A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Friday Cartoon Fun: The Sherrod Affair Edition

Obama Cool With Cutting Food Stamps To Pay For Education (We're Doomed)

Obey: White House Suggested Cutting Food Stamps to Pay for Education Program

By ANNIE LOWREY 7/16/10 5:04 PM

This entire interview with Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), the head of the House Appropriations Committee and a powerful veteran member of Congress, who is retiring this year, is worth a read. But one passage is particularly striking. Obey is discussing his proposal to divert funds from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education program to save teachers’ jobs. Due to the states’ fiscal crises, as many as 200,000 local government employees, many of them teachers, might lose their jobs in the coming year.

The proposal made it in to the House war-funding bill, which needs a Senate vote. The White House has threatened to veto the war-funding bill if it contains Obey’s change. Here is the quote, from an interview with The Fiscal Times:

The secretary of education [Arne Duncan] is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… [W]hen we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal. So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “Look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.” We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the secretary of education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.

If Obey is right about this, it is, in a word, horrifying. Food stamps are not particularly generous. They help families that are often desperate. They are just about the last thing that should get cut in the midst of a horrific employment crisis in the wake of a job-sapping recession.

"Reason" Not An Administration Value

Over at The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss kicks Duncan and Obama, deservedly, in the teeth:

...
Duncan uses a lot of jargon too, but it is easy to understand what he is trying to do with education: expand charter schools, increase student standardized testing, link teacher pay to test scores and close down the nation’s lowest-performing schools.

Unfortunately, what is not easy to understand is why President Obama's education secretary is pushing those initiatives. This administration was supposed to bring some reason back into education reform after the failed era of No Child Left Behind.

But from the looks of it, Secretary Duncan may be taking on a race to somewhere even worse.

...

A Blueprint For More Nonsense

Blueprint for Reform

On the first page, in the second sentence paragraph of the Blueprint For Reform, there is a bit of erroneousness. The claim that America was once the most educated nation in the world is true. But we still are. Those other countries we like to compare ourselves to don't report ALL scores like we do. We report everything; they report only scores of those headed for college. That puts us lower on any list, but it is also meaningless.

Statistics can be used to prove or disprove anything, especially when statistics are presented in a vacuum, as Arne did here. In fact there is not one reference for any statement made citing "research." I think education research is pretty much useless. Until we understand the brain, completely, we will not make any progress on "how kids learn" or "how one should teach." What students need can be figured out by a marginally smart person charged with educating a group of kids. It's an art. It ain't science.

How many Americans go overseas to study? Surely not as many as come here from overseas to study. This phenomenon, known as getting an education, seems to attract lots of foreigners to America because of our superior universities. How does Arne explain that? He doesn't. He doesn't even mention it. None of the reformers do because it would pillory their stance that American education is in decline.

Look, America is in decline. The whole lot of us, and it's not due to bad teachers. It's all politics and money.

If you have a kid in public school, and you think his or her teacher is worthy, write a quick letter to the superintendent (and give copies to the principal and teacher!) saying how great the teacher is. Teachers never get positive feedback, and they need it now more than ever.

NCLB 2.0 Worse Than 1.0

Congratulations again America! We have elected a FOO (Friend Of the Oligarchs) president who has placed another FOO in charge of education. Jim Horn lays out the ramifications of their new plans to reform our schools:

Because the annual testing will continue unabated under the Oligarchs' plan that Obama will present, this new system will pit the poor against the poorer and the poorer against the poorest, because the only thing that will keep your school off the shutdown, er, turnaround list is some other school in your vicinity that is doing worse still. No targets, no impossible goals. AYP be gone, they don't need you anymore. Under NCLB 2.0, there will be a never-ending list of the "bottom five percent" of schools every year, and there is nothing any school can do except to hope there is some schmucky school further down the road that is even poorer.

Obama Cool With Firing All Teachers

Obama's strategies for "fixing" failing schools seem a bit harsh, especially since firing everybody hasn't been shown to do a damn thing (except to make paupers of former teachers and principals). From WaPo:

With the proposed $900 million in school turnaround funding, Obama is placing a bet on four strategies to fix thousands of schools in which reform ideas have come and gone without success. Targeted schools include those with low graduation rates and the lowest-achieving schools in impoverished neighborhoods.

Each of the strategies, at minimum, appears to require replacing the school's principal. The "turnaround" model would also require replacing at least half the school staff. "Restart" schools would be transferred to the control of independent charter networks or other school management organizations. "Transformation" schools would be required to take steps to raise teacher effectiveness and increase learning time, among other measures. The fourth strategy would be closing a school and dispersing its students.

Robert Gibbs Pulls A Stupid Stunt

Eggs, Milk, Bread, Hope, Change

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' hand at a press conference. What a dick (though it's funny). (link)

No Nukes

From swimming freestyle:

It's a mystery to me, though, why there continues to be that much interest in nuclear power. The only way nuclear power is funded, and this is true all around the world, is either via government loan guarantees or public ownership. Utility companies are unwilling to make the investment on their own, the cost per kilowatt of electricity produced is higher than existing, albeit dirty, methods, and the nuclear waste disposal issues are still unresolved.

According to one recent analysis, the cost of building nuclear power plants has approximately doubled in the last seven years (due to things such as increasing materials costs). As it stands, this means that the cost of electricity from new plants would be around 8.4 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to about 6 cents per kilowatt hour for conventional fossil fuel plants.

A little bonus No Nukes Nostalgia (David Lindley is my hero):

A Librarian Speaks Truth To Power

An Indecent Proposal

Dear Mr. President:

Today I learned through the American Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians that your FY 2011 education budget does not include any additional specific funding for school libraries, additional school librarians, or statues mandating certified school librarians for every state. Equally disappointing is the news that the Improving Literacy for School Libraries grant program has been all but put out of reach for school libraries with the FY 2011 budget proposal that will absorb this grant program into a variety of other Department of Education programs.

In October of 2009, you issued an official proclamation celebrating and affirming the importance of information literacy with the declaration of National Information Literacy Awareness Month. In this proclamation, you stated,

Our Nation’s educators and institutions of learning must be aware of — and adjust to — these new realities. In addition to the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, it is equally important that our students are given the tools required to take advantage of the information available to them. The ability to seek, find, and decipher information can be applied to countless life decisions, whether financial, medical, educational, or technical.

In your proclamation, you privilege information literacy as being equally important to the traditional literacies and mathematics, yet you are providing no additional funding to provide all schools the primary teachers of information literacy, school librarians. Why are you providing funding for additional resources and teachers to support reading, writing, and mathematics, yet you ignore funding for the experts who are most ready, willing, and able to teach information literacy to our nation’s students in grades K-12: school librarians. Are you aware that not all states legally mandate a fully certified school librarian? Did you know that many school libraries do not have a full time certified school librarian? Do you think students can become informationally fluent in the absence of rich, current, and diverse collections in their school libraries or appropriate access to digital content? How can we as a nation provide students the instruction needed to help students cultivate “the ability to seek, find, and decipher information” without fully funded libraries staffed by highly qualified, certified school librarians?

In this same proclamation, you assert:

Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise.

Information evaluation. Authority. Social scholarship. Digital citizenship. Content creation. Self-filtering. Mr. President, I teach these concepts and skills regularly in my school library. School librarians are your go-to team for teaching these valuable life skills, skills that today’s students need to grow into citizens who can fully participate in today’s society? Do you think we wait until they are age eighteen or older to suddenly explore these concepts of information fluency, the very ones you declared to be of national importance? Is this charge left only to our public and academic librarians? While our public libraries certainly do an outstanding job in teaching these skills, our most disadvantaged learners often do not have physical or virtual access to a public library, nor can a public library provide ongoing instruction in these skills on a regular basis as part of a child’s daily learning environment like the school library. Ultimately, I feel the instruction of these skills has the most value when taught in the context of the school curriculum and when driven by student’s own inquiry. If you say you support information literacy as the cornerstone of a democratic society and informed citizenry, then you must not marginalize school libraries and librarians, and consequently, the students we serve. The very fact that the words “library, libraries, and librarians” are missing from the Department of Education budget speaks volumes about how you perceive our role in educating today’s youth and that you do not have an authentic commitment to helping today’s young people acquire this form of literacy capital so vitally needed for today’s world.

I find it demeaning and insulting that within a span of less than six months, your actions and your budget betray the very values you purported to support through your presidential proclamation. Change we can believe in?

I think not, Mr. President.

Sincerely,

Buffy Hamilton, School Librarian

h/t Jim Horn

Obama Seeks Lowest Common Denominator

From Drew Westen at HuffPo:

...Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting...

h/t DWT

John Turley Explains Justice Department: Power Mongering

Jonathan Turley explains how Obama's Justice Department is defending the indefensible. Did Nuremberg mean nothing?

The Obama Administration has filed a brief that brushes over the war crimes aspects of Yoo’s work at the Justice Department. Instead, it insists that attorneys must be free to give advice — even if it is to establish a torture program.

In its filing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department insists that there is “the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military’s detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict.” Instead it argues that the Justice Department has other means to punish lawyers like the Office of Professional Responsibility. Of course, the Bush Administration effectively blocked such investigations and Yoo is no longer with the Justice Department. The OPR has been dismissed as ineffectual, including in an ABA Journal, as the Justice Department’s “roach motel”—“the cases go in, but nothing ever comes out.”

The Justice Department first defended Yoo as counsel and then paid for private counsel to represent him (here). His public-funded private counsel is Miguel Estrada, who was forced to withdraw his nomination by George Bush for the Court of Appeals after strong opposition from the Democrats.

Yoo is being sued by Jose Padilla, who was effectively blocked in contesting his abusive confinement and mistreatment as part of this criminal case and in a habeas action. The Bush Administration brought new charges to moot a case before the Supreme Court could rule. The Court previously sent his case back on a technicality.

It is important to note that the Administration did not have to file this brief since it had withdrawn as counsel and paid for Yoo’s private counsel. It has decided that it wants to establish the law claimed by the Bush Administration protecting Justice officials who support alleged war crimes. They are effectively doubling down by withdrawing as counsel and then reappearing as a non-party amicus.

The Obama Administration has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions. The third of the twelve trials for war crimes involved 16 German jurists and lawyers. Nine had been officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the others were prosecutors and judges of the Special Courts and People’s Courts of Nazi Germany. It would have been a larger group but two lawyers committed suicide before trial: Adolf Georg Thierack, former minister of justice, and Carl Westphal, a ministerial counsellor.

They included Herbert Klemm, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and served as minister of justice, director of the Ministry’s Legal Education and Training Division, and deputy director of the National Socialist Lawyer’s League.

Oswald Rothaug received life imprisonment for his role as a prosecutor and later a judge.

Wilhelm von Ammon received ten years for his work as a justice official in occupied areas.

Guenther Joel received ten years for being an adviser (like Yoo) to the Ministry of Justice and later a judge.

Curt Rothenberger was also a legal adviser and was given seven years for his writings at the Ministry of Justice and as the deputy president of the Academy of German Law.

Wolfgang Mettgenberg received ten years as representative of the Criminal Legislation Administration Division of the Ministry of Justice.

Ernst Lautz (10 years) had been chief public prosecutor of the People’s Court.

Franz Schlegelberger, a former Ministry of Justice official, was convicted and sentenced to life for conspiracy and other war crimes. The court found:

‘…that Schlegelberger supported the pretension of Hitler in his assumption of power to deal with life and death in disregard of even the pretense of judicial process. By his exhortations and directives, Schlegelberger contributed to the destruction of judicial independence. It was his signature on the decree of 7 February 1942 which imposed upon the Ministry of Justice and the courts the burden of the prosecution, trial, and disposal of the victims of Hitler’s Night and Fog. For this he must be charged with primary responsibility.

‘He was guilty of instituting and supporting procedures for the wholesale persecution of Jews and Poles. Concerning Jews, his ideas were less brutal than those of his associates, but they can scarcely be called humane. When the “final solution of the Jewish question” was under discussion, the question arose as to the disposition of half-Jews. The deportation of full Jews to the East was then in full swing throughout Germany. Schlegelberger was unwilling to extend the system to half-Jews.’

It was the “ideas” that these lawyers advanced that made the war crimes possible. Other officials were tried but acquitted. All of these officials used arguments similar to those in the Obama Administration’s brief of why lawyers are not responsible for war crimes that they defend and justify. Bush selected people like Yoo to justify the war crime of torture. If they had written against it, the Administration might have abandoned the effort. The CIA director and others were already concerned about the prospect of prosecution. The Obama Administration’s brief revisits Nuremberg and sweeps away such quaint notions. Indeed, the brief for Yoo could have been used directly to support legal advisers Wolfgang Mettgenberg, Guenther Joel, and Wilhelm von Ammon.

If successful in this case, the Obama Administration will succeed in returning the world to the rules leading to the war crimes at Nuremberg. Quite a legacy for the world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Wednesday Cartoon Fun: We're Screwed Edition

"A Fondness For The Quaint Old Constitution"

Entangled Giant
By Garry Wills

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama's presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain.[1] Obama's nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo's claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law."[2] On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama's attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so.[3] Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.[4]

The President said that past official crimes would not be investigated—certainly not for prosecution, and not even by an impartial "truth commission" just trying to establish a record. He said, on the contrary, that detainees might be tried in "military tribunals." When the British government, trying a terrorist suspect, decided to use some American documents shared with the British government, Obama's attorney general pressured it not to do so. Most important, perhaps, was the new president's desire to end the nation-building in Iraq while substituting a long-term nation-building effort in Afghanistan, run by a government corrupted by drug trafficking and not susceptible to our remolding.

Even in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush's. Gay military personnel, including those with valuable Arabic-language skills, were being dismissed at the same rate as before. Even more egregiously, the Obama administration continued the defiance of the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause, which requires states to recognize laws passed by other states, when it defended the Defense of Marriage Act, which lets states refuse to recognize gay marriages legally obtained in another state. Many objected when Dick Cheney would not name energy executives who came to the White House in 2002, though Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had been forced to reveal which health advisers had visited her. Yet the Obama team, in June 2009, refused to release logs of those who come to the White House. (It later reversed itself, but only in response to a lawsuit.)

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, "Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place." A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, "It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say "estimated" because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

On January 25, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales signed a memo written by David Addington that called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete." Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Few people even consider anymore Madison's lapidary pronouncement, "In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates." Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief. Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awesome proximity to the Football, to the Button.

Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, "One doesn't fight in the hope of winning" (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès).

— September 10, 2009
Notes


[1]Jane Mayer, "The Secret History," The New Yorker, June 22, 2009.


[2]Charlie Savage, "Obama's War on Terror May Resemble Bush's in Some Areas," The New York Times, February 18, 2009.


[3]John Schwartz, "Obama Backs Off a Reversal on Secrets," The New York Times, February 10, 2009. See also my recent discussion of the Reynolds case, "Why the Government Can Legally Lie," The New York Review, February 12, 2009.


[4]Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman, "Obama Tilts to CIA on Memos," The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009; R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "CIA Fights Full Release of Detainee Report," The Washington Post, June 17, 2009.


[5]See David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). See also the review by Jonathan Freedland, "A Black and Disgraceful Site," The New York Review, May 28, 2009.

"Insurance Exchange"? WTF?

Someone explain what an "Insurance Exchange" is, seeing as how Obama will apparently tout it this evening...

Now, if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t currently have health insurance, the second part of this plan will finally offer you quality, affordable choices. If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage. We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange – a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers. As one big group, these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage. This is how large companies and government employees get affordable insurance. It’s how everyone in this Congress gets affordable insurance. And it’s time to give every American the same opportunity that we’ve given ourselves.

School Reforms That Might Actually Work

A smarter education strategy

By Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves | September 7, 2009

AS PRESIDENT OBAMA prepares to address the nation’s students via classroom TVs and streaming Internet tomorrow, all eyes are on America’s schools. After years of unprecedented federal involvement, educators and the public have grown weary of high-sounding reforms that never seem to achieve the desired results. But we can’t give up on our schools. As we watch students from other nations outperform the United States, it is more important than ever that the Obama administration get its education strategy right.

Charter schools, pay-for-performance for teachers, alternative routes into teaching, and closing failing schools are the policy mix the administration is pushing. Most of its education ideas differ little from those of prior administrations. The ideas aren’t new, and the evidence driving policy is just as questionable as ever.

Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are rushing headlong down a path that in many ways replicates for schools the same market-based principles that have left our economy a shambles. We know that inventing new finance models created a hollow prosperity for a few.

Likewise, we cannot create a separate underclass of public schools that charters leave behind. Financial rewards for a few teachers won’t raise quality among all of them. And shutting failing schools, like property foreclosures, fails to address the underlying problems.

There are better ways. We have seen this firsthand in our studies of high-achieving school systems around the world.

Finland’s schools lead the world on the Program for International Student Achievement tests. When its unemployment rate hit almost 20 percent in 1992, Finland reinvented itself to become the world’s most economically competitive country. Its strategy? Education.

Unlike US policies urging us to “lower the barriers’’ to let just about anyone teach, Finland has made teaching such a prestigious occupation that only 10 percent of applicants to Finland’s teacher education programs are admitted. Their system isn’t expensive - teachers are paid at the median rate for comparable nations. But there are good working conditions in all schools and a very different social ethic: Finns support “collective responsibility,’’ not narrow “accountability,’’ for improving schools. Strong schools don’t compete against weak ones, but help them instead. The result? Finland has the world’s smallest achievement gap between students based on their social class background.

Or consider a nation with an urban mix similar to the United States. The London borough of Tower Hamlets climbed from the worst-achieving district in England to the top half in the last decade. In Tower Hamlets - where more than half of the students are immigrants - our recent study found educational leaders have built ties with local community groups, particularly imams from the mosques that serve the district’s large Bangladeshi population. They reversed high truancy rates and brought the community inside the schools to serve as classroom aides, translators, and social service providers. Schools set their own improvement targets together, rather than reacting to ones from outside; and when one school sank into failure, all the others rallied round to help.

Finally, consider the Canadian province of Alberta - the second highest performer on the PISA tests after Finland. The Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, created by the government with the teachers union, receives 2 percent of the provincial education budget and has engaged 90 percent of all schools in the province in designing their own local innovations and solutions to educational problems.

We’ve found in Finland, Tower Hamlets, and Alberta paths not taken in US education today. There is nothing in the new administration’s policies that provides incentives for strong schools to help struggling ones, least of all where charter schools are concerned. Pay-for-performance schemes offer market incentives that motivate a few teachers rather than providing the mission and conditions that energize all of them. There are proven ways to lift underperforming schools rather than simply shutting them down.

It isn’t too late for this administration to reconsider its plan. In almost all his policies, Obama has proven to be a man of the world. But in education, we seem to be re-treading outworn paths from the past. Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?

Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves are professors in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and authors of “The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change.’’

h/t Schools Matter

Tom Daschle, Secret Lobbyist

Come on, Obama! Either hire the guy away from the moneyed interests, or drop him like a bad habit!

NYT Pulls Back the Curtain on Tom Daschle, WH & Industry Front Man
By: Scarecrow Saturday August 22, 2009 6:07 pm

The New York Times does a disturbing piece on what a swell guy Tom Daschle is to be so willing to privately advise President Obama on health care while he serves as a paid political consultant to a myriad of health industry clients.

Mr. Daschle, who conveniently neglected to pay taxes on incomes only the wealthy understand, isn't a registererd lobbyist, though one wonders why he's exempt. Instead, Tom, who works for Alston & Bird, prefers to be called a "resource."

“I am most comfortable with the word resource.”

Well, no kidding. So what does a "resource" do?

1. He promotes the idea of co-ops. And just by coincidence:

It is an idea that happens to dovetail with the interests of many Alston & Bird clients, like the insurance giant UnitedHealth and the Tennessee Hospital Association. . . .

Friends and associates of Mr. Daschle say the interests of Alston & Bird’s clients have no influence on his views. They say he sees no conflict in advising private clients on the one hand and advising the White House on the other, because he offers the same assessment to everyone: Though he has often said that he favors a government-run insurance option, the Senate will not pass it.

And why are we not surprised that "friends and associates of Mr. Daschle" would think there's no conflict problem?

2. He tells his private clients how to interact with his government friends:

Clients of Alston & Bird say Mr. Daschle advises them, sometimes indirectly through the firm’s registered lobbyists, about the personalities of his former colleagues, as well as strategies to achieve their policy goals.

That's nice. I wonder what the best approach is for talking to the President about how to stall or undermine effective health care reform?

3. He presumes to speak for the Administration's plan:

Mr. Daschle does not shrink from his leading role in the debate. Speaking at a hospital industry conference last week, for example, he accepted billing as “the architect of President Obama’s health care plan.”

Before such industry groups, Mr. Daschle can sometimes cheer on their lobbying efforts, as he did at a meeting on Aug. 8 of chain drugstore executives when he urged them to push lawmakers to raise certain Medicaid reimbursements.

4. He promotes an agenda -- the co-op concept and deferred triggers for a public plan that he developed with Dole, et al -- that is inconsistent with the majority of Congressional Democrats and the American people:

Their proposal, released in June, was among the first to spell out the idea of helping states establish health insurance “co-op plans with consumer boards.”

Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and one of Mr. Daschle’s closest friends, began pitching the idea at about the same time and has become its champion. . . .

As a backstop, their plan provided that if state co-ops or other programs failed to meet certain cost and coverage goals in five years, the president could create a public plan on a fast track without threat of a Senate filibuster.

That feature, known as a trigger, was briefly acknowledged as another possible compromise by the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Though it was little discussed, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and one of the Finance Committee’s group of six, has recently expressed support for the concept, and committee aides say the idea is under consideration.

5. He's setting the agenda for the "gang of six."

Mr. Conrad is among six members of the Senate Finance Committee working on their own compromise proposal that aides say looks increasingly like the Daschle-Dole-Baker report.

It's just a coincidence that every one of these proposals has produced a misstep by the White House and further loss of trust by the Democratic base.

If you're not yet disgusted by this blatant example of Washington's legal insider corruption, read the rest of the article. But this is sickening. It doesn't matter whether you think Tom Daschle is a force for good or ill, his dual role is unprincipled, too cute by half. And he's being allowed to mainline his industry-paid-for views right into the White House and the Senate Finance Committee. No wonder the President [continues] to praise the Republicans in the gang of six for their "hard work."

Does the rest of Congress care about this? Does anyone?

The President of the United States can meet with and take advice from anyone he chooses. But at a time when this President is struggling to regain the confidence of his own base and the American people, it's disappointing -- or revealing -- that this President continues to rely so heavily on health care reform advice from those with privileged access and conflicted allegiances to those whose reform the President says the nation's health care depends.

h/t FDL

I Am Officially Disappointed

Chris Hedges writes:

Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

You should read the rest.

Let's Focus On The Future, Okay?

...And after a report from five inspectors general about the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping said on Friday that there had been a number of undisclosed surveillance programs during the Bush years, Democrats sought more information."

Let me add my own little millibar to that pressure. All of these things deserve to be investigated. This is not a matter of focussing [sic] on the past at the expense of the future. We will not have the future we want if government officials can break the law with impunity, safe in the knowledge that no future administration will be willing to take the political heat and investigate them.... [emphasis mine]

h/t hilzoy

Obama And Duncan: Manipulators And Spinmeisters

Jim Horn finds the evidence of what we all knew to be nonsense. How these people in power continue to cite nonsense, and then get called on it again and again, and then cite more nonsense, is beyond me. Maybe because I am not insane. (We all know the definition of insane, right? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.)

Obama and Duncan lie, obfuscate, get called out, then lie and obfuscate some more. Maybe it's the public that is insane?

Here is more nonsense debunked. Arne Duncan is not our savior, not even close...

The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003.

Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.