From the New York Times:
Tag: Government
Yes, on Fox News’ Hannity tonight, the name of a so-called “agent of the Muslim Brotherhood” was named. Brooke Goldstein, Director of The Lawfare Project and frequent guest on Fox News programs, went out of her way to expose a rotten hidden Obama secret. A secret that Fox News and their viewers already knew the answer to. And that nasty secret is… that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government and is working for the President.
Heck, this is not the first time we’re hearing this, so you shouldn’t be shocked. Even an elected official, Michele Bachmann warned us that this was happening thanks to Obama. A little over a year ago back in June 2012, Bachmann dropped this piece of nugget:
It appears that there has been deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood has been found to be an unindicted co-conspirator on terrorism cases and yet it appears that there are individuals who are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who have positions, very sensitive positions, in our Department of Justice, our Department of Homeland Security, potentially even in the National Intelligence Agency. I am calling upon the Justice Department and these various departments to investigate through the Inspector General to see who these people are and what access they have to our information.
We always wondered who Bachmann was referring to. She has a way of lying and making her lies sound like truths. But Bachmann never elaborated on her statement and now we know. Brooke is naming names!
Brook Goldstein, in responding to a question about why about why the terrorists “do not fear us” under President Obama as they clearly did under Bush, Brooke answered by stating something we’re sure she has researched and is now presenting as her fact. Brooke said that “we have a policy of cuddling the Muslim Brotherhood.”
She went on;
We have Muslim Brotherhood… in the Government. And I can name it right here, I can name Arif Alikhan who is our Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Policy Development, who is a Muslim Brotherhood Agent in our Government. Who is advising our foreign policy? This is a question that all Americans deserve an answer to.
Brooke however failed to include this little bit of info on Arif Alikhan. Yes, he is working in the government and yes, he is a Muslim, but Arif has been working in governmental affairs long before Obama became President. A quick trip to FactCheck found that Arif came from Los Angeles, where he served as deputy mayor for homeland security and public safety. Before working for Democratic Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, Alikhan was a top prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice from 1997 to 2006.
And get this: Arif even worked for the Bush Administration as Senior Counsel and Executive Director of the Intellectual Property Task Force. Yes, that same George Bush who Fox loves so much.
However, don’t let the decades of government work by Arif fool you. Brooke and Fox News have a talking-point to maintain and that talking point includes inducing the fear of all Muslims into their low information audience. And what better way to do that, than telling their audience that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government, thanks to Obama?
Video:
New Hampshire State Rep. Stella Tremblay (R-Ozone) posted on Glenn Beck’s Facebook page, as the Huffington Post reports:
“the Boston Marathon attack and the subsequent search for suspects was playing out how Beck had suggested. She said the bombings were a plot by the federal government, and included a link to a video from another conservative talk show host Alex Jones, in which Jones also claims the federal government planned the bombing.”
Huffington quotes the pol:
Just as you said would happen. Top Down, Bottom UP. The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops “terrorist” attack. One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak. Drones and now “terrorist” attacks by our own Government. Sad day, but a “wake up” to all of us. First there was a “suspect” then there wasnt. Infowars broke the story and they knew they had been “found out”.
r/t Alan
In case you’re wondering exactly why CPAC – The Conservative Political Action Conference – invited Sarah Palin to speak at their yearly circus, instead of formidable Republican candidates like Chris Christie, then consider what the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had to say on her Facebook page – that America will eventually default on its debt and claims that the federal government is “stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest” to prepare.
“If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest,” Palin wrote in a Facebook message Tuesday.
The former GOP governor of Alaska was referring to the sequester, the automatic $1.2 trillion cuts in federal funding that take effect Friday unless lawmakers reach a deal.
“D.C.: Cut the Drama. Do Your Job. Americans are sick and tired of yet another ginned-up crisis. D.C. needs to grow up, get to work, and live within its means,” wrote Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential running mate of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
She continued: “The real economic Armageddon looming before us is our runaway debt, not the sequester, which the President advocated for and signed into law and is now running around denouncing because he never had any genuine intention of reining in his reckless spending.”
Palin wrote that she wants lawmakers to “stop the hysterics.”
“If we ARE serious about putting our fiscal house in order, then let’s stop the hysterics, tighten our belts, and take our medicine.”
Yep. These are the people conservatives look to for leadership.
If AIG decides to join the complaint, which seeks $25 billion in damages, it would pit the company against the government that rescued it in 2008 from collapsing under the weight huge losses on mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets
AIG said that its directors will take up the matter on Wednesday and expects they will have a decision by the end of the month.
Starr International Co. Inc., the investment firm of former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg, filed the lawsuit in November 2011 on behalf of the firm and AIG shareholders.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asserts that the government didn’t provide shareholders fair compensation when it took a nearly 80 percent stake in the insurer as part of its bailout. As a result, the government violated the Constitution, Starr claims.
AIG said that, by law, its board must consider three options: take over the lawsuit and pursue the claims on its own; attempt to prevent the claims from being pursued by Starr; or, allow Starr to continue to pursue the complaint on AIG’s behalf.
r/t AP
No one goes into business to lose money. So when Mitt Romney promised to quickly sell the remaining shares of GM if he becomes president, it makes the average business person wonder just how keen Romney’s business skills are, and why would he want to sell the shares now even if it means the American Taxpayer suffers a $16 billion loss.
In an interview with The Detroit News, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee vowed to quickly sever ties between the U.S. government and GM, which was bailed out with about $50 billion in taxpayer funding.
“The president is delaying the sale of the shares to try and avoid the story that the taxpayer took another loss. I would get the company independent from the government and run for the interests of the consumer and the enterprise and its workers — not for the political considerations of government officials,” Romney said.
The U.S. government still holds a 26% stake in GM. The automaker is currently trading at around $21 a share. If the government sold its remaining 500 million shares now, it would lose about $16 billion of its investment, The News says.
GM reported first quarter profit of $1 billion in May, aided by strong numbers in North America.
Mitt Romney has obviously made a lot of money in the business sector, but selling shares at a $16 billion loss when GM is reporting record profits is just dumb. As long as the profits keep coming in from GM, the shares the government American Tax payer has in the company increases in value.
Or maybe Mitt Romney know he’s not gambling his own money. Maybe he knows that it is the Tax Payer’s investment at stake, and selling 500 million shares of GM now at a $16 billion loss would be another opportunity for him to point to President Obama and say, see, he made a bad investment in GM. This $16 billion loss is all because President Obama chose to bail out the auto industry instead of letting Detroit go bankrupt… like I suggested in the first place!
An article in the Washington Post attempts to pinpoint where the problem lies in Washington, and the conclusion was what we’ve all been saying for a long time – Government is not the problem, Republicans in Government is the problem.
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
Remember when Joe Clark was the face of educational reform? The former Principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, NJ patrolled the hallways of his out-of-control institution in the 1980s with only a bullhorn and a baseball bat, fighting poverty, gangs, crime and under-performing students as the face of urban education. His tactics were crude and anti-education, but the fact that he was a hero to many spoke volumes about the way in which people saw the problems in our schools.
Today, the people with the bullhorns and the weapons are politicians and business owners who believe that the best way to cure the ills of public schools that have educated the freest, most productive people who’ve ever lived on this planet, is to make our schools just like the entities that led the way towards job outsourcing, unconscionable home loan processes, and a laser-like focus on stock prices that have almost bankrupted the economy.
Joe Clark’s sounding mighty effective right now.
I can understand how many politicians view the public schools. When your political ideology glorifies competition above cooperation and the bottom economic line over investment in the future, you’re going to behave this way. Of course, it’s easier if you have little contact with the public schools, either becuase you didn’t attend or you’ve decided that even in the great neighborhood that you live, a private school is better. Even the progressive Clintons sent their daughter to a private school. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were the last White House residents to put their money where their mouths were. Just so you don’t think I’m contradicting myself too much, I do believe firmly in the right of parents to make decisions in the best interest of their children. Those choices, though, have consequences when you are an elected official with direct influence on public schools.
The main point, though, is that the people pushing for changes in schools now have little, if any, experience working in education and are deliberately excluding those who do.
Here in New Jersey, the person in charge of the program to ensure teacher quality has not one minute of experience in the classroom. Is classroom experience absolutely necessary in order for someone to create a program that will assess teachers? I would say yes. Everyone who works in schools or education should have at least 5 years of teaching experience and preferably even more. How else will you know the pressures and challenges that teachers face on a day-to-day basis? How will you know how to evaluate teachers of students with varying learning styles, academic strengths and weaknesses, and social problems? How will you see the effects that more testing has on the curriculum? Reading articles and interviewing stakeholders (well, most of them) is fine, but there’s something about direct experience that warms the souls of those who will be evaluated. Maybe it’s that we’ll see you as one of us. With some credibility. On education.
That won’t happen. And that’s the point. Without experience, all someone can do is apply the research on teacher evaluation, which is certainly not conclusive, and make assumptions. Governor Christie has not consulted public school teachers about his proposed plans not because he has legitimate differences with the teacher’s union, NJEA, over curricular matters, but because he wants to destroy the union. He isn’t interested in what public school teachers have to say about the issues because they might bring in valid but contradictory evidence that he would be responsible for addressing. His is a political argument, not an educational one. That’s why most teacher oppose them, and him.
But what about merit pay, you say? Don’t teachers want more money? In Washington, D.C., some teachers are earning up to $20,000 extra per year because they’ve been labeled “highly effective” by their supervisors. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a similar system of merit pay for the city’s teachers. So why do many teachers oppose it (listen to the podcast)?
There are many reasons.
Competition, while a highly prized skill in business, works against the interests of schools. teachers need to cooperate with each other in order to educate students. They share lesson plans, teaching strategies and materials. If you force them to compete for money, or tell them that they are competing against other 4th grade teachers for a bonus, it destroys the trust that’s built up between those educators.
It also begs the question of where this extra money is going to come from. Budgets are already tight and spending is capped at 2% in New Jersey. If more teachers earn bonuses than the district has budgeted for, then what happens? Are raises for other teachers sacrificed?
There is also no reliable evidence that shows merit pay for teachers results in better teaching, even if you use the false argument that teachers can be evaluated based on student standardized test scores.
Merit pay is not the only issue that will harm public schools. Among the other reforms, promoting Charter schools is probably the most prominent. Charter schools do have their place as laboratories for innovative programs, but there is no reliable evidence to show that Charters perform better than public schools. They might also be harmful to a district because charters are also publicly funded and take money away from local schools. In the New Jersey suburbs, the blow-back has already begun.
The governor’s educational reform program is on hiatus at this point, but he is going to make it a priority for this year, starting with today’s State of the State Address. If he is serious about making our schools better, he’s going to have to include teachers in the conversation.
Join the conversation at www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives
Why are Republicans trying to game the system? Why do they insist on maintaining loopholes that benefit only the rich? These are questions many Americans are asking, and Rick Perry’s actions pin points exactly why Republicans do what they do. Perry found a way to retire, and still collect his salary and make more money in the process.
Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay.
Perry makes a $150,000 annual gross salary as Texas governor. Now, thanks to his early retirement, Perry, 61, gets a monthly retirement annuity of $7,698 before taxes, or $6,588 net. That raises his gross annual salary to more than $240,000.
On a swing through Cherokee, Iowa, Perry was asked why the Employee Retirement System should be paying his retirement while he’s still collecting a salary.
“That’s been in place for decades … I don’t find that to be out of the ordinary,” Perry said. “ERS called me and said, ‘Listen, you’re eligible to access your retirement now with your military time and your time and service, and I think you would be rather foolish to not access what you’ve earned.”
Why does it seem that money matters everywhere but in public education? Corporations spend lavishly to recruit the best workers and provide the most luxurious perks. The best places to live are in the wealthier suburbs that can pay for clean, safe streets. High end cars have the latest gadgetry and safety features.
But public education? In the most important industry we have to promote learning, culture, and democracy we race to the bottom to find out who can spend the least and cut the most, then lament that we don’t get the best people to teach or the highest test scores in the world. Politicians want to break teacher’s unions under the pretense of saving money and are working to create evaluation systems that will use bad data to punish educators and pay them less. And the biggest fraud is the old saw that schools can ameliorate the effects of poverty and raise all students to above average academic levels, a claim that any mathematics teacher will tell you defies the bell curve.
This particular lie is uncovered in the opinion piece, Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It? by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske in Monday’s New York Times. The findings should not surprise anyone:
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act was meant to address this correlation, but it only showed how faulty the logic was behind the law.
As we are now seeing, requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system and lend support to arguments that the system is failing and needs fundamental change, like privatization.
We’ve wasted billions of dollars trying to achieve results using the wrong measurements and the wrong strategies, from relying on standardized tests to using scripted curricula to cutting money for vocational and technical training for students who do not excel at academic subjects. Then came the devastating budget cuts precipitated by the recession and the rise of Republican governors who don’t understand that competition within schools does little other than to destroy the collaborative atmosphere that enables successful schools to thrive.
What works?
Large bodies of research have shown how poor health and nutrition inhibit child development and learning and, conversely, how high-quality early childhood and preschool education programs can enhance them. We understand the importance of early exposure to rich language on future cognitive development. We know that low-income students experience greater learning loss during the summer when their more privileged peers are enjoying travel and other enriching activities.
Since they can’t take on poverty itself, education policy makers should try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-class students enjoy as a matter of course.
Of course, you can’t replicate the middle class experiences by implementing policies that hurt the existing middle class while protecting the wealthy, but that’s a minor detail.
As always, though, there’s more.
Another article sheds more light on the relationship between quality education and money in a less obvious realm; the military. That’s right. According to Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students by Michael Winerip, children in public schools on military bases are performing better than the general public school population on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and are narrowing the income gap at the same time.
At the military base schools, 39 percent of fourth graders were scored as proficient in reading, compared with 32 percent of all public school students.
Even more impressive, the achievement gap between black and white students continues to be much smaller at military base schools and is shrinking faster than at public schools.
On the NAEP reading test, black fourth graders in public schools scored an average of 205 out of 500, compared with a 231 score for white public school students, a 26-point gap. Black fourth graders at the military base schools averaged 222 in reading, compared with 233 for whites, an 11-point gap.
In fact, the black fourth graders at the military base schools scored better in reading than public school students as a whole, whose average score was 221.
Now, I’m not saying that a 39% reading proficiency rate is something to crow about, and there is the matter that military people must be high school graduates and pass an entrance exam to get into the service, but the results do show an improvement over other public school children. And they succeed without doing most of the things that busybody state governments want their schools to accomplish. Military base schools do not use standardized tests to evaluate teachers, but only to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, and the principal can decide how many times to observe their teachers. Average class size is lower than regular public schools and there seems to be a positive relationship between the teacher’s union and the administration.
But the real lesson is that economically and academically, the students get the support from home that they need in order to succeed. All of the families have health care, housing and necessities because they serve in the military, and at least one parent in the household has a job. These are the basic middle class advantages that are missing from many communities across the country, but ones that politicians are ignoring in their race to blame teachers and demonize their negotiated benefits. They are also what Ladd and Fiske refer to as the absolute minimum that less fortunate students need to compete with upper middle class schools.
Excellent public schools must be available to all students, but they won’t be as long as know-nothing politicians and would-be reformers concentrate on the wrong remedies and research that advocates privatization and cuts to social programs. We need to replicate what actually works for children, families and communities.
Find out what else works at www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives
For those of you who think Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain has no official campaigning platform or staff for that matter and that he’s running for President in 2012 purely for the fame and fortune such notoriety will bring him…think again.
With the assist of his own campaign strategist and chief of staff, Mark Block, Cain has concocted this creeeeeepy video in which a smarmy faced Block rants on about Cain’s electability points ( also giving viewers a great view of his smoked stained teeth – now that’s a real American, y’know, like the Marlboro Man!) And after the usual rhetoric of …”we can take this country back!”, the camera then pans in close to Mr. Block’s face where he takes a drag from a cigarette and blows a puff of smoke into the camera. The real clenceher is at the end when the Man Of The Hour assures us with that knowing look and enigmatic smile, that he’s Herman Cain, and he approves of this message.
This is a big LOL! moment. The Huffington Post is reporting that Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a major problem – his campaign staffers are heading for the door in droves.
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich’s campaign manager, senior strategists and key aides in early delegate-selection states all resigned on Thursday, a mass exodus that leaves his hopes of winning the Republican nomination in tatters.
Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, said he, campaign manager Rob Johnson and senior strategists had resigned, along with aides in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Other officials said Gingrich was informed that his entire high command was quitting in a meeting earlier in the day. They cited differences over the direction of the campaign but were not more specific.
Maybe they all saw something shiny on the outside and decided to go investigate. How easily they get distracted.
Gingrich said he is determined to continue his campaign. At this rate, he may be doing it all by himself.