It’s the second day of classes here in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD, or DISD). Already we experience great trials from the loss of funding across the board in Texas education, as Gov. Rick Perry encouraged the state legislature to cut more than $4 billion from schools. Cuts will be larger next fall.
At Molina High School we have about 25% more students, with 10% fewer teachers. Classes strain the seams of the school — classrooms are crowded, desks and chairs are in short supply. Computers promised for teachers, supposed to be delivered eight months ago, still are not delivered. Printers, printing supplies, and paper, stand in conservation mode. There are so few technical support people that those few new computers delivered often are not set up to operate yet.
This year’s inspiration for Dallas teachers comes from Dalton Sherman, a fifth grader at Charles Rice Learning Center. Here’s a YouTube video of the presentation about 20,000 of us watched last Wednesday, a small point that redeemed the annual “convocation” exercise, for 2008:
Sherman’s presentation rescued what had been shaping up as another day of rah-rah imprecations to teachers who badly wanted, and in my case needed, to be spending time putting classrooms together.
(By the way, at the start of his presentation, you can see several people leap to their feet in the first row — Mom, Dad, and older brother. Nice built-in cheering section.)
Staff at DISD headquarters put the speech together for Dalton to memorize, and he worked over the summer to get it down. This background is wonderfully encouraging.
First, it makes a statement that DISD officials learn from mistakes. Last year the keynote was given by a speaker out of central casting’s “classic motivational speaker” reserves. As one teacher described it to me before the fete last Wednesday, “It was a real beating.”
Second, DISD’s planning ahead to pull this off suggests someone is looking a little bit down the road. This was a four or five month exercise for a less-than-10 minute presentation. It’s nice to know someone’s looking ahead at all.
Third, the cynical teachers gave Dalton Sherman a warm standing ovation. That it was delivered by a 10-year-old kids from DISD made a strong symbol. But the content was what hooked the teachers. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa provided a death-by-PowerPoint presentation leading up to the speech, one that was probably not designed solely as contrasting lead in. In other words, Dalton Sherman’s speech demonstrated as nothing else the district has done lately that someone downtown understands that the teachers count, the foot soldiers in our war on ignorance and jihad for progress.
The kids came back Monday, bless ’em. School’s in session, to anyone paying attention.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2001 report proclaimed if the Bush tax cut legislation were to pass, it would:
1) Effectively pay off the federal debt;
2) Reduce the federal surplus by $1.4 trillion;
3) Substantially increase family income;
4) Save the entire Social Security surplus;
5) Increase personal savings;
6) Create more job opportunities.
Everyone of those claims did not happen and in fact the exact opposite occurred. But, what did happen was a massive transfer of wealth to the Ultra-Wealthy, which were the true goals of the Bush Tax Cuts.
Who pays taxes, and is it fair? Odd to me that the assumption is it’s the poor who don’t pay taxes, and that it’s unfair to the rich because the poor are living so high on the hog.
Evidence, anyone?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Historian Rick Perlstein told Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball that President Obama needs to go powerfully on the defensive, defending the social safety net Republicans are working hard to shred.
Talking Points Memo billed it as a dig at Rick Perry’s not-grounded campaign platform, but we’d all do well to listen to former President Bill Clinton’s larger point here: A good economy for a great nation requires a good, working government, regulations and all.
This is not a new idea by any stretch, that doing great things and dreaming great things to do is one of the things that makes America what it is, in its better incarnations.
Physicist Robert R. Wilson at the 1968 groundbreaking of Fermilab - Fermilab photo via Wikimedia
Physicist Robert Wilson — who had been the youngest group leader at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project — gave a brilliant defense to a Congressional committee about the value of pure research, while working on the project that eventually became Fermilab. Wikipedia has a good, concise description of the event, and an account of Wilson’s words:
In 1967 he took a leave of absence from Cornell to assume directorship of the not-yet-created National Accelerator Laboratory which was to create the largest particle accelerator of its day at Batavia, Illinois. In 1969, Wilson was called to justify the multimillion-dollar machine to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Bucking the trend of the day, Wilson emphasized it had nothing at all to do with national security, rather:
It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
Thanks to Wilson’s leadership—in a full-steam ahead style very much adopted from Lawrence, despite his firings—the facility was completed on time and under budget. Originally named the National Accelerator Laboratory, it was renamed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab for short) in 1974, after famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi; the facility centered around a four-mile circumference, 400 GeV accelerator. Unlike most government facilities, Fermilab was designed to be aesthetically pleasing. Wilson wanted Fermilab to be an appealing place to work, believing that external harmony would encourage internal harmony as well, and labored personally to keep it from looking like a stereotypical “government lab”, playing a key role in its design and architecture. It had a restored prairie which served as a home to a herd of American Bisons, ponds, and a main building purposely reminiscent of a cathedral in Beauvais, France. Fermilab’s Central Laboratory building was later named Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall in his honor.
It’s time to dream, America. It’s time again to make America worth defending.
No love lost between Hutchison and Perry. Hutchison opposed Perry for the Republican nomination for governor of Texas in 2010. Perry was brutal in his criticism of her, and he defeated her in the primary.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry should not count on the support of his state’s seniority senator (and his 2010 Republican gubernatorial rival) if he decides to run for president.
(Polaroid photo by Sarah Tung/Hearst Newspapers)
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Dallas, told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell today that she is looking for a Republican candidate with private-sector experience as her choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nomination.
Perry is a career politician who has held elective office since 1985.
“He certainly has got government experience,” Hutchison told Mitchell on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” this morning, adding that “we need people who have been in the private sector, as well.”
The Republican senator’s comments hint strongly that she’d prefer one of the GOP candidates who has run a business: former Winter Olympics organizer (and venture capitalist) Mitt Romney, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain or former chemical company executive Jon Huntsman.
Hutchison said she has no immediate plans to endorse any candidate.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
You can disagree with him about every other sentence, but he speaks a lot of sense and a lot of stuff we need to think about. Before his death in 2010, historian Howard Zinn talked about the bank bailouts that got us out of 2008:
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L-Prize-winning bulb from Philips North American Lighting -- a 10-watt LED bulb to replace 60-watt incandescent bulbs
From the White House blog, something you probably didn’t see in your local newspaper and/or Tea Party organ:
Bright Ideas: Thomas Edison would be amazed. The conventional light bulb now has some serious competition. Philips Lighting North America has invented a revolutionary 10-watt light emitting diode (LED) bulb. Phillips is the first winner of the Energy Department’s Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize(L Prize). The L Prize challenged the lighting industry to develop high performance, energy-saving replacements for conventional light bulbs that will save American consumers and businesses money.
Some business gets an award for lights that conserve energy? Rats, there goes Rand Paul’s raison d’etre — all but for the lack of a toilet Paul could flush on his own.
It’s almost an arcane fight, but it’s an important one — if you’re going to discuss climate science and the policies required to clean up pollution that causes destruction of our planet, can we at least agree to stick to the facts, the real facts?
John Mashey is a computer smart guy who jumped into the fray to point out that most opponents to doing anything to stop the destruction have a social or economic interest in stopping the action and continuing the destruction, something Mashey determined from looking at the networks linking the people involved. There’s a lot of howling about Mashey’s pointing out that the emperor is a crook. So far he’s been proved correct.
An academic group you probably never heard of, the National Association of Scholars, has an elected leader who decided to take after Mashey, rather than clean up the house. Peter Wood writes a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and sadly, their editorial mavens appear not to have fact checked it. To their credit, they allowed Mashey’s response.
Wood’s article misused the platform of CHE. Its relevance to the concerns of CHE was minimal. It had little purpose but to damage the reputation of one of us, John Mashey, and the climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Wood has often denigrated elsewhere. The political false-association tactics were obvious. Climate scientists are under incessant attack, a fact strongly decried the day before Wood’s article by the AAAS Board. The muddy battlefield of blogs and media has now arrived on the CHE premises, easily seen in the comments.
This is, indeed, a case of trying to kill the messenger’s reputation.
Am I the only one suspicious that the National Association of Scholars may have been named to foster confusion about the authority of reports, say from the National Academy of Sciences, the long-time science advisory group to presidents whose reports urge action to stop climate change? Notice their acronyms are the same.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Ezra Klein’s on-line column this morning worries me more — will any Republican stand up for America?
No, I don’t mean lip service, I don’t mean flag lapel pins. I mean, will any Republican stand up for the policies we need to steer through the shoals of economic woe we face in the next 60 months?
The most telling moment of Thursday’s GOP debate wasn’t when Michele Bachmann cooly stuck a knife between Tim Pawlenty’s ribs, or when Rick Santorum plaintively begged for more airtime, or when Mitt Romney easily slipped past questions about his record on health-care reform. It was when every single GOP candidate on the stage agreed that they would reject a budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He asked again just to make sure the assembled candidates had understood the question.
Primary debates are usually watched for what they say about the candidates, but they’re generally important for what they say about the party. This one was no different. With the notable exceptions of Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, the candidates didn’t disagree over policy. They disagreed over fealty to policy.
Bachmann didn’t attack Pawlenty’s policy proposals. She attacked him for past statements suggesting he might believe in other policy proposals, like the individual mandate and cap-and-trade. Pawlenty’s assault on Romney took the same form. This debate wasn’t about what policies the candidates believed in. That was largely a given. This debate was about which of the candidates believed in those policies the most.
The best policy in this debate wasn’t the policy most likely to work, or the policy most likely to pass. It was the most orthodox policy. The policy least sullied by compromise. A world in which the GOP will not agree to deficit reduction with a 10:1 split between spending cuts and tax increases is a world where entitlement reform can’t happen. It’s a world where the “supercommittee” fails and the trigger is pulled, and thus a world in which $1 out of every $2 in cuts comes from the Pentagon. It’s not a world that fits what many in the GOP consider ideal policy. But it is a world in which none in the GOP need to traverse the treacherous politics of compromise.
Policies discussed weren’t mainline, capitalist economic policies, either. They’re so far out in left field they can’t even see the pitcher’s mound from where they are. Plus, they’re looking the wrong way.
Over and over again, [Michelle] Bachmann misstated basic facts. She said that Tim Pawlenty “implemented” cap-and-trade in Minnesota. He did no such thing. She said “we just heard from Standard Poor’s,” and “when they dropped our credit rating what they said was we don’t have an ability to repay our debt.” Simply not true.
S&P has never questioned our ability to repay our debt. That’s why we remain AA+. They have questioned whether political brinksmanship will stop us from paying our debt. The downgrade “was pretty much motivated by all of the debate about the raising of the debt ceiling,” said John Chambers, head of S&P’s sovereign ratings committee. That is to say, it was motivated by political brinksmanship from the likes of, well, Michele Bachmann.
It’s fitting that the candidate best able to resist compromise is the candidate who seems least able to correctly explain the policies at issue and the choices we face. It’s a lot easier to take a hard line if you don’t understand the consequences of your actions, and a lot simpler to belt out applause lines if you’re not slowed down by the messy complexities of the issues. But where Bachmann is leading, the other candidates are following. Mitt Romney knows perfectly well that a deal with $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases is a great deal for conservatives. What he probably doesn’t know is how he’s going to explain why he pretended otherwise when he was vying for the nomination.
Winners in the debate? Unclear. Losers? You, me, and every American.
Can any Republican explain where in the world they got these nightmare economic policies? Are they being made up on the spot?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Apathy is a cruel political philosophy. It supports despots, fools, crooks and partisan hacks — more often than it supports good government, in my humble opinion.
In Wisconsin, had all those who signed the petitions to recall Tea Party Republicans, voted, the results would have been more favorable to Democrats. Tea Partiers won big in 2010 on the basis of poor voter turnout nationally (could it really have been as low as 18% of all voters?).
Look at it this way — 26,000 people in the 2nd Senate District signed the petition to recall Sen. Rob Cowles of Allouez in the spring. But only 18,000 people ended up voting for Cowles’ opponent, Nancy Nusbaum on Tuesday.If the 26,000 petition-signers would have voted for Nusbaum, she only would have needed 1,500 more votes to beat Cowles, who had 27,500 votes.
From Appleton, in one contested district, only 35 voters showed up to vote.
It is clear why Republicans work so hard, nationally, to restrict voter turnout by making it difficult, onerous, or just bothersome to vote. And no doubt, they think that they will make better decisions than those who didn’t vote and thereby handed them the reins of power. Despots, fools, crooks and partisan hacks rarely confess they are not the purveyors of good, democratic government.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Sen. Rob Cowles blocked one of six attempts by Democrats on Tuesday to oust a sitting Republican lawmaker from office, putting his party in a position to maintain control of Madison and continue its unchecked, aggressive agenda.
That’s about as polite as it is possible to be.
Democrats faced an uphill battle, but took two out of three seats from Republicans. It is not enough to flip the majority in the Senate.
Will it be enough of a scare to make Republicans talk sense? You’d think that, after watching the damage done to the stock market, almost as bad as the attack on the World Trade Center, Wisconsin voters would have been more circumspect.
But these six Republicans were well-entrenched. 33% is better than nothing. It means 33% of Wisconsinites appear to have awakened to the wolves at their doors.
How to wake up the rest?
Two Democrats face recall elections next week, revenge for the recall elections this week.
Will the assault on U.S. values, education and public institutions, continue?
At the time I wrote “Nickel and Dimed,” I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to — only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29 percent of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes — though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. 29 percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Liberty does not flow to those who lack the money to eat, or keep warm. We have strides to make to get to “liberty and justice for all.”
Libertarians, why do you oppose liberty for poor-but-working people?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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