The Secretary of State released a statement regarding ISIS and their second beheading of an American freelance journalist, calling the acts “unfathomable brutality” and an “act of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask.”
Yesterday, the world bore witness again to the unfathomable brutality of ISIL terrorist murderers when we saw Steven Sotloff, an American journalist who left home in Florida to tell the story of brave people in the Middle East, taken from us in an act of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask.
There are no words strong enough to express the sorrow we feel for his family, particularly his mother, whose heartbreaking video plea spoke to every single parent who has ever worried about a son or daughter who goes to dangerous places to do the work they love.
This young man was a driven and courageous journalist, reporting from places like Syria, Libya, and Egypt. Steven Sotloff’s reporting was as empathetic as his killers are evil. He focused on the stories of average people trapped in war, and documented their day-in and day-out struggle for dignity. Like Martha Gellhorn, he chronicled humanity in the face of inhumanity, and he told the story of enormous generational events as if they were happening to someone you knew from your own life.
For so many who worked so long to bring Steven and the other Americans home safely, this was not how the story should’ve ended. It’s a punch to the gut. The U.S. Government has used every military, diplomatic, and intelligence tool we have, and we always will. Our special operations forces bravely risked a military operation to save these lives, and we’ve reached out diplomatically to everyone and anyone who might be able to help. That effort continues, and our prayers remain – as they always are – with the families of all hostages who remain trapped in Syria today.
Barbarity, sadly, isn’t new to our world. Neither is evil. We’ve taken the fight to it before, and we’re taking the fight to it today. When terrorists anywhere around the world have murdered our citizens, the United States held them accountable, no matter how long it took. And those who have murdered James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria should know that the United States will hold them accountable too, no matter how long it takes.
I remember a time when democracy meant the best man won. When two candidates put forth their vision of how they would help their constituents and the people voted based on who they thought had a better plan to right the wrongs and make things better.
Those days are long gone as voters today would prefer to suffer the consequences of their vote and elect someone with a proven record of destruction, simply because that someone is of their political party.
This poll from the Republican state of Florida proves my point, as Republican governor Rick Scott – Mr. Destruction himself – has a better shot of winning in the midterm election for governor over his democratic challenge Charlie Crist.
Scott received support from 40.9 percent of those surveyed, Crist drew 35.7 percent and Libertarian Adrian Wyllie 6.3 percent. When asked to choose between only Scott and Crist, Scott’s lead grew to 6 points over Crist, 43.7 percent to 37.6 percent.
An overwhelming seven in 10 voters said the governor “can do a lot” about the state’s economy, while 48.7 percent said Florida’s economy is recovering and another 25.2 percent said it will recover soon.
In yet another chilling video, the terrorist group ISIS is seen murdering another American journalist, Stephen Sotloff, in the name of Islam.
In the video, which lasts for just under three minutes, ISIS murders Sotloff and threatens the life of David Haines, a British citizen.
Sotloff, 31, was kidnapped in 2013 while reporting on the bloody civil war in Syria. He had been a freelancer for outlets such as Time magazine and Foreign Policy.
Recently, the New York Times ran a profile of Sotloff. Friends of his told the paper that he was a “selfless,” “loyal” and “caring” person.
Last week, his mother, Shirley, recorded a video intended for ISIS. She pleaded with the group to be “merciful” towards her son.
The video comes weeks after ISIS released a video in which it beheaded another American journalist, James Foley. In that video, the militants threatened to murder Sotloff next if the US bombing of ISIS targets continued.
ISIS is believed to be holding several more journalists in captivity.
At one point in our short history, voting was a right. A right people fought and died for. But thanks to Republicans and their massive voter suppression drives, encouraging people to vote these days is now seen as a crime, a crime that landedTy Turner behind bars on Monday.
The stars of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement took the stage on Labor Day at Charlotte’s Marshall Park to condemn the state’s record on voter suppression and racial profiling, and urge the community to organize and turn out at the polls this November. Just a few hundred feet away, police cuffed and arrested local LGBT activist and former State Senate candidate Ty Turner as he was putting voting rights information on parked cars.
“They said they would charge me for distributing literature,” Turner told ThinkProgress when he was released a few hours later. “I asked [the policeman] for the ordinance number [being violated], because they can’t put handcuffs on you if they cannot tell you why they’re detaining you. I said, ‘Show me where it’s illegal to do this.’ But he would not do it. The officer got mad and grabbed me. Then he told me that I was resisting arrest!”
When you are overwhelmed with all the negative news going on on today’s world, it’s time to take a break, take a deep breath and exhale when good news like this is shared.
Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic congresswoman who lost multiple limbs in war, is expecting her first child in December.
In a heart-warming segment on NBC’s Today show, the Illinois Democrat talked about her pregnancy in an interview with three other Iraq War veterans — all of them amputees who are either expecting or just had children. Duckworth calls the women her “Band of Sisters” and they have dubbed themselves the “Band of Mothers.”
We all know that Republicans are against all policies that help the middle class and the average, hard-working American. If a millionaire or billionaire is not being helped by such policies, Republicans are just not interested.
President Obama used his Labor Day speech on Monday to highlight this fact about Republicans and their opposition to an increase in the minimum wage, equal pay for women, affordable health care and more.
“Republicans in Congress love to say ‘no.’ Those are just facts, they’re facts of life. They say ‘no’ to everything,” Obama said to the crowd gathered at Milwaukee’s Laborfest.
The president began to outline his goals for working-class families, saying that he has “put [his] money down” on the middle class.
“I want an economy where your hard work pays off with higher wages, and higher income and fair pay for women, and workplace flexibility for parents, and affordable health insurance and decent retirement benefits,” Obama said. “I’m not asking for the moon, I just want a good deal for Americans.”
He continued, “Most of the policies I’m talking about have two things in common: They’re going to help more working families get ahead, and the Republicans who run our Congress oppose almost all of them.”
As the crowd began to boo, Obama responded, “Don’t boo, vote,” a motto he has used before when directing speeches against Republicans as midterm elections approach in November.
“If we had a Congress that cared about policies that actually help working people, I promise you we could get everything done that we’ve talked about doing,” Obama said. “But until we have that Congress, it’s up to us to fight for these policies.”
You’d think Fox News had nothing to do with the loss of credibility they’re complaining about. Just if you haven’t been paying attention lately, Fox News has led the way in making sure the media is not credible. So they assembled a panel and began discussing why the media is not credible, why the media “don’t have a sense of shame,” one panelist said.
Pure insanity indeed! You cannot make this stuff up!
Howard Kurtz and his guests on this Sunday’s Media Buzz took a walk down bizarro-lane and made believe they themselves and the network they work for are not exactly what’s wrong with our corporate media these days.
Aside from the December holiday season, the back-to-school late August and early September rush has the most profound effects on the United States. Shopping patterns change, traffic gets worse, and the general tenor of every community shifts to accommodate the children and adults who work in education.
Welcome to this year’s edition. Some things have changed, and other have stayed the same.
In most polls, a majority of Americans say that they respect their school’s teachers and consider them, aside from parents, to be the most influential voices their children will encounter every day. The problem is that the evaluation systems that most states have set up do not accurately measure how effective the teachers are. Standardized tests have not proven to be reliable and systems that use Value Added measures, such as in California, are notoriously unstable. In addition, most Americans don’t like the tenure system as it is applied to teachers and we’ve had one court weigh in and declare the California system to be unconstitutional. In Wisconsin, Indiana and a host of other states, teachers, and other public employees, have lost significant contract negotiation rights that impact their pay, benefits and work rules. Add all of these up and you get a picture of an education system that wants to change, but is ignoring or minimizing the very people who can affect that change most specifically. Teacher morale is low nationally. That’s not good.
Most Americans also value education and consider education to be the major stepping stone to a better economic, social and democratic life. But the truth is that just below that surface, a roiling debate is under way about how much money schools should spend and on what materials, and what should schools actually teach anyway. This year is no different.
The most pressing issue in the poll is the reaction to the Common Core Curriculum Standards which is opposed by most of the respondents. A good deal of that opposition is related to the idea that Americans are wary about a national curriculum, especially one that seems to be prescriptive about what teachers can teach, and that local communities will have little say in what their children will learn. The Common Core is also the basis for national tests, which are anathema to many parents and strike most teachers as a waste of good instructional time.
While the standards are new, they are not as dangerous as many people would make them out to be. They do focus more on having students read nonfiction and analyzing in greater depth what they read, but otherwise, they give schools and teachers the leeway to choose reading materials and to tailor instruction to address local concerns. They ask that all students be conversant in research tools and to determine the reliability of sources, an especially important skill in the electronic era.
The mathematics standards are proving to be especially vexing since they ask students to explain their answers in both numbers and words. My experience with younger students is that they have a difficult time explaining how they came to an answer. Some do the calculations in their heads and others are not as articulate with explanations. This has lead to some famous YouTube videos of parents excoriating school board members for turning their child off to school and making homework time a tear-filled exercise in screaming and running away from the table.
As with anything new in education, and there have been many new programs in the thirty years that I’ve been teaching, the Common Core Standards will need some alterations, but in the long run, they will provide a useful map for student progress. The other advantage is that as students move from one town to the other, the standards will remain the same. That hasn’t happened in the United States, and it’s a major step forward.
We’ll have to wait until October for more polling answers on questions relating to teacher evaluation and spending.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: The United States succeeds because its teachers succeed in educating generations of children with the resources we have available. Where schools do not have the resources or community support or high levels of social dysfunction, the job becomes that much more difficult. If we can equalize the curriculum, we should be able to equalize the educational opportunities for every child in this country.
And so to my teaching colleagues I say, have a wonderful school year. You do one of the most important paid jobs in this country and you deserve respect and appreciation.
At a time of crisis in the Middle East, Congress has gone “AWOL,” Rep. John Larson said Monday.
“Congress has been off for more than six weeks,” the Connecticut Democrat said on MSNBC. “Some have said, and I can’t disagree with them, that we’re AWOL,” Politico reports.
Congress began its recess on Aug. 1 and reconvenes on Sept. 8, but as news of threats in Iraq and Syria mount, Larson said lawmakers “cannot wait till next week” to join the discussions on what should be done in regard to foreign policy.
“We ought to be back there making sure that we’re meeting as a committee of the whole and debating and defining this issue clearly,” Larson said.
Larson’s interview came on the Labor Day holiday, as members of the House and Senate enjoyed their last week of vacation.
“Today is Labor Day, where we celebrate work and we celebrate the efforts of those who labor throughout the year,” Larson said. “Congress is not at work.”
He added, “I agree with the premise that these are issues that have to be debated and the time is now, and Congress has a responsibility and an obligation to the American people.”
French police arrested her at the airport when she tried to get on a plane to Syria. They also arrested a 20-year-old man who reportedly recruiting her and paying for her plane ticket. And according to France’s interior minister, the girl’s family had no idea what she was up to.
The terrorist group ISIS has been rather notorious for recruiting Westerners, and a recent U.S. intelligence estimate says about a dozen Americans have joined the cause. (There’s nothing in the report about this teenage girl, however, that she was going to join ISIS.)
Something is seriously wrong with this nation when we put more effort into making sure 9-year-old girls stay away from make-up, but we’re totally okay with them shooting fully automatic weapons, like an Uzi for example!
The “small government” Republicans in the great state of Texas are not going to take this one laying down. They have already indicated they are going to fight this decision and are prepared to take their fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
A federal judge late Friday struck down two provisions of a Texas law that has already forced the closure of half the state’s abortion clinics, granting at least a temporary reprieve to nearly a dozen more facilities that would have otherwise gone out of business Monday.
U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel, in a 21-page decision, concluded that when the two provisions in question “are considered together, they create a scheme that effects the closing of almost all abortion clinics in Texas that were operating legally in the fall of 2013.”
As a result, Yeakel said, “the overall effect of the provisions is to create an impermissible obstacle as applied to all women” seeking an abortion. If the provisions were allowed to stand, women in Texas would shoulder an “unconstitutional undue burden,” he wrote, because the Texas law restricts access to previously available legal facilities.
These “small government” Republicans who believe that “government should stay out of our lives,” need to be in charge of the most personal, private decision a woman can make over her own body.
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