A More Reasonable Way to Understand the Electorate

  Since Oktober Fest is nigh upon us and it overlaps with the final lap of the US Presidential Election Season, it seems fit that we rethink the lenses through the electorate is observed and understood. Via Monkey Cage we have this great graph and post on the history of beer and politics. It is interesting to note which ideologies skew toward what brands of beer and what that may say about ideas on domestic and foreign policy. I have no idea if drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon connotes a belief in "legitimate rape" or if drinking Sam Adams suggests a Libertarian investment in the Sovereign Citizen's Movement. I will leave that for more sober minds to consider. Yet what I do know and what warms my heart is, despite the divisions in the vision of what this country should be, it is (ahem) refreshing to know that certain things remain common to us all.

Y'all (He) Need to Be Ashamed, Vol. 3

or "Have all the Intelligent People Left the Republican Party"?

  Sen. Scott Brown's (Dumbass-MA) continued attempt to do something (make hay, spill the beans, race bait, smear) with the issue of Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren's claims of being of Cherokee descent just get more and more ridiculous. I have no idea what it means for him to point out that Warren does not appear to be Native American. Leaving out the fact that in America looking like your ancestors or not looking like your ancestors means absolutely nothing and every thing, I am not sure what Scott is doing with this. Is it a dog whistle for the Puritan Restoration Society? Is it an attempt to get the cowboy vote? Is he trying to distract the electorate with a little dumb and dazzle? Is he trying to make her out to be a liar, untrustworthy, and thus unelectable? Or is it an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Affirmative Action policies by implying how arbitrary they can seem in application? Scratch that, the last point is too sophisticated for his like.This is what I mean.

  In fairness Brown cannot be blamed for dumbass supporters that choose overt racism over his (relatively speaking) more moderate but confusing racism. But when those supporters include paid employees of your campaign staff who have given you a "47%" moment and, it gets worse, because you offend people that are most assuredly Cherokee, thus trafficking in what the fuck are you thinking racism and political incompetence than, Scott Brown once and former Senator from the great State of Massachusetts, you really should be ashamed of your self! 

The Price of Obama's Ticket

In his new book, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics, Fredrick Harris claims that, in order to win election to the White House, Obama had to make a concession that all people of color knew he would have to make: he would have to prove to a critical mass of white America that he would not be a "black president", and would instead be a "president who happens to be black." According to Harris, this strategy (one employed by a generation of black politicians in the post-civil rights period) has done more harm than good. As Mansfield Frazier over at The Daily Beast says in his review of the book, "The core of Harris’s argument is that, while Obama’s win was (and still is) a source of great pride for blacks, it’s much more symbolic than substantive; that he has done no more to address core concerns and issues facing black Americans than any other Democratic president before him, and, indeed, for a number of reasons falling under the umbrella of political expediency, has done far less."

Here's Harris on C-Span's "After Words" discussing his book.

Every Single Public School In America Sucks...

...Or so we've been told. Unless you've been living in the outer reaches of our cozy little solar system, you've no doubt heard (more than once) that the public schools in the United States of America are completely awful. Beyond redemption. Abysmally bad. Downright crappy. According to the education glitterati, there are multiple reasons for this failure. Government intervention is a main one - here's that Libertarian argument laid out rather thoroughly. Another major reason, so the narrative goes, is the poor quality of the teacher's who stand in front of the kids every day.  This theory has sparked the "let's get rid of the bad teachers" approach - another in a long list of silver bullets, that, if implemented as Bill Gates suggests in this piece, would shoot America back to the top of the international rankings in education.

The previous silver bullet designed to fix public education was the test-and-torture monster known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This ugly beast sought to squeeze achievement out of public school students by testing them at every turn in a narrow number of subjects, primarily math and reading/english. While it's taken some time, we're finally starting to see some significant push back from the states on the incessant testing that lay at the heart of NCLB. After vetoing a new version of the school test data monster, California governor Jerry Brown wrote an eloquent letter addressing his concern about the course and nature of educational evaluation in the state. And, you know something's wrong with your accountability system when officials in 345 school districts in Texas - representing 4.2 million students - sign a petition protesting high stakes testing.

Much (if not all) of this conjecture about the crummy status of American public education rests on the belief that, when American students are compared to their peers in other countries, their performance is underwhelming. Even Aaron Sorkin got in on the American underperformance act with the high-quality liberal pablum known as The Newsroom. Yes, yes - when liberals and conservatives conclude that we've fallen of our perch, they must surely be on to something, right? According to Michael Lind, in an interesting piece in Salon, the conclusion that public schools are significantly underperforming is based on faulty comparisons.  When we break down the data, we find that the majority of students in the United States are performing in the upper tier along with the top performers in other advanced nations. It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that the groups of kids in the U.S. who underperform on international assessments are low-income children of color and rural kids. Their performance - and their futures - are dogged by an insistent poverty that no level of testing, teacher removal, and voucher provision will alleviate.

F*** Me Sideways or The Top 10 Things Mitt Romney Could Do to Make Us Forget About His Fundraiser Speech

My head is still twisting and neck still spinning from the dumbest f****** thing a Presidential candidate could be caught saying on video. David Corn and Mother Jones have pulled off a mucktastic scoop, the likes of which has not been seen since George Allen's disquisition on ethnic tolerance.

Dear reader I, for one, have an almost ghoulish desire to see what the f*** else Romney said after those comments. Fortunately for us (me), Christmas has come early and I am sure Corn, who has promised more excerpts to come from the Romney Tapes, is playing the showman, leaving the best for last. This has to be the warm up. What I am willing to hazard, from a purely clinical examination of objective political circumstances, is a Top Ten List of Things Mitt Romney may have done or said, that could exceed and make the world forget his comments about Obama voters. So I present to you, The Top Ten Things Mitt Romney Could Do or Say to Make Us Forget About His Fundraiser Speech.

  
10) Mitt Romney, blackens up and dances to Al Jolson songs as the fund raiser attendees, throw bags of gold dust at him.

9) Mitt Romney, unzips his skin like a Men in Black character and reveals his true persona, Rich Uncle Pennybags, from Monopoly.

8) Mitt Romney, receives faux fellatio from an on the skids descendant of FDR.

7) Mitt Romney, demonstrates the American entrepreneurial spirit by selling bottles of poor people's tears, at mark up, for use as a skin cleanser.

6) Mitt Romney, does a dramatization of The Grapes of Wrath, in the style of a Punch and Judy show.

5)  Mitt Romney, promises once elected, the nation's motto will change to  "In Mammon We Trust".

4)  Mitt Romney, randomly selects an audience member to role play in a little S&M drama titled, "The Rod of Fiscal Discipline".

3) For $10,000 per contestant Mitt Romney organizes a competitive game of "Robert Reich Tossing".

 2) Mitt Romney will read from his private collection of stories, The Big Book of Self Pity: Stories of Moral Turpitude Among the Lower Classes

1) (What we all assume) Mitt Romney will bathe in the blood of left wing bloggers while chanting the million words for "money" in the ancient languages of the Cthonic gods.

                                                              (Money Green Cthulu)
 

Where's Izzy Stone when you need him?

I read somewhere that the great independent journalist Isidore Feinstein 'Izzy' Stone once scolded a radical activist for swearing off what we now call the mainstream news. When the activist protested that the papers only printed lies, Stone said something like this: 'Yes, but somewhere around the fourth paragraph the truth starts peeking through, if you know how to read it.'

I am surely getting that story wrong (and will get it right when I get through the fine recent biography of Stone by D.D. Guttenplan), but the spirit is right, and important. I'm put in mind of it by two stories from today's news. One is on US policy in Egypt, and the other is on Bill Clinton's - I mean, US - policy on Haiti.

Labor and Race

A must-read position paper by Tamara Nopper and Kenyon Farrow (cross-post)

Why the AFL-CIO must address Black criminalization and (un)employment: A position paper

"In hopes of pushing the AFL-CIO to expand its agenda, we want to address here why the two issues of police targeting of African Americans and Black (un)employment are intertwined.  This is more than a theoretical exercise given the aforementioned Black unemployment rate—which is higher in each state than the overall rate—and the fact that African Americans have a higher arrest rate, a higher imprisonment rate, and a disproportionate number under some type of community supervision than other racial groups. While the AFL-CIO is of course not the only labor organization in the United States, we purposefully address our concerns to the federation as it involves 56 national and international labor unions representing 12.2 million people in a country with only 16 million peoplerepresented by a union (those who are union members or have jobs covered by unions or employee association contracts). Thus, the AFL-CIO is one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in a country and world experiencing one of the worst financial crisis in decades.
This position statement addresses four issues related to the criminalization of African Americans and Black (un)employment: 1) arrest and conviction records and what this means for job applications and licensing; 2) surveillance on the way to work; 3) the health impact of criminalization and what this means for Black employment status; and 4) mass incarceration and prison labor. Our goal is to synthesize some of the ways the criminalization impacts African Americans’ efforts to seek work or maintain employment and also encourage the AFL-CIO to prioritize addressing the Black unemployment crisis."

The whole paper is here.

Measuring Charter Schools

"Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States" is the 2009 report from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. It's one of (if not the single most) comprehensive assessments of charter school performance that's out there now.  The bottom line: only 17% of the charter schools evaluated in the survey performed better than their local public school counterparts; nearly half of the charter schools performed no differently than other public schools; and 37% performed worse than the local traditional schools in the area. Here's the report.

What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means that the overwhelming support for the charter school model as a clear and effective alternative to traditional schools is not in any way supported by a body of substantive national research. We see this all the time: someone famous (and rich - they have to be rich) or some educational professional-of-the-week, or some politician determined to kill public education raves about the charter schools in their neck of the woods, and wonders (with frequently feigned concern for "the children") why we "can't give all of our kids the education they deserve?" In recent years, Bill Gates has traveled down the well-worn path of trying to increase the number of charter schools, and turning the remaining schools into something akin to widget factories. For these dubious efforts, he has been roundly criticized by folks who know what they're talking about - people like Diane Ravitch, who asks Gates a series of pointed questions here, and Anthony Cody, a 20-year veteran of the Oakland Public Schools who had the nerve to ask Gates some more questions and make some clear observations here.

All I know is that when it comes to education - and the riddle of public education in particular - there are more than a few moving parts.  Quick - name all of the ingredients that we have to take into account when it comes to educating a child, any child. Here's my quick list: kids, parents, teachers, learning styles, social dynamics, income, race, health, taxes, buildings, nutrition, principals, policy, legislation, politics, community investment, culture, crime, educational standards, testing, the arts, athletics, opportunity, passion, dedication, luck and prayer (especially if there will be math). I remain highly skeptical of anyone who comes along with the "silver bullet" answer to a problem that has bedeviled our society for far too long. You should be skeptical, too.

Being Bill Clinton

(Cross-posted from Salon)
As usual, Matt Stoller cuts usefully to the chase. There's so much here that I almost don't know where to begin. Let's start with the title: "Bill Clinton's no liberal hero." The point? "The press, party leaders and voters at large have completely hidden the actual stakes in [this] election. Bill Clinton can star in a television commercial bashing the deregulation of Wall Street, and then immediately collect cash from Wall Street firms whose industry he deregulated." Exhibits A and B? "Clinton has in fact done phenomenally well from the financial services industry in his post-presidential career. He received $125,000 in cash apiece from Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse just two months after signing the bill deregulating derivatives. His speaking arrangements, a well-known conduit to funnel cash to retired politicians, has garnered him over $80 million since 2001, a substantial amount of which has come from the financial services industry he helped." If Big Journalism hadn't been fully captured by Big Politics, we wouldn't need Stoller to remind us of all this a few weeks before the election.

The Final Stage of a Successful Presidential Campaign

  We (and I mean the authors and readers of this blog) all know that you are not really acknowledged as President of the US until SNL spoofs you. So in the face of the final days of the 2012 Presidential campaign a very important question has been asked. Should Jay Pharoah portray Barak Obama? It certainly is not about Jay being one of SNL's Negroes de jour (the other being Keenan Thompson who surprisingly is crushing it ). Darrell Hammond did a hi-larious Rev. Jesse Jackson. As the linked Speakeasy article states (and I repeat this in the most sincere spirit of colorblindness) Fred Armisen is just not funny. However this opens up a larger question and that is the effect of SNL's spoofs on the electorate's understanding of the president (see above). Chevy Chase's portrayal of Gerald Ford had nothing to do with appearance and though Chase depicted Ford as a clumsy clod, it was the popular impression that Ford was over his head in a job that demanded a steadier pose that was most damaging to his re-election chances (enhanced by the pardoning of Nixon and the poorly phrased explanation of the Eastern bloc's relationship to the Soviet Union during the debate with Jimmy Carter). Regardless of Ford's experience as House Minority leader or successful Big Ten athlete, Chase hit upon the public's sense that a lesser man was running things. As has been stated about the great impressions on the show, it is not the most accurate depiction that strikes home (granted Armisen has no idea how to capture Obama's vocal tone or cadence--personally, I think he hesitates because he is afraid of sounding too black) but the most essential evocation that strikes home. The performer that captures the audiences unspoken assumptions about the candidate will put a thumb on the scale of the candidate's success or failure. I knew it was over for the 2008 John McCain  presidential bid when I saw this

Fey's startling physical resemblance and her scribe like approach to Palin's word salad, were just the cherry on the cake of her hugely successful characterization. I think the glassy eyed pageant stare and waxy smile revealed someone not just, not up, for the job but someone that wanted to ride that position to something else. But to the original question whether or not Jay Pharoah should take over the Obama character from Armisen (who, I can not say it enough, is painful to watch) if Pharoah can bring that insight into the instinctive perception we have of Obama that he has brought to his other SNL creations

than let him have at it. I would love to see what we collectively sense about Obama as described by Jay Pharoah. On the other hand I always thought that they should have hired my man below, instead of torturing us (oops did I say that?) with Armisen for 4 years.

Update: It seems that the folks over at Salon recognizing that mimicing ain't easy as, this post details the thread the needle like task of capturing the essence of a public figure for comic effect especial;ly one as elusive as Barack Obama.. Good luck Bro. Jay, good luck.

Today's 'What [blank] looks like' (9-14-12)

What innovation a money-grab looks like: Here's the IT version, courtesy Apple Inc. (what Andrew Leonard is right to call 'Apple's Enormous Insult' to its customers). And here's the education version, courtesy of the unholy marriage of education 'reform' and the glittering allure of internet riches.

A Few More Posts for the Day...

1. Mitt - snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? The president has been confronted with a series of issues recently that, were he running against someone other than the autobot known as Mitt Romney, would give his campaign apparatus pause.  However, he is running against Mitt, which means that he can rest just a bit easier and take solace in the fact that his opponent - who once held four positions on Libya in the course of six weeks - will in all likelihood screw this moment up. Charles Pierce gives us the gory details here.
2. In case you were wondering this is what voter suppression looks like. 

Today's links (9-13-12)

1. Director of the private school where Rahm Emanuel enrolled his kids throws Emanuel's (that is, Arne Duncan's, that is, Obama's) education vision under the bus.
2. Sarah Palin is concerned about the size of Obama's stick.
3. The 'free' trade express hurtles on in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (NAFTA on HGH), crushing everything in its path. A few people stand in its way and wait for the rest of us to catch on. Between this and the teachers' strike, both of which reveal his indifference to standard democratic constituencies (and to small-d-democracy), it's no wonder Obama doesn't talk policy that much when campaigning.
4. Yesterday was the anniversary of Steve Biko's assassination. Nigerian novelist Ben Okri delivered the annual memorial address at UCT.
5. Greg Palast may have written the best short piece on the Chicago teachers strike, unless Diane Ravitch did.  

today in 'what [blank] looks like'

What profiteering privatization looks like: this amazing story, cross-posted from feminist philosophers, comes from the UK, which has hired a private contractor (something called 'Atos') to assess applications for government disability benefits:

"My friend Polly has a severe form of Crohn’s disease. She’s been given countless different medications, and operations to remove parts of her small intestine. In fact, her Crohn’s is so resistant to the strongest medications and surgery available that she was referred to an experimental chemotherapy and stem cell transplant medical trial.... Atos sent a doctor to assess whether she could re-qualify for benefits. On arrival, he told her that he’d never heard of Crohn’s Disease. Forgive me for being pedantic, but a doctor who hasn’t heard of Crohn’s Disease isn’t a doctor."

It gets worse from there. (The original story appears here.) This is the future most western policymakers envision - heck, it's the present they embrace - and the one that, in a different form, the Chicago Teachers Union is resisting.

Y'all Need to Be Ashamed, Vol. 2

To the Romney/Ryan campaign where do you get these poor Negro children from? They are so not ready for the big bad world where questions get asked? And intelligent answers are expected.

Throwing our most precious melanized resource to the wolves should have ended circa 2009. So because our children are the future, and a mind is a terrible thing not to have, to waste, and Mitt you clearly don't care for the challenged (politically and otherwise). I believe "Y'all Need to Be Ashamed" for doing this to that woman above.

A Letter to Future Generations: "This Was the Straw"

My apologies for the dramatis of the post title but sometimes a loud tap on the crystal or a resounding throat clearing is necessary to get some attention. Vanity Fair blogger Kurt Eichenwald has written a post, that like a sawed off shotgun blast, is short but powerful. In The Five Reasons Romney/Ryan Must Be Defeated in 2012 and Why Republicans Should Hope They Are, Eichenwald unleashes a frightening, rational and clear testimony to why the contemporary Republican Party must, not only, lose this election, but be completely dismantled and re-booted. Ordinarily this would read like your average campaign season, "Get out the vote, the conservatives are coming!" rant. However in the circumstances of this election (economic, social, and cultural upheaval) the Party's more than willingness to demagogue using the most explosive charges to the American ear and their attempt to implement policies that seek to roll back over a century's worth of expansive legal and social rights is creating a circumstance in which, the very nature of progressive US society is being undermined. I will leave it to you to read the entire post but I will give you Eichenwald's Five Reasons, with  my own commentary.

1) They are Liars. Not your run of the mill political "Nudge nudge say no more" type liars, but the full on let's give Goebbel's experiment a test, type of Munchausenistas. Their lies threaten to render the most basic fabric of acceptable discourse in democratic campaigns. If they win with these lies facts will cease to have any purchase in US elections.

2) They are demagogues. The desperation of the Romney/Ryan team and the Republican Party as a whole lies in the reality that the society is changing in ways unrecognizable to the grass roots of the party (90% of Republican voters are white) and the fact that the doyens of the party (the Party of Big Business) are tired of fucking around and want their oligarchy NOW! So the political operatives are now dredging up the beasts from the darkest part of the American id, to convince it's herrenvolk, that now is the time to stand at the gates and beat back the barbarians.

3) They are economic arsonists. There is no need to destroy the village to save it but one must destroy the village to better profit from it. Naomi Klein says it best but in short the Republicans are ignorant because of their "Supply Side" theology and dangerous because of their socio-pathic greed.

4) They are threatening American Democracy ( such as it is insert mine) Unable to win a fucking election on their policies, the Republicans now are simply trying to re-instate the time honored traditions of Jim Crow voting rights. If all else fails requiring (likely Democratic) voters to name the number of bubbles in a bar of soap, will always do in a pinch.

5) They are Threatening America. All of these actions lead up to the result that the crypto white supremacist fundametalist fascist take over of the Republican Party is an existential threat to the US. As a "house divided cannot stand" half free and half nuts (with access to the ballot) threatens the very foundation of the Republic, which only remains so, if you can keep it.

Mitt Romney's Economic Plan in 6 Easy Steps

  Yesterday Mitt Romney had a rare foray into his idea of the truth and gave us some insight into his economic plan for the USA. Thanks to Dailykos commenter, Flint, for the summation.

Romney's Economic Plan for America...  

1. Get control of the company = win the election and get control of congress

2. Harvest profit centers and sell them off... Privatize the postal Service, Privatize education, Privatize all healthcare, military supply already sold to Halliburton by Bush etc. etc.

3. Liquidate Assets = Sell off federal lands and mineral rights.

4. Reduce payroll by laying off personnel = shrink government by getting rid of public employees (teachers,firemen, policemen, postal workers,FDA inspectors and the list goes on!)

5. Get rid of pension plans to reduce overhead = Get rid of medicare, medicaid and social security

6. Provide dividends to key investors for continued support = massive tax cuts to the .0001%ers funding his campaign and buying congress through lobbyist.

If you don't believe me . . . 

Today in 'What sovereignty looks like'

Tunisia's still-new president orders an audit of the country's foreign debt, to distinguish debt that supported beneficial development from debt that "served to line the pockets of the former rulers and their... acolytes." This while South Africa is still servicing the debt that bought the guns that killed anti-apartheid activists.