Former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, champion of "education reform," is a right-wing folk hero because while working for the public she combined corporatist policy with open contempt for the public. An ostensible Democrat, she now advises Republican governors on how best to battle the nefarious teachers' unions, which, in her reckoning, are almost solely responsible for poor student performance. Her solutions to the "education crisis" mostly involve the privatization of public schools. Her qualifications, besides having all the currently fashionable opinions, are her successes as head of Washington's schools. Test scores increased during her tenure! In some places, they increased dramatically!
But USA Today reported yesterday that the test improvements were, in many cases, a bit suspicious. ...
And Rhee responded, last night. Not by answering any specific charge, at all, but by reasserting her essential rightness about everything, and the wrongness of her awful critics.
"It isn't surprising," Rhee said in a statement Monday, "that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved ... unless someone cheated."
I'm sorry, but this is the "haters gonna hate" defense. It's just a blanket assertion of bias without any sort of attempt to refute the actual charges leveled against her.
Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee backed away Wednesday from her vehement criticism of a USA Today story on concerns about standardized tests during her tenure, acknowledging that some cheating may have occurred.
In an interview with Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews, Rhee said that some of her initial comments were “stupid.”
Stupid, indeed.
But the Washington Post editors, supporters of Rhee's management and apparently unaware of the latest news, steps out and defends her:
ANYTIME THERE is a suggestion a school may have cheated its way to showing improved student achievement, there is reason for serious concern. That’s why D.C. school officials hired a high-priced outside expert to investigate what appeared to be anomalies on a number of student test sheets. It’s also why it is prudent for the system to take another look at the schools where tests were called into question. But to use the issue of erasure marks at a handful of schools to disparage the very real improvements made in recent years by D.C. schools is irresponsible.
[Attention] centered on Crosby S. Noyes Education Center in Northeast Washington, credited with dramatic boosts in student achievement. There were extraordinarily high numbers of erasures for three years at the school. One Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on a 2009 reading test when the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than one.
Experts caution against any simplistic reading of erasure rates; there are many innocent explanations for changed answers.
There are good comments in the Post's report (2nd link) and the editorial (3rd link).
Newt Gingrich "warned that America is headed toward becoming a godless society unless voters take a stand against President Obama and liberal-minded college professors and likeminded media pushing his agenda," the San Antonio News-Express reports.
He also "called for a return to historic, Christian roots he said were critical to protecting the nation's freedoms."
Said Gingrich: "There's a desperation with which our elites are trying to create amnesia so that we literally have generations who have no idea what it means to be an American."
This is the man you want out there beating the drum for Christianity, and against "liberal-minded college professors".
There is a "researcher" named Lott, who guides most conservatives' thought. If a theory might falter, then the data he'll alter, not thinking he'll ever get caught.
For a long time I have wondered whether the true purpose of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is to attempt to get a responsible long-term federal budget or to provide a safe harbor for politicians--primarily Republicans--who want to burnish their reputations as deficit hawks without actually doing anything to balance the long-term federal budget.
Now Stan Collender and Paul Krugman appear to have decided that it is the second.
Maya MacGuineas of the CRFB was interviewed Wednesday (23 March) on a Los Angeles progressive radio station (KPFK) by Ian Masters (you can get the podcast). At one point (48 minutes in) Social Security was brought up and Masters said that he thought Social Security was in good financial shape. Maya MacGuineas said the following:
Social Security is now running cash flow deficits. And while the money has been put away in the trust fund and Social Security has a "claim" on government revenues for the next 25 years, it doesn't have the money to pay for those benefits and so the rest of the government is going to have to provide it to Social Security to the tune of about $600 billion over the next decade. Now we may decide that that's our most important priority and that that's what we should do, but it also leaves large deficits in the Social Security program which we are now being faced with, necessitate that we at least think through whether that's how we want to be spending the $600 billion next year. And if so, where's it going to come from? The way the government trust funds work is it's not set aside in a way that's been saved, it's set aside in the way that it financed other government priorities. Now the government is going to have to pony up and figure out where to find that money. And that will not be an easy task.
MacGuineas dismissed the obligation to honor the Social Security bonds as a mere 'claim' that we may decide to ignore. That should tell you all you need to know about where the CRFB stands.
There are several objections to the essay, but here's one particular element that deserves scrutiny: (emp add)
Moreover, the progressivity of Social Security should be looked at in the broader context of federal support for retirement savings. The federal government confers more than $100 billion in tax benefits each year on participants in employer-sponsored retirement programs. These benefits flow almost entirely to middle and high earners, who generally participate in their employers’ retirement plans. By contrast, the employers of many low-paid workers do not offer retirement plans — and if they do, more low-wage workers do not have the financial leeway to make the necessary contributions.
Because of the differential impact of these tax benefits, the overall federal approach to retirement is regressive. For Social Security to become both solvent and progressive, Congress should maintain existing benefits for low earners while slowing the growth of these benefits for middle and high earners.
Got that? Because of policies in a different area, with impacts that are a statistical average, there should be cuts to everyone of a given category (middle income) in Social Security.
The essay has other propagandist tricks, such as ruling out solutions by saying that "As a practical political matter, it is doubtful that Congress would" increase taxes. Leaving us with the only "practical matter" of cutting benefits. Anybody can play that game.
There is a brighter future for America. We know what we need to do: Grow jobs, limit government spending, and tackle entitlements. We need to encourage the dreamers and innovators, the small business owners, the hard workers, the brave men and women throughout this country's history that have asked for nothing more than the freedom to work hard and get ahead without government getting in the way.
Sounds like a more polite version of Limbaugh. Or of motivation guru Tony Robbins. Everybody can succeed. All it takes is hard work and you will be appropriately rewarded. And if you're not, then it's the government's fault.
Pawlenty has to first appeal toe Republican primary voters, so that's why his pitch is closely aligned with Tea Party nostrums. But still, it's embarrassing in its denial of the complexities of economics (and life in general).
Formerly of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and a libertarian who has recently turned to the left, E.D. Kain now blogs at Forbes. It's pretty good. About two posts a day, not particularly long, and well written.
What? Declare that the Social Security special bonds, which are where the surplus monies went over a 30-year period, are worthless. Interesting that he never raised the alarm throughout that period of accumulation, but only now when the bonds are set to be redeemed.
What do you call someone who witnesses an agreement - in this case the federal government promising to return money borrowed from Social Security surplus funds - and then when it's time to fulfill it, declare the agreement null and void, resulting in the loss of trillions of dollars by one party?
Krauthammer argues that the Social Security bonds are different, and that borrowing "is nothing more than a bookkeeping device that records how much one part of the U.S. government (Treasury) owes another part of the same government". By his logic they aren't really bonds, and therefore they can be defaulted on. I wonder if Krauthammer is cool with the federal government defaulting on Treasury bonds held by states, cities, and local governments and agencies.
Jonathan Chait on the history and current state of the Republican anti-tax stance. (2,600 words) Key excerpt: (emp add)
There is one idea that explains Republican behavior: moral disgust at income redistribution. Since it doesn’t poll well, this is not an idea that you often find expressed in talking points or in other means of public persuasion. But occasionally this sentiment pops up in the form of a kind of raw royalism, usually from conservatives who don’t have to run for office. Former Bush economist Greg Mankiw endorses the belief that free markets are a flawless arbiter of income distribution. Republicans, he writes, believe that “in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.” ...
The underlying sentiment is that the practice of levying higher tax rates upon the rich amounts to an oppressive form of discrimination—democracy as mob rule. Conservatism’s commitment to flattening the tax code, so inexplicable to those outside the movement, is an inviolable principle within. ...
This state of affairs helps explain the increasingly bitter partisanship of the American political debate. Opposition to the progressive income tax is at once a sacred and a hidden value for Republicans, and thus one that makes compromise nearly impossible. You cannot bargain with a partner whose stated goals are merely pretexts. A slow economy proves that tax cuts are needed, or a prosperous economy shows that tax cuts are affordable, or tax cuts will reduce the deficit by increasing revenue, or tax cuts will reduce the deficit by starving government of revenue. Vast swaths of public discourse are couched in nonsense.
Not long ago, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan—who enjoys unparalleled prestige on budget issues among conservatives of all stripes—railed against the deficit and was asked about the massive cost of extending tax cuts. He replied, “Keeping tax rates where they are, and preventing them from going up, is not spending, because that is people’s money in the first place.” What on earth could this mean? Here is the answer. Ryan has declared his deep intellectual debt to Ayn Rand. He required all his staffers to read her work. When he responds to a question rooted in simple accounting with a moral claim (“people’s money in the first place”), he is saying that the arithmetic of revenue, outlays, and deficits does not matter to him. None of the pecuniary issues that he claims to care about so deeply ultimately matter. He is fighting a class war, which he views as a war for freedom itself.
More on those Japanese nuclear reactors so close to each other:
And the spent rods also at the facility. Clive Crook writes:
From the start of this calamity I have wanted to know, "What is the worst that can happen at these nuclear sites? Suppose everything that could go wrong does go wrong: what then?" ...
My father, who retired many years ago, was a mechanical engineer in the British nuclear power industry. He worked on the designs of several new reactors, specialising in the handling of fuel. I vividly recall his telling me decades ago that the thing that concerned him most about nuclear power was not the reactors but the storage of spent fuel. This needed to be very carefully managed. If planners insisted on giving nuclear installations the smallest footprint, everything would be on the same site. What would happen to the spent fuel if an accident meant a site had to be evacuated? Insufficient attention was being paid to this, he said. The conversation passed through my mind as soon as the first reports of problems at Fukushima appeared. Where do they put the spent fuel?
Today the New York Times tells us where: on "the top level of the reactor buildings". The piece worsens the worst-case scenario yet again, saying that this fuel may pose a bigger risk at Fukushima than the reactors themselves (reactors, plural, of course: the small-footprint approach bunches many of them together). Elsewhere one reads that hundreds of workers have already been evacuated from the site and only 50 remain, scrambling to stabilize six reactors, and to keep the storage pools replenished. What happens if and when those last workers are pulled out?
Palin, or whoever writes for her, penned the following:
According to one industry study, allowing Royal Dutch Shell to tap these reserves in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas would create an annual average of 54,700 jobs nationwide with a $145 billion total payroll and generate an additional $193 billion a year in total revenues to local, state, and federal governments for 50 years.
Development of resources in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska’s Arctic coast would create an average 54,700 jobs/year nationwide with a $145 billion total payroll and generate $193 billion in federal, state, and local revenue over 50 years, according to a study by Northern Economics Inc., Alaska’s largest private economic consulting firm, and the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research.
It's obvious that the totals are cumulative over 50 years (if it was per year, then the $145billion-payroll/54,700 jobs comes to $2.6 million a year; but $145billion/(54,700*50years) is $57K per worker per year).
Not that any of this matters these days in American politics.
SEIU Chief: Obama ‘Has Stepped Up’ in State Labor Fights
ABC News’ Rick Klein reports:
With organized labor under attack in the states, the president of the Service Employees International Union today praised President Obama’s role in the fight, saying the administration “has stepped up” to offer the full weight of their support.
“Our members in Wisconsin and Ohio were incredibly proud when the president spoke out about the real agenda in Wisconsin and Ohio being about eliminating workers' voice and busting unions,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told us on ABC’s “Top Line” today.
“And that was a huge step forward. We then saw the Secretary of Labor issue a statement and then an op-ed and then do a speech that said union is in her family -- that we have to have a way to solve problems at the collective bargaining table.”
“So we think the administration has stepped up in this moment. And that it's up to us, the people all across this country, to hold our government accountable and get the private sector to reinvest in America.”
The state-level pushes to reduce the clout of organizing labor, she said, could have the opposite effect, with labor leaders hopeful that it will be easier for them to mobilize for political purposes moving forward.
“It allows for us to stand with all working people in this country,” Henry said. “It has allowed the American labor movement to join hands with the Sierra Club, with the high school students, with the college students, and say we want to be able to have a future in this country where I kids can do better than we have.”
That's not a whole hell of a lot of support. The president and secretary of labor make a few remarks, but that "it's up to us" to fix the problem. And the part about joining hands with high school students shows that the spokeswoman is trying to make the best of a very bad situation. (NOTE: The ABC story is dated March 8, before the Wisconsin legislature dropped the bomb on labor.)
Why are those 4 reactors in Japan - two which have had explosions, and an additional one threatening to meltdown - so close to each other?
One one reactor fails, because of the proximity to the others, it presents a significant obstacle to workers trying to keep the remaining ones from failing.
via Sullivan, at Glenn Beck's (!) website, The Blaze, evidence that James O'Keefe misleadingly edited - again - a video. In this case the sting of the NPR guy. To edits are highlighted.
1) Take a completely unrelated clip of NPR guy laughingly (and apparently approvingly) saying "they said that?" and make it look as if it was uttered in response to a statement by some group that wants to spread Sharia around the world.
2) Omits NPR guy's qualifying statement that (to paraphrase) "some Republicans believe" the Tea Party is racist. Making it look as if the NPR guy holds that opinion. Which he very probably does, but that's not what the video "proves".
As Sullivan puts it:
Despite the fact that O'Keefe is a known liar, and that his past video stings have been edited in misleading ways, much of the mainstream media ran with his latest. Will those outlets now inform their viewers and readers about the deceptions ... ?
What's more amazing is the video and audio in at least one segment (the 2nd identified above) doesn't even match.
And of course, Breitbart, who is a major player in all this doesn't get taken to task.
"If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."
- Barack Obama, 2007
Yeah, it's a speech and allowances should be made for polliticians, but still ...
Not only that, but this is clearly a partisan issue. In state after state (e.g. Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Maine) the Democrats are on one side, the Republicans the other. And the president doesn't weigh in.
Also, Joe Klein, in a follow-up after the "surprise" Wisconsin bill, makes it obvious that he has no interest whatsoever in public service unions.
Reports are that Democrats, union leader, and pundits were surprised when Wisconsin's senate passed a "non-fiscal" bill gutting the public unions (no strikes, no collective bargaining, no mandatory dues collection). But why was this a surprise? It was always an option, one that I kept wondering why the Republicans weren't exercising the last several weeks.
That said, this looks like a serious defeat for unions everywhere. It's also a defeat for Obama, who was an indirect target of the Republicans. That was clear. What is not clear is why Obama didn't weigh in forcefully in the matter.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see what Joe Klein has to say about all of this. Will he walk back his:
"it seems to me that Governor Scott Walker's basic requests are modest ones"
... Social Security affects our larger budget problem. Annual benefits already exceed payroll taxes. The gap will grow. The trust fund holds Treasury bonds; when these are redeemed, the needed cash can be raised only by borrowing, taxing, or cutting other programs.
It was national policy not to reduce the debt and later redeem S.S. Treasury bonds fairly easily through a commensurate raising of the debt to "normal" levels. Now that that policy was followed, Samuelson is saying there will be a negative budgetary impact and hints strongly that the bonds should be defaulted (at least partially).
Of interest, while Social Security was building a surplus, making the misleading "unified budget" look good, hiding the reality of the General Fund deficit, and making it easier to advocate cutting taxes, Samuelson was silent.
... some encouraging new jobs numbers show the economy is moving in the right direction, but is it fast enough? Where are the American jobs? Could buying more American-made products be part of the solution? As part of a special ABC News series of reports, "This Week" looks at "Made in America" with special guests ABC News anchors Diane Sawyer, David Muir and Sharyn Alfonsi.
Fox News: It's all about promoting the interests of the rich...
... and crushing those at the bottom.
I don't think I've seen a more vivid example of a double standard on Fox. In the clips shown by Jon Stewart, teachers and bankers are both getting taxpayer money. Watch who Fox supports and who Fox attacks.
As a two-week spending bill sailed through Congress, the White House hardly made a move. That must change ...
Obama has got to step up his game. Maybe he's been biding his time, waiting for the right moment -- when the GOP goes after programs sure to stir up a public ruckus. But the ease with which Republicans have moved the first round of cuts through Congress seems bound to increase the GOP's appetite for deeper gouging. There are too many moderate Democratic senators facing tough 2012 election fights to count on sustained resistance from that corner, without some help from the White House.
When is it going to arrive?
UPDATE: The Hill reports Obama springing into action after the Senate vote. The president called on congressional leaders to meet immediately with Vice President Biden, White House chief of staff Bill Daley and budget director Jack Lew to start hammering out a longer-term budget plan.
Briefing reporters at the White House while negotiators made their way to the VP's office on the Hill, top administration officials said they had agreed to cut another $6 billion from the measure (and would be willing to go even further) in an attempt to bridge the party divide.
Minutes before lawmakers and Vice President Joseph Biden met to discuss a funding measure to keep the government operational through the fiscal year, the Obama administration offered the first formal compromise.
Briefing reporters at the White House while negotiators made their way to the VP's office on the Hill, top administration officials said they had agreed to cut another $6 billion from the measure (and would be willing to go even further) in an attempt to bridge the party divide.
We have made it "clear that we can meet them halfway," said top economic adviser Gene Sperling at an off-camera briefing for reporters, "[W]e have made it clear we are committed to doing that and we are willing to cut further if we can find common ground on the budget with reducing spending in the right way while protecting our investments in education, innovation and research."
Yesterday's New York Times poll showed that the public, by a 60-33% margin, opposes taking away collective bargaining rights from public employees. Conservatives pronounced the poll hopelessly biased. Fred Barnes -- last seen here calling for poll results designed to produce support for the Republican agenda -- declared, under the headline "Skewed Public Sector Union Poll Ignores Reality":
A New York Times/CBS News poll never lets you down. Today’s survey features a skewed sample (36 percent Democratic, 26 percent Republican), tricky questions, and an emphasis on results likely to thrill liberals and Democrats.
Commentary ("A Shoddy New York Times Poll"), Ira Stoll ("A Slanted New York Times Poll"), the Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, the Heritage Foundation, two different NewsBusters posts all chimed in making the same point.
And now, the Wall Street Journal has a new poll out asking this question. Finally, a chance to correct the record -- Right, freedom-loving champions of accurate public opinion data?
Uh oh:
Eliminating collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers over health care, pensions or other benefits would be either “mostly unacceptable” or “totally unacceptable,” 62% of those surveyed said. Only 33% support such limits.
It looks like the conspiracy to slant the news runs deep.
My favorite post of all of the criticisms comes from Commentary's John Steele Gordon, who sneers at the Times poll:
How do you square these figures with the results of last November’s elections, in which anti-tax, anti-deficit, anti-public-union forces swept to historic victories in federal and state elections across the country? Well, you can’t, of course. The Times doesn’t even ask this blindingly obvious question, let alone try to answer it.
Although less than 12 percent of the workforce is unionized today, 20 percent of the households in the survey had a union member. Although government workers are 17 percent of the workforce, 25 percent of the households surveyed had one living there. In other words, the sample was wildly skewed toward the very people most likely to give the answers the Times was hoping to hear.
This John Steele Gordon person at Commentary is either a knave or a fool. Hard to say which. In any event, it's obvious that households, containing one or more workers, would have a higher percentage of having at least one unionized or government worker. Gordon's stupid analysis allows him to decry the Times survey as "skewed".
Half the population is male. In a (hypothetical) survey, 75% of the households had a male. Ergo, the survey is skewed. That's John Steele Gordon thinking.
