Omar mandating Sharia Law on the Iron Range, this one has no connection to a real and imminent reality.

But, don’t let me ruin your fun. Howl away.

I Still Take Omar Over Samuels

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It’s a running discussion, whether newspaper endorsements mean anything in a modern world where crazy Uncle Steve and a few hundred Russian bots can create a groundswell of enthusiasm for the dimmest of political bulbs. But this morning’s Strib shout-out for Don Samuels over Ilhan Omar in next Tusday’s DFL primary may be a bit different in that, unlike a Republican primary, it’s talking to a mostly sanity-based audience.

The endorsement comes within a (very) long recitation of Samuels’ activist-within-the-accepted system bona fides. And there’s no disputing that at age 72 he’s covered a lot more ground than Omar, who is 39.

But as I read the endorsement I was reminded again of something I tell cranky lefties rolling their eyes at positions the Strib Op-Ed page takes on a range of issues. And that is that big newspapers (TV news doesn’t risk opinionated stands) are almost by definition a status quo entity. They see themselves playing a stabilizing role, calming and shushing the hormonal impulses of the fringes. In football terms, news organizations like the Strib prefer, and with their opinions they play a game between the 40 yard-lines. A little wiggle over this way, then a little wiggle back. Never too far or too much. But rather everything at mid-field, far from the over-heated end zones.

This is by way of me saying that I’ll vote for Omar again next Tuesday. Not necessarily because I see her as a more disciplined bureacrat, or even as the Strib argues for Samuels a more imaginative legislator, but because I see value in what the Strib sees as her excesses.

Omar is invariably lumped in with “The Squad”, the band of firebrand liberal women that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. The women, all under age 50, representing barely 1% of the current Congress, yet are constantly irritating Washington’s Democratic leadership with loud demands for an aggressive, progressive agenda. And on the flip-side they are perpetually inflaming the nightmares of Trumpist Republicans who see all women of color as the deepest kind of threat to “the American way.”

These are both qualities hard to quantify but which I find appealing … and valuable.

It’s absolutely true that Omar has stepped in it more than once. In her first term, she exuded more than a bit of the entitled attitude that comes with being a good-looking woman — (a lot like the ‘tude that comes with star athletes, guys like Aaron Rodgers for example, who have pretty much always lived a rareified, revered existence substantially different than their peers.) She seems to have learned to modulate her public comments a bit more in her second term.

I suspect that her much-quoted remarks about Israel and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Muslims in general did very little to stoke her appeal to the Twin Cities’ and U.S. Jewish community. But, for what it’s worth, what I heard in what she was saying, or trying to say, was that today’s Israeli government, only recently and perhaps only temporarily, released from the claws of the rigidly conservative, deeply corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu was the central issue … not simply that Israel is a Jewish state and all Jews are racists.

And what informed audience is going to deny that about Netanyahu and Israel’s version of our bat shit conservatives?

More central to my point here, what American political figure is going to make a consistent point of that? Of drawing regular attention to the crude and frankly ugly, counter-effective ways conservative Israeli governments have behaved in the Middle East?

I know nothing about how well Omar’s office has provided constituent service, but if it’s average it’s good enough, and if it pays particular attention to the Fifth District’s Somali population, that too is tolerable.

The Strib clearly sees Samuels being a better agent for Minneapolis’ black community. But I have a hard time imagining Omar neglecting the north side’s problems, despite her, um intemperate anger over name-your-favorite-Minneapolis-cop-killing of an unarmed black constituent.

And a final note to the bad faith crowd forever playing purely team-oriented politics. Ilhan Omar, AOC and the rest of the scary hyper-liberal “Squad” bear no resemblance — none — to the appalling freak-show idiocy and recklessness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Madison Cawthorn, Jim Jordan and on and on … and on and on … down there in the Republican end zone.

Omar still has plenty learn. But she’s engaged in serious, valuable progressive messaging and legislation. And she remains a unique voice in a Congress badly polluted by authoritarian dimwits and musty, status quo bureaucrats.

So yeah. I’m voting for her, again.

Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

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Whatever problems the Post Office is having, they haven’t slowed the torrent of anti-Ilhan Omar/pro-Antone Melton-Meaux clogging our mail slot here in the beating heart of the Fifth District. In sheer total mass the accumulating pulp is approaching the heft and gloss of that Restoration Hardware catalogue. Post-primary, the printers handling all this stuff will be kicking back in Cabo for a month.

The cash for attacking Omar is believed to be coming from “bundlers” associated with pro-Israel lobbies, committees and such, as well as Republicans eager to paint Omar’s high-profile immigrant, female, Muslim “radicalism” as a political loser and swap her out for something more mainstream. At this moment I’m not certain if either or both is true. But the size and sophistication of the effort to take out a young, first-term Congresswoman is both extraordinary and more than a little repellent.

I’ve rolled my eyes more than a few times over the past two years at the way Omar has said things as well as moves she’s busted in the context of her squirrely personal melodramas.

IMHO there’s a prima donna factor involved there, as well as, ironically, a tone of entitlement. At the risk of stepping out into the minefield of sexism, what I’ve seen with Omar is not unlike what I’ve seen countless times with other young, female celebrities. Being successful and good-looking buys you a lot of space in modern America. It can go to your head.

That said, I had no second-thoughts about checking her name and mailing in my ballot for her. Having yet to meet the perfect politician, my attitude is that Omar deserves another term, at least to tidy up her personal life and refine her message discipline. You never want to set the bar for comparison as low as utter fools and frauds such as Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Ted Yoho, Matt Gaetz and a dozen other trolls in the Republican caucus. But if they, (mostly sewage-spewing white guys), can hang around DC year after year, Ms. Omar — who may be self-involved but isn’t stupid — deserves at least one more term.

Frankly, I like Omar’s style of in-your-face “radicalism”, and I’m not all that bothered that she hasn’t stuck a sock in it and waited ten years to step up and say what’s on her mind. Despite what Breitbart and OANN and FoxNews are forever hyper-ventilating over, Omar and the rest of the all-female, “ethnic” Squad are hardly on the verge of enacting Sharia Law in ‘Murica, grabbing our guns and forcing us to live on a diet of kale and seaweed.

They remain distinctly minority voices … but with unusual potency in the age of social media.

Far from being detrimental, the noise Omar and the others are making, both impudent and imprudent to the ears of sclerotic institutions like the Star Tribune editorial page, is actually healthy for a functioning democracy. And absolutely vital to one like we have today, which is being rotted out from within by an enormous cast of shameless, homogeneous charlatans. (You want eye-rolling? Zoom me any time the Strib natters on about the anodyne values of “reaching across the aisle”, “consensus-building” and “pragmatism.”)

I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi has ever had a kind of Mother Hen chat with Omar. But certainly someone explained to her the hellfire she’d face if she dropped so much as a syllable of negativity about America’s carte blanche commitment to “Israel”, which is synonymous with “Benjamin Netanyahu” as far as too many Americans are concerned. Netanyahu is as flagrantly corrupt as Donald Trump, and as long as his kind holds power in Israel we need someone with a high Congressional profile asking, “Exactly what in hell are we doing here?”

Ms. Omar is hardly a bashful flower. She likes the stage and the lights. No one will confuse her with quiet, plodding Marty Sabo. And that’s good. This is a wildly different time.

The Squad is .92% of the current Congress. The GOP’s Orwellian-named Freedom Caucus is nine times as large, and none of them are enduring a flash flood of attack cash during their primary campaign.

Stylistically and tactically Omar has things to learn. And if she doesn’t, her 2022 race may be a different story. But right now she’s a valuable voice because she’s unique and because she won’t quietly relent to brute tradition.

The Fifth District can live with that just fine.

Again, the Star Tribune and MPR Keep Their Distance from a Big, Volatile Story

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As of last Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews/Fox Business News empire had mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 3,181 times in 42 days, an average of 75 times a day. Murdoch’s media empire is similarly obsessed with my congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, to the point where last week his Manhattan paper, the New York Post, mashed her up — on a full-color cover — with the exploding World Trade Center.

The pile-on aimed at Omar naturally included Murdoch/Fox’s biggest fan/property, Donald Trump, who went on a Twit tear against Omar to the point that literally hundreds of other publications and public figures have expressed disgust at the attacks and fear for Omar’s safety. As of this morning U.S. Capitol security is “assessing” how much additional attention they need to give … a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

I’ve always placed faith in the notion that it’s pretty easy to see what people fear most simply by listening to what they talk about the most.

In the case of MurdochWorld the concept of fear is of course inseparable from their “assessment” of what their audience wants to hear. (What’s the First Rule of Show Biz? “Give the people what they want.”) In AOC and Omar, Murdoch-Fox has a twin tri-fecta for its predominantly old, white and male audience — i.e. two young, not-(entirely) white women.

As I say that part is easy to understand. Not that it makes the threat to Omar’s safety any less legitimate. Hell, less than two weeks ago FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that white supremacy was a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the security of the United States. No one following the news with intelligence and good faith denies what the FBI is correctly seeing. Not that Sarah Sanders or Trump or Stephen Miller or Fox (as far as I can tell) made so much as a peep about this FBI’s of fact.

But here’s the curiosity, locally, as far as the Ilhan Omar story goes. While the furor of what Omar said to a group in California in late March has been intense, to say the least, Minnesota’s largest news organizations have been treating it like a mildly curious side-show. Strib reporter Patrick Condon wrote a straight-down-the-middle-no-value-judgment-here piece on April 11, dutifully quoting, in a fair and balanced way, both sides of the controversy, giving each equal weight. Since then though, as Trump has twitted and the attacks on Omar by Murdoch Inc. have become an international incident, the Star Tribune has left the story to wire services, as though what? their DC correspondents have more important stories to cover?

This morning’s Strib has a tout to the latest Omar story (inside on A4) at the top left of the front fold. But the reporting therein is a product of The Washington Post.

Since the uproar over her “some people did something” speech the paper has taken no op-ed stance on the controversy. Likewise, MPR is content to use AP coverage  — of an international furor over Minnesota’s highest profile congressperson. (Obviously, MPR is never in the business of taking a values-based stand on anything, much less assessing the validity of what Omar said in California or the Fox media/White House attacks on her.)

The behavior of the Star Tribune and MPR on the Omar story bears a striking similarity to their “we have no fingerprints on this” non-coverage of accusations of staff abuse by Amy Klobuchar.

Which leads you to ask, “What is the similarity here?”

Is it that neither news room is yet aware of what the Fox/Trump machinery is saying about Omar? Of what papers from England to Australia are saying about the episode? Are both newsrooms too understaffed to prioritize a national/White House assault on … a metro area congresswoman? Or is it perhaps another one of those stories that screams “partisan dynamite” so loudly that it is most, um, prudently, farmed out to other more faceless, and more distant messengers, organizations who are less well-defined targets for wrath and antipathy?

I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The basic rub with this latest Omar story is that no fair-minded, dutiful reporter could listen to her entire California speech and come away with any interpretation other than what she was saying was that the entire world’s muslim community — 1.5 billion people — was being held responsible for the criminal actions of 19 people, “some people”, who attacked the US on 9/11. Likewise, no professional newsroom could look at the truly dangerous Murdoch/FoxNews/Trump re-framing and exploitation of those comments and see it as anything but the grossest and most reckless kind of exploitation.

Could Omar have spared herself some of the heat from the Murdoch/Trump echo chamber if she had instead said something like, “… 19 criminals, 15 of them privileged youth from our great ally Saudi Arabia, attacked us on 9/11 and as a result every muslim everywhere, all 1.5 billion of us, has been tarred as a radical terrorist. Did that happen to white, male Americans when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building in Oklahoma?”

Maybe.

But given the Fox/Trump obsession with selling muslim terror to their primary audience and the stark visual reality of Omar — a brown female in a hajib, I truly doubt it. Anytime she says anything, her words are a target for hyper-cynical retrofitting. Every day the Murdoch machine needs new fuel to fire the base.

Still, I fail to see how the Star Tribune and MPR, again, can see this latest full-frontal attack on, as I say, the most prominent person in the state’s House delegation, as a noisy sideshow most wisely left to others to cover.

Oh yeah, they’d take plenty of heat if they gave a full and accurate appraisal of Omar’s comments and the tone of the Murdoch/Trump reaction. But the thing is, that’s the news game. It’s what happens when you — not someone else — does your job and gives your audience the complete story.

If that scares you, find another line of work.

Dear Ilhan Omar: Don’t Sand All the Sharpness Away

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My congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, seems to be getting a painful lesson in the value of nuance. I hope she doesn’t take it too seriously.

As of this morning (Wednesday) Ms. Omar has dodged the bullet … fired by her own Democratic colleagues … and will not be specifically cited in a lip service “condemnation of anti-Semitism.” The new, watered-down version now will include counter-balancing language also condemning “anti-Muslim” speech. Given another couple days and a few more committees the Democrats will be boldly condemning mean people, potholes and dogs barking after midnight.

Omar and other members of the Democratic freshman class — the wildly celebrated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them — should be commended for delivering the left-wing version of what the right-wing goobers claim they wanted with Donald Trump. Namely, someone who would go to DC and “shake things up.” (There’s a Newtonian unity at play here.)

The key difference being that the goobers and Trump have little to no foundation in historical reality and think spitting in the face of common sense and decency is revolutionary. With Omar, Cortez and the like, they clearly understand how powerful influences keep vital, full-spectrum discussions of important issues walled-off and neutered.

Omar is either very brave or very naive in disregarding the impact her image — dark-skinned woman in a hajib — has on America’s cultural battlefield. She’s an absolute godsend (a white, male, bearded god … send) to Gooberus Americanus, FoxNews and every uber patriot itching to take the fight to the towel heads once and for all. I suspect Mother Superior, Nancy Pelosi, has already had a chat with Omar about the fund-raising she’s doing for the Republican party.

But for those of us over here in the Reality Bubble, Omar, while problematically blunt and only mildly abashed is, like AOC, broaching some truly important issues. And she should continue doing so, with only minimal sanding of her sharpest edges.

There is simply no question that Congress’ resoundingly uncritical support of Ariel Sharon-Benjamin Netanyahu-style leadership, rancid with its supplication to the most intolerant conservative religious factions in Israel (and the US), needs to be regularly called out for “allegiance.” No intelligent person disputes the importance of supporting a (mostly) democratic government in Israel. Just as no intelligent person should dispute the obvious antagonism the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu — pandering to the interests of the most radically conservative forces — is constantly inciting among Palestinians and the profoundly cynical governments in Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

Amid all the attention Omar has received in the past couple weeks, precious little has been paid to equally blunt comments she’s made on American subservience to Saudi Arabia … which is not a Jewish state, in case you forgot.

In a series of Tweets over the Trump administration’s refusal to press the Saudis for the truth about the murder of (Amazon-owned and biased Washington Post) journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Omar said, “Once again, our President proves that you can’t buy a moral compass. And Saudi Arabia proves that you can, on the other hand, buy a President.”

Here’s a piece from never-that-close-a-pal-of-Jerusalem, Glenn Greenwald. Also good is this from Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight.

Not just at the heart of what Omar is saying, but right there on the face of it, is the argument that money (shocking!) has thoroughly distorted American objectives in a number of critical foreign relationships. In a sane world, Omar’s bluntness would provoke a healthy conversation about whether unequivocal loyalty to the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu is in the best interests of the U.S, the Middle East or even Israel. (Jared Kushner is probably finessing that one as we speak.)

All that said, there is roiling support for the essence of what Omar has been saying from American Jewish leaders uncomfortable with Netanyahu-style leadership and America’s lock-step “allegiance” to that kind of rigid and corrupt authoritarianism. It is also demonstrably true that here in ‘Murica, support for Israel-no-matter-what is at least as fervent among white, evangelical (know-nothing) Christians as among the average Jewish voter.

So, Dear Congresswoman Omar:  You’re on to something significant. My concern is that as .037% of the current Congress, you’re fully prepared to take far more heat and threats of violence than have ever been aimed at an actual bigot, like, oh say, male and very white Steve King.

 

 

 

 

Friend and Foe Drop the Hammer on Ilhan Omar

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Well, it appears the Democrats have dropped a five-ton “Zero Tolerance” hammer on my newbie congresswoman. That’s gotta hurt.

The reaction to Ilhan Omar’s tweets about Jewish money in American politics could not have been more swift and indignant or filled with any higher level of dudgeon. Another breath was not going to be taken without hearing her unequivocal apology … which she kinda offered.

Within hours of her glibly tossing out a reference to an old P Diddy song she (and all Democrats by association) were being condemned for “hating Israel”.  Minutes later she was being taken out behind the barn for a whoopin’ by Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat close to a microphone. Yikes. Bad day, madam.

To be clear, the dagger’s edge of the condemnation of Mar wasn’t directed at her complaint about money in politics so much as it was … the inference of the “trope” she banged out via Twitter. To everyone that mattered, any reference to the way AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) doles out cash in Congress is exactly the same thing as saying “Jewish bankers control the world.”

I’ve said “yikes” already, right?

Several things come to mind.

1: Public officials in general would be very well-advised to reserve Twitter for only the blandest pronouncements. For example: “Today is Mothers Day. Let’s all tell Mom we love her.” On Twitter (which, “When it isn’t kindergarten it’s a sewer”*) anything else leads to instantaneous re-re-interpretation, flame wars and grief. Stop trying to prove you’re more clever in 20 words and an emoji than everyone else and stick to a speech or policy paper when you’ve got something important to say.

2: A nuanced conversation about Israel is damned rare in the USA. The reasons include the often psychotic tribalism of both the genocidal dictators over there in the ‘hood, (Saddam, Bashir al-Asad) and our oil-rich Gulf allies. (That sound you hear is the bone saw carving up the reporters our gas station buddies don’t like.) That and the perilous position Israel is always in relative to those neighbors. That reality has a way of severely out-weighing the innumerable ways Israel makes its situation worse by being controlled by its arch-conservative religious “leadership”. Given that pretty medieval crowd, there’s not much chance puppet governments like Benjamin Netenyahu’s will ever stop piling more and more people into West Bank developments and rubbing Israel’s affluence in the face of the average Palestinian, penned in and governed by their own rotating cast of demagogues. (And forget about ever sorting out which is the chicken and which is the egg.)

3: Omar is part of the current Congress’s 0.6% Muslim representation, (1% of total US population.) By contrast, Congress today includes 31% Catholics, 14% Baptists and 6% Jews. 3% of 535 declared either “don’t know” or “refused”, so they might be our atheist representation. Praise be!) Point being, Omar’s in no position to do anything other than register an occasional (albeit much too glib) complaint about the US government’s near-total deference to Israel … and the wealthiest of the Middle East’s Muslims. (But hey … when that Palestinian rabble strikes oil, we’ll take their calls.) Omar’s a voice in the wilderness, and yet she’s getting hammered by friend and foe alike as though she’s winding up to lead a jihad. Proportionality isn’t much in vogue these days.

4: It goes without saying that virtually every Republican in Congress and the pundit-ocracy is a hypocritical fool when it comes to condemning “hate speech.” Somewhere, a few of them might have expressed discomfort with Trump referring to the cro-magnon, tiki-torch, in-your-face-anti-Semitic Nazi-bros in Charlottesville as some of the “good people on both sides”, I just don’t recall at this moment. But it’s unfortunate even a few Democrats don’t use this fleeting window in the news cycle to reinforce Omar’s underlying complaint about money — from wherever — steering US politics.

Unfortunately, Zero Tolerance within the herd means everyone stays on the same script in these moments of (Twitter-sparked) crisis.

So much then for making lemonade out of this outrage.

(*Me. Often.)