One of my favorite radio programs is This American Life. It’s especially good when driving to Sacramento, it pulls your cares away from what’s going on there.
Except this week’s episode doesn’t do that at all. In fact, it goes into the lying sack of horse manure that is Steve Poizner’s book. In it, he criticizes Mt. Pleasant High School students for being “lazy” and “unmotivated.” But the facts are
Checking school records I learned that Poizner’s unmotivated, unambitious class included one of the school valedictorians, Charles Rudy, who graduated and went to college.
Could he be getting this so completely wrong? I wondered. Could he have written an entire book misperceiving so thoroughly what was happening right in front of his eyes, and now is trying to use that book to run for governor? It seemed too incredible. (TAL)
The program then goes on to document lie, half-truths and whole manners of rich white dude misinterpretation. A tough neighborhood? Well, not really. High dropout rates? Again, not so much, graduation rates were actually substantially better than the state and national stats.
Rather than ruining the story for you, you can check it out here. Like Whitman, Poizner is entirely unqualified to run a modern, diverse state like California.
I’ll push that episode to the top of my list.
Another great T.A.L. ran a few weeks ago, one called “Inside Job.” The first part is a small wonder, although it’s also a very wonky wonder, filled with plenty of financial jargon. It’s about Chicago-based hedge fund Magnetar’s way of making money from the financial crash by stacking the deck in their favor — essentially helping a investment bank create a very risky CDO, not telling anyone that they helped pick the CDO’s contents, and then betting against it (and, of course, raking in big profits). The behavior is somewhat like what Goldman Sachs is in trouble about with the SEC.
In the introduction, Ira Glass sounds seriously angry about the “no one saw it coming” lie from the big money men. You can stream it at the TAL site or buy it from Audible (or if you subscribe to their podcast, it might already be on your computer somewhere). Link: http://www.thisamericanlife.or…