A Sad Anniversary Today: September 11

Today is the seventh anniversary of the day Osama Bin Laden hired some Saudi's to fly planes into our buildings.

John McCain has claimed that he knows how to catch Bin Laden, but won't tell us unless and until he is elected president. WTF?!

John, if you know how to catch him, shouldn't you tell the authorities? Don't you have some military connections you could inform, and then take credit for catching the SOB?

Or would you rather hold your own country hostage in return for an election?

John McCain is a traitor, apparently. Please don't vote for him. He lies, calls women cunts, pushes ladies in wheelchairs, and doesn't know what Walter Reed Hospital looks like.

Oh, and he picked an unqualified person as his VP candidate. Get a clue America! McCain likes war, thinks it works, and will get us in another!

Let's hope the Republicans will not use today as a commercial for themselves.

Remember, it was THE REPUBLICANS IN OFFICE ON 9/11/01!!!

Everyday Math: Sucks

What math curriculum did your district adopt? Mine adopted Everyday Math. Explain something to me; why do we need to adopt new curricular materials if none of us use them anyway? Actually I know the answer. Because all teachers need to teach the same thing, the same way, because research has shown that teaching all children the same thing, the same way, works better than tailoring the curriculum to the kids' needs.

No? What? I am wrong on that? Jebus. I thought my job was to try to teach as many of my students as possible as much as possible in the best way possible. Oh well. Silly me.

Everyday Math for 2nd graders begins with money. That's right, money. Not place value which is the foundation for what will be the major focus of 2nd grade math. And for the money unit I am supposed to ask kids to bring in coins! The district spent I don't know how many thousands of dollars on the new curriculum, and we have to ask poor kids to bring in change. We suck.

And then there are the "math coaches" who are there to help. In our math meeting today our coach told us the district has not yet figured out what assessments we will be using. The coach does not know if or when all teachers will get the materials that have not shown up yet. The coach does not know how we are going to share the materials (1 set for 2 classes), but that is our problem.

We were given an assignment by the coach: the scavenger hunt activity the faculty engaged in consisted of a couple pieces of paper with questions like; where do you find the ELL support in the teacher materials? The principal, who hates me so she sat next to me, couldn't find any of the stuff on the scavenger hunt list. Why? No, she is not stupid. It is that the materials are made for teachers, which means the Everyday math folks can sell us training sessions on how to use their unnecessarily complicated teacher guide (all teacher guides are like this, so, very few people use them, and the are simply overkill anyway).

The sequence of Everyday Math is out of whack, the daily lessons and activities--that must be followed--are less robust than what I do now. When I told my principal that I thought there were a few very powerful but simple things we could do to make our instruction more "regular" among grades, like using academic language, she agreed that would be good. I said considering everone is complaining about the new adoption, and it is no different that what it is replacing, and it is too complicated for anyone to put to good use this year, why don't we make a couple changes that are simple and powerful. Principal said we need to get on board with the new curriculum because not all teachers can handle the academic language on their own.

Okay. Fine. I guess most teachers are stupid, and we need scripted curricular materials. Except that some of us don't. Did I mention my scores?

Principal Certification: For What?

The following post is not about the district where I work, but it might as well be!

Principals used to be experts, former educators, and had to fight for the privilege of becoming principal. Now, well, not so much. I can tell you this from personal experience, as could many, many folks who are in on the hiring of principals (it's always the superintendent's choice!

“Take This Certification And…”

Filed under: Education by Ron Isaac @ 8:39 pm

One fine day a few years ago my principal summoned me for a good-natured chat about a piece I had written that some brownie-point seeker or other well-wisher had retrieved from the Internet and forwarded to her. My piece was about the “reformed” view of what currently passes as qualifications to be a school leader and how it falls short of the admittedly flawed principal-selection process of the past. Basically I lamented the actual (not merely perceived) de-legitimization of credentials that characterize the present chancellor’s presumed rehabilitation of the school leadership concept.

This principal, who although not pristine, was on the whole superior to most (we need to rate and educate the “whole” principal just as we do the “whole” child). She had, to her credit, come up through the ranks and left a track record of achievement. She showed by example that applying administrative skills and displaying humanity are not contradictory.

The principal, sounding more hurt than indignant, asked plaintively, “You don’t think I’m a competent principal? I read what you wrote about new principals.”

Well, most of the time this principal realized that she was neither the center of the universe nor of my articles, but she had been egged on into thinking that she was my target. Heck, she wasn’t even my case in point.

“Yes, you are, competent,” I replied, adding “but your qualifications were incidental to your getting this job. You didn’t get placed here because of them and if you hadn’t had them you’d be here on the throne just the same. Your appointment was a fait accompli. The first time that anyone in this building ever saw or heard of you was when the superintendent popped by to announce his decision to put you here.”

I was glad he did, but that wasn’t the point. It was a fortuitous imposition but an imposition nonetheless. I was accurate and sincere. It was one of those rare times that truth’s levees could not be blown away by the gale of skepticism.

But how has the principal selection process been degraded under the current DOE, with its penchant for self-congratulation? “Let’s “compare and contrast,” as we English teacher dinosaurs used to say.

Before “Children First” (which doesn’t mean what it says. People can make up any slogan just as they can sue anybody for anything or call a dictatorship a “People’s Republic”), principals were invariably veteran educators who had logged at least a decade as teachers and assistant principals before they applied for their first supervisory position. Without training, knowledge, and experience, you could still dream about being the boss of others who had the expertise that you totally lacked, but you wouldn’t have the nerve to think you belonged in that position. If you still put in for the job you’d not only be rejected; you’d be laughed out of town.

Until the present era you couldn’t become a principal practically straight out of college exclusively because of your social networking prowess or DNA links. Naturally there was always an element of “who you know…not what you know,” but rising to the top with nothing substantive to recommend you became an art form only in recent years. Of course, among the “old-school” principals there was a fair (and unfair) share of autocrats, but at least that species knew something about curriculum, methodology, educational philosophy and programming.

A “desirable” school would typically receive two hundred resumes for a vacancy. Representatives from the PTA, UFT, and CSA would separately sift through them and later collaborate to pick finalists among candidates who had met the mutually determined criteria for selection. The finalists were ranked and interviewed in an open and orderly way. There was consultation among the groups doing the selection and their feedback was not only tolerated but mandated. The discussions were frank, sometimes cantankerous, but almost always fruitful and unifying in the end.

The tradition was corrupted intermittently by some incorrigible insiders. The collective will was sometimes suspiciously overruled and a candidate out of the blue got the nod. But rarely did the successful applicant feel they had a right and indeed a holy obligation to barge into a school and like gangbusters impose their ego and redefine a flourishing school culture. Before the corporate children’s takeover, a new school leader usually showed a trace element of humility when introduced to a staff of many dozens of professionals with hundreds of years of total experience. This is often lacking among the new breed of school leaders who though they take the title and ape the role, mock the profession to which they are strangers.

Disclaimers have become the “in” genre for critics, so let me concede that the old system was not all good and the present malpractice is not all bad.

Having said that, let’s suppose that the surgeon doing your transplant is a newbie from the Stomach and Liver Leadership Academy whose prior “operations” were with hedge fund management. Or that NASA’s project manager in charge of rescuing astronauts stranded on the space station was trained to command nothing but investment portfolios before his first gig at Cape Canaveral’s controls. Would your prayers not take on a more urgent ring?

And that is why, with helter-skelter cronyism and nepotism in place and in force, our schools need buckets of worldly activism and divine intercession.

Stop Blaming Teachers and Schools! Part II

The New York Times Magazine has an article by Paul Tough about what is wrong with education. Hint: It's not the teachers! Read it below, or of course, here.

September 7, 2008

24/7 School Reform

By PAUL TOUGH

In an election season when Democrats find themselves unusually unified on everything from tax policy to foreign affairs, one issue still divides them: education. It is a surprising fault line, perhaps, given the party’s long dominance on the issue. Voters consistently say they trust the Democrats over the Republicans on education, by a wide margin. But the split in the party is real, deep and intense, and it shows no signs of healing any time soon.

On one side are the members of the two huge teachers’ unions and the many parents who support them. To them, the big problem in public education is No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law. Teachers have many complaints about the law: it encourages “teaching to the test” at the expense of art, music and other electives, they say; it blames teachers, especially those in inner-city schools, for the poor performance of disadvantaged children; and it demands better results without providing educators with the resources they need.

On the other side are the party’s self-defined “education reformers.” Members of this group — a loose coalition of mayors and superintendents, charter-school proponents and civil rights advocates — actually admire the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind, although they often criticize the law’s implementation. They point instead to a bigger, more systemic crisis. These reformers describe the underperformance of the country’s schoolchildren, and especially of poor minorities, as a national crisis that demands a drastic overhaul of the way schools are run. In order to get better teachers into failing classrooms, they support performance bonuses, less protection for low-performing teachers, alternative certification programs to attract young, ambitious teachers and flexible contracts that could allow for longer school days and an extended school year. The unions see these proposals as attacks on their members’ job security — which, in many ways, they are.

As the fall campaign and a new school year begin, both the unionists and the reformers find themselves distracted by the same question: Which side is Barack Obama on? Each camp has tried to claim him as its own — and Obama, for his part, has done his best to make it easy for them. He reassures the unions by saying he will reform No Child Left Behind so teachers will no longer “be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests,” and he placates reformers by calling himself a “strong champion of charter schools.” The reformers point to his speech in July to the National Education Association, during which he was booed, briefly, for endorsing changes to teachers’ compensation structure. The unionists, in turn, emphasize his speech a week later to the American Federation of Teachers, during which he said, “I am tired of hearing you, the teachers who work so hard, blamed for our problems.” On blogs and at conferences, the two sides have continued to snipe at each other, all the while parsing Obama’s speeches and policy pronouncements, looking for new clues to his true positions.

It’s possible, though, that both camps are looking in the wrong place for answers. What is most interesting and novel about Obama’s education plans is how much they involve institutions other than schools.

The American social contract has always identified public schools as the one place where the state can and should play a role in the process of child-rearing. Outside the school’s walls (except in cases of serious abuse or neglect), society is seen to have neither a right nor a responsibility to intervene. But a new and growing movement of researchers and advocates has begun to argue that the longstanding and sharp conceptual divide between school and not-school is out of date. It ignores, they say, overwhelming evidence of the impact of family and community environments on children’s achievement. At the most basic level, it ignores the fact that poor children, on average, arrive in kindergarten far behind their middle-class peers. There is evidence that schools can do a lot to erase that divide, but the reality is that most schools do not. If we truly want to counter the effects of poverty on the achievement of children, these advocates argue, we need to start a whole lot earlier and do a whole lot more.

The three people who have done the most to propel this nascent movement are James J. Heckman, Susan B. Neuman and Geoffrey Canada — though each of them comes at the problem from a different angle, and none of them would necessarily cite the other two as close allies. Heckman, an occasional informal Obama adviser, is an economist at the University of Chicago, and in a series of recent papers and books he has developed something of a unified theory of American poverty. More than ever before, Heckman argues, the problem of persistent poverty is at its root a problem of skills — what economists often call human capital. Poor children grow into poor adults because they are never able, either at home or at school, to acquire the abilities and resources they need to compete in a high-tech service-driven economy — and Heckman emphasizes that those necessary skills are both cognitive (the ability to read and compute) and noncognitive (the ability to stick to a schedule, to delay gratification and to shake off disappointments). The good news, Heckman says, is that specific interventions in the lives of poor children can diminish that skill gap — as long as those interventions begin early (ideally in infancy) and continue throughout childhood.

What kind of interventions? Well, that’s where the work of Susan Neuman becomes relevant. In 2001, Neuman, an education scholar at the University of Michigan, was recruited to a senior position in George W. Bush’s Department of Education, helping to oversee the development and then the implementation of No Child Left Behind. She quit in 2003, disillusioned with the law, and became convinced that its central goal — to raise disadvantaged children to a high level of achievement through schools alone — was simply impossible. Her work since then can be seen as something of a vast mea culpa for her time in Washington. After leaving government, Neuman spent several years crisscrossing the nation, examining and analyzing programs intended to improve the lives of disadvantaged children. Her search has culminated in a book, “Changing the Odds for Children at Risk,” to be published in November, in which she describes nine nonschool interventions. She includes the Nurse-Family Partnership, which sends trained nurses to visit and counsel poor mothers during and after their pregnancies; Early Head Start, a federal program, considerably more ambitious than Head Start itself, that offers low-income families parental support, medical care and day-care centers during the first three years of the lives of their children; Avance, a nine-month language-enrichment program for Spanish-speaking parents, mostly immigrants from Mexico, that operates in Texas and Los Angeles; and Bright Beginnings, a pre-K program in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina that enrolls 4-year-olds who score the lowest on a screening test of cognitive ability and manages to bring most of them up to grade level by the first day of kindergarten.

Neuman’s favorite programs share certain characteristics — they start early, focus on the families that need them the most and provide intensive support. Many of the interventions work with parents to make home environments more stimulating; others work directly with children to improve their language development (a critical factor in later school success). All of them, Neuman says, demonstrate impressive results. The problem right now is that the programs are isolated and scattered across the country, and they are usually directed at only a few years of a child’s life, which means that their positive effects tend to fade once the intervention ends.

This is where Geoffrey Canada comes in. He runs the first and so far the only organization in the country that pulls together under a single umbrella integrated social and educational services for thousands of children at once. Canada’s agency, the Harlem Children’s Zone, has a $58 million budget this year, drawn mostly from private donors; it currently serves 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood of Harlem. (I’ve spent the last five years reporting on his organization’s work and its implications for the country.) Canada shares many of the views of the education reformers — he runs two intensive K-12 charter schools with extended hours and no union contract — but at the same time he offers what he calls a “conveyor belt” of social programs, beginning with Baby College, a nine-week parenting program that encourages parents to choose alternatives to corporal punishment and to read and talk more with their children. As students progress through an all-day prekindergarten and then through a charter school, they have continuous access to community supports like family counseling, after-school tutoring and a health clinic, all designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle-class and upper-middle-class kids through their childhoods. The goal, in the end, is to produce children with the abilities and the character to survive adolescence in a high-poverty neighborhood, to make it to college and to graduate.

Though the conveyor belt is still being constructed in Harlem, early results are positive. Last year, the charter schools’ inaugural kindergarten class reached third grade and took their first New York state achievement tests: 68 percent of the students passed the reading test, which beat the New York City average and came within two percentage points of the state average, and 97 percent of them passed the math test, well above both the city and state average.

Obama has embraced, directly or indirectly, all three of these new thinkers. His campaign invited Heckman to critique its education policy, and Obama has proposed large-scale expansions of two of Neuman’s chosen interventions, the Nurse-Family Partnership and Early Head Start. Most ambitiously, Obama has pledged to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country. “The philosophy behind the project is simple,” Obama said in a speech last year announcing his plan. “If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works.”

Obama has proposed that these replication projects, which he has labeled Promise Neighborhoods, be run as private/public partnerships, with the federal government providing half the funds and the rest being raised by local governments and private philanthropies and businesses. It would cost the federal government “a few billion dollars a year,” he acknowledged in his speech. “But we will find the money to do this, because we can’t afford not to.”

It remains to be seen, of course, whether Obama will convince voters with this position, and whether, if elected, he will do the heavy lifting required to put such an ambitious national program in place. There are many potential obstacles. A lot of conservatives would oppose a new multibillion-dollar federal program as a Great Society-style giveaway to the poor. And many liberals are wary of any program that tries to change the behavior of inner-city parents; to them, teaching poor parents to behave more like middle-class parents can feel paternalistic. Union leaders will find it hard to support an effort that has nonunion charter schools at its heart. Education reformers often support Canada’s work, but his premise — that schools alone are not enough to make a difference in poor children’s lives — makes many of them anxious. And in contrast to the camps arrayed on either side of the school-reform debate, there is no natural constituency for the initiative: no union or interest group that stands to land new jobs or new contracts, no deep-pocketed philanthropy devoted to spreading the message.

The real challenge Obama faces is to convince voters that the underperformance of poor children is truly a national issue — that it should matter to anyone who isn’t poor. Heckman, especially, argues that we should address the problem not out of any mushy sense of moral obligation, but for hardheaded reasons of global competitiveness. At a moment when nations compete mostly through the skill level of their work force, he argues, we cannot afford to let that level decline.

Obama’s contention is that the traditional Democratic solution — more money for public schools — is no longer enough. In February, in an interview with the editorial board of The Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, he called for “a cultural change in education in inner-city communities and low-income communities across the country — not just inner-city, but also rural.” In many low-income communities, Obama said, “there’s this sense that education is somehow a passive activity, and you tip your head over and pour education in somebody’s ear. And that’s not how it works. So we’re going to have to work with parents.”

In the end, the kind of policies that Obama is proposing will require an even broader cultural change — not just in the way poor Americans think about education but also in the way middle-class Americans think about poverty. And that won’t be easy. No matter how persuasive the statistics Heckman is able to muster or how impressive the results that Canada is able to achieve, many Americans will continue to simply blame parents or teachers for the underperformance of poor kids. Obama’s challenge — if he decides to take it on — will be to convince voters that society as a whole has a crucial role to play in the lives of disadvantaged children, not just in the classroom but outside schools as well.

Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine. His book, “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” will be published next week.

School Accountability vs Hospital Accountability

I have made comparisons before. I have even equated teachers and doctors before. Here is a definitive comparison having to do with risk adjustment and accountability for hospitals. As a comparison to how we rate schools, look how hospitals are rated:

And it's quite eye-opening to compare the language used by state and federal governments used to explain their accountability systems with the rhetoric we hear in education. Consider this statement from the Department of Health and Human Services to explain the rationale behind risk adjustment:

The characteristics that Medicare patients bring with them when they arrive at a hospital with a heart attack or heart failure are not under the control of the hospital. However, some patient characteristics may make death more likely (increase the ‘risk’ of death), no matter where the patient is treated or how good the care is. … Therefore, when mortality rates are calculated for each hospital for a 12-month period, they are adjusted based on the unique mix of patients that hospital treated.

If you replace the word "hospital" with "school" above, you can imagine the reception this statement would receive in the educational accountability debate. Soft bigotry of low expectations, and you probably kill baby seals for fun, too.

Lessons for No Child Left Behind from "No Cardiac Surgery Patient Left Behind"

New AYP numbers are out, folks. In California, only 48% of schools made AYP, and only 34% of middle schools did so. In Missouri, only about 40% of schools made AYP. Pick almost any state, and you'll see that there are soaring numbers of schools designated as "in need of improvement." With numbers like these, it's worth considering whether NCLB's measurement apparatus is accurately identifying "failing schools."

One way to get leverage on this question is to consider how other fields approach the issue of accountability. Doctor and hospital accountability for cardiac surgery - also the topic of a NYT commentary today - is instructive in this regard. Borrowing heavily from previous work, let me outline how state governments have approached doctor and hospital accountability in medicine. In subsequent posts this week, I'll write about the outcomes of medical accountability systems, as well as some of their unintended consequences.

Medicine makes use of what is known as “risk adjustment” to evaluate hospitals’ performance. Since the early 1990s, states have rated hospitals performing cardiac surgery in annual report cards. The idea is essentially the same as using test scores to evaluate schools’ performance. But rather than reporting hospitals’ raw mortality rates, states “risk adjust” these numbers to take patient severity into account. The idea is that hospitals caring for sicker patients should not be penalized because their patients were sicker to begin with.

In practice, what risk adjustment means is that mortality is predicted as a function of dozens of patient characteristics. These include a laundry list of medical conditions out of the hospital’s control that could affect a patient’s outcomes: the patient’s other health conditions, demographic factors, lifestyle choices (such as smoking), and disease severity. This prediction equation yields an “expected mortality rate”: the mortality rate that would be expected given the mix of patients treated at the hospital.

While the statistical methods vary from state to state, the crux of risk adjustment is a comparison of expected and observed mortality rates. In hospitals where the observed mortality rate exceeds the expected rate, patients fared worse than they should have. These “adjusted mortality rates” are then used to make apples-to-apples comparisons of hospital performance.

Accountability systems in medicine go even further to reduce the chance that a good hospital is unfairly labeled. Hospitals vary widely in size, for example, and in small hospitals a few aberrant cases can significantly distort the mortality rate. So, in addition to the adjusted mortality rate, confidence intervals are reported to illustrate the uncertainty that stems from these differences in size. Only when these confidence intervals are taken into account are performance comparisons made between hospitals.

Contrast this approach with that used by the New York City Department of Education's progress reports, where "point estimates" are used to array schools on an A-F continuum with no regard for measurement error. Readers know well that your friendly neighborhood "statistical nut" has no beef with the use of sophisticated statistical methods to compare schools. But I would just ask that we have some humility about what these methods can and cannot do. (Sidenote: The only winners when we ignore these issues are educational researchers, who can then write regression discontinuity papers using these data. Thanks for the publications, Joel and Mike!)

And it's quite eye-opening to compare the language used by state and federal governments used to explain their accountability systems with the rhetoric we hear in education. Consider this statement from the Department of Health and Human Services to explain the rationale behind risk adjustment:

The characteristics that Medicare patients bring with them when they arrive at a hospital with a heart attack or heart failure are not under the control of the hospital. However, some patient characteristics may make death more likely (increase the ‘risk’ of death), no matter where the patient is treated or how good the care is. … Therefore, when mortality rates are calculated for each hospital for a 12-month period, they are adjusted based on the unique mix of patients that hospital treated.

If you replace the word "hospital" with "school" above, you can imagine the reception this statement would receive in the educational accountability debate. Soft bigotry of low expectations, and you probably kill baby seals for fun, too.

Readers, why is the educational debate so different? Full disclosure: I will shamelessly appropriate your thoughts in my dissertation, which attempts to answer this question, and also establish the effects of each of these systems on race, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities in educational and health outcomes.

Joe Biden Told Bush "You're Stupid" To His Face (and George said thanks!)

The New York Times Magazine has an old piece (2004) that sheds some good light on Biden. Here is the good stuff:

''This is why he [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''


Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

A Post Of A Comment From TNR By WilliamYard

The New Republic has 2 worthy posters (well, one is a commenter):

Why Palin Scares Me

Before I get to that, let me explain what I'm not scared of, which is that Palin has somehow altered the demographics of the race. I have a hard time believing that female Hillary supporters, or Rust Belt men, are suddenly racing to support McCain because of Palin. For one thing, vice presidential nominees almost never attract demographic groups that the nominee can't attract on his own. People vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. More importantly, if that historical pattern somehow broke down this year, it would probably hurt the GOP ticket more than it would help. People may love Sarah Palin, but they don't think she's ready to be president.

The reason Palin scares me has more to do with mechanics than demographics: Palin is such a sensation, and draws such large crowds, that anything she says--particularly attacks on Obama--immediately become part of the campaign conversation. On the other hand, both because she has a knack for delivering barbs with a smile, and because voters don't quite see her as presidential material, McCain suffers less blowback than he would if a more traditional running mate were saying the same things. Simply put, Palin has a much bigger megaphone than traditional running mates, but gets held to a lower standard.

That's a huge problem for the Obama campaign. Among other things, it really complicates the question of how to respond. You'd normally want to ignore your opponent's running mate in these situations, but it's hard to because of her reach. And when you do respond--say, when Obama points out that she's been making stuff up--there's very little impact, because no one's conditioning their support for McCain on Palin. Call her the phantom menace.

Obama's best hope is that Palin's novelty wears off soon, at which point we can go back to ignoring running mates the way we've been ignoring Joe Biden the last week or so. I'm honestly not sure what he does in the meantime.

--Noam Scheiber

In response to this post above,

williamyard said:

Palin doesn't scare me; rather, she confirms what I believe about democracies.

Democracies are doomed to self-destruct because the people who run them (the electorate) eventually find themselves, collectively, on the defensive. When that happens, they'll hire (i.e. vote for) the person who best ignore the rising waters while promising to order the Titanic's band to keep playing. Voters do not want to know what is really going on. That's the scary part. Otherwise the messenger gets killed.

Thus we have a nation (the United States of America) that is shipping over $1.5 billion a day in oil money alone overseas, mostly to people who loathe us and our way of life. To give one example: we enrich Venezuela, which now gives five times what the United States does in foreign aid to Latin America, with plenty of anti-American propaganda to go along with the aid. In other words, we are paying people to tell other people we're assholes. Just like we fund the madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere, like we recently paid for the Cossacks to plunder Georgia.

We will not stop doing this, no matter what any candidate says. We can't, because we lack the will.

We live on a planet whose biosphere we are seriously fucking with. We will not stop doing this, either. We don't want to. It's not in our character to do so. Any candidate who will tell us, straight up, what we have to do to fix things (i.e. sacrifice) will get slaughtered at the polls.

Health care? Entitlements? Balanced budget? Hahahahaha, oh, y'all crack me up!

Nice piece in Bloomberg the other day about the fact that our taxes will be going up, big time, over the next decade or so, regardless of who's elected. And yet both Obama and McCain are promising tax cuts. Give me a fucking break.

Like any great nation in steep decline, we seek those who will sing us their lullabies--hush little babies don't you cry, Sarah's gonna sing you a lullabye. Why the hell should Palin tell us the truth about anything? We can't handle the truth, like the man said.

Barack Obama has got to realize he won't win the Lying Game or the Blaming Game. He has to go on the offensive by attacking the one group he's been afraid to attack before: the people whose votes he wants. He needs to say, straight up, "Get what, folks? We're fucked. It's either gonna be bad or it's gonna be worse. With me it's gonna be bad, and here's how: I'm gonna raise your taxes and you'll get little in return. You're gonna continue to shoot up millions of barrels of oil before I can get you into detox. Iran, Russia, Venezuela et al. are gonna yank your chains and there's not a God damned thing you or me or anybody else can do about it. In fact, the only thing I'll promise you under an Obama Administration is that a hell of a lot of America's families will get sober, truly sober, for the first time since the late 1800s when we started getting high on cheap energy."

"Any questions? Okay, line up in alpha order, drop your pants, bend over and wait for the body cavity search. And shut the fuck up."

Palin, Freddie and Fannie

Sarah Palin thinks Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are taxpayer funded. Her quote:

Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers."

They are not taxpayer funded. That's what they were intended to be back in the day, but now they are for profit companies that we now own because they WERE NOT publicly funded!

Olbermann & Matthews: Fuck Ups?

The story is that Olbermann and Matthews will not be doing political anchoring anymore because they snipe and are too liberal.

Okay. They do snipe. Too much sniping around lately indeed, with shovels and finger-jabber mocking and off-air (oops! not!) stoopid gaffes. But too liberal?

I mean, yeah, they are pretty liberal, Scarborough, Matthews, Todd. Oh, and Olbermann can get pretty lefty now and again. Maybe Maddow will be a bit lefty too. But after all these years of FOX, can't we have one place where the truth can be told without fear?

When Olbermann got sanctimonious about the 911 video shown at the Republican convention, HE WAS RIGHT! Yeah, he was a bit much. But he lost friends, and felt wrong saying nothing of the Republican's horrible video. He was right to call it out, his over-the-top special comments are right on, and he ought to be anchoring everything, if not for the truth, then for the humor.

Olbermann and Matthews make a crazy, spontaneous, intelligent (sometimes) team, and they are fun to watch. They also provide a rather benign--too benign--retort to FOX.

MSNBC has bowed to ratings and image. Fuck journalism, right? Who needs it?

Sullivan Gushes Over Palin's Religiosity

Andrew Sullivan, erstwhile raging right-winger, has this to say about Sarah Palin's decision to keep her (?) Down Syndrome baby:

In thinking about this astonishing week, and what's to come, I want to go on record again as saying that the decision to bring up a Down Syndrome child is one of the most noble, beautiful and admirable decisions any person can make. That Sarah Palin is doing that says a huge amount about her. The love obviously being shown toward tiny Trig is also about as profound an advertisement for genuine, pro-life Christianity as you can have. It means that, in this respect, Palin has walked the walk of the pro-life movement - in ways that many others have not. In my view, and I mean this as passionately as I mean my criticisms of her public record, this really is God's work.

Seriously? It's God's work? It shows love? These two statements seem mutually exclusive to me. Either it is for love, or for Jesus. Of course, if you (like Sullivan and Palin, apparently) believe Jesus is love, then I suppose Andrew makes sense. Walking the walk of the pro-lifers seems to point toward Sullivan's prior take on the baby: that it is Bristol's!

Keeping the Down Syndrome baby is something, depending on why you are keeping it. If you are keeping it because your parents won't let you abort it, that is bad. If you are keeping it so you will get into Heaven, again, that's a bad reason. I have no reason to believe there is another option for the Palins. This is not love, this is blind devotion being spun as love.

C'mon Sully!

Update question: Why is it that atheists, with no moral compass or reason to behave, can't screw their way to population dominance? Rather, it's those God-fearing right-to-lifers who seem to be making all the babies. Maybe if they were to lose their religion, we would have fewer of them!

Palin To Be Interviewed This Week!

AP says Charlie Gibson will be flying to Alaska this week to interview Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate.

Here's hoping Charlie doesn't wimp out. He needs to ask her about:

1. The Bridge to Nowhere
2. Troopergate
3. The Governor's jet
4. Her belief that the bible is the "truth"
5. Why she went to 5 colleges in 6 years
6. What is her favorite shade of pitbull lipstick
7. Why she flew home to Alaska after her water broke
8. Why it is okay for her daughter to make up her own mind about keeping the baby, but not okay for the other American teenagers who find themselves in the same unfortunate position
9. What's with the hair

Palin Is A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing!

Over at Newshoggers they are talking about what I mentioned earlier: that Sarah Palin is no neophyte, and we must be cautious!

The Palin Trap

By Libby

I haven't been blogging much here for a few reasons. One, I'm job hunting. Two, I'm blogging up a storm at The Detroit News on the premise that I'm reaching the most McCain supporters there. Three, I've been arguing for days with libertarians. And four, I've been doing a lot of research on Sarah Palin, trying to figure out the GOP strategy beyond the obvious ploy of keeping her away from the media in any sort of unscripted format in order to avoid a Fred Thompsonesque crash. I've come to the conclusion that we've walked into an incredibly intricate, Rovian trap that is breathtaking in the scope of its long range planning.

The current, carefully built narrative speaks of a hasty and rash pick, plucking a fragile and shallow neophyte, unprepared to battle with the big guns of the Village out of the wilds of Alaska, who nonetheless is showing her mettle and proving her critics wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, she's been in politics for a long time and from her tiny fiefdom in Wasilla to the statehouse in Juneau, she has demonstrated a strong ability to practice the ruthless politics of personal destruction. She forms alliances of convenience and does not hesitate [sic] to stab her allies in the back to further her own goals.

As McCain might say, she's learned her dirty tricks at the feet of some the most corrupt politicians in the USA. She was cozy with the Murkowskis, bowing out in one state Senate race and working to elect his daughter, ultimately being rewarded for her 'team spirit' with a patronage position as head of Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which by the way pays a six figure annual income. Two years later, having gathered her oppo, she quit the commission, charged her enemies, now including Murkowski, with corruption and developed the 'ethical maverick,' corruption buster storyline that ultimately carried her into the governor's office.

Then there's her long association with with the king of corruption, Ted Stevens, including as a founding member of his 527 PAC. She had plenty of national press experience in the long course of Stevens' indictment. Blue NC uncovered a joint press conference she gave with him that appears to have been with local media. But if you watch the whole thing, where they address their ongoing association despite Sarah's public criticism of him, it speaks volumes on how practiced she really is in spinning. She's clearly learned much from him, though you can tell from her body language she doesn't like him a bit. He's just another convenient ally, but he's too big to take down -- yet.

But beyond all that, the GOP has had their eye on her for a very long time. Back in July of 07, Fred Barnes did a gushing profile piece on her, where he was already building the hockey mom meme. The piece reveals, among the endless flattery, that she is no stranger to the politics of personality. Her whole career has been built on it and a key element is avoiding too much exposure to the public and the press.

Her campaign for governor was bumpy. She missed enough campaign appearances to be tagged "No Show Sarah" by her opponents. She was criticized for being vague on issues. But she sold voters on the one product that mattered: herself.

In other words, (forgive me feminist readers for saying this) she traded on her looks and her personality to get what she wanted. She's not so much an achiever, as I've seen posited elsewhere, as she is a master manipulator. In December of 07, Fred Barnes had this to say about her.

"What helps her obviously is that she's a woman, she's attractive, she's a conservative, she has a strong record of integrity, she's a spending-cutter, she's not a tax-raiser, and those things obviously would help," Barnes said. "I'm not sure she's ready to be vice president, yet, however."

Notice the continued building of the current narrative. But, two days ago, Fred had this to say.

Palin shouldn't be shackled by her conservatism. True, she's a committed social conservative strongly opposed to abortion. But the portrait of her as a right-wing zealot painted by the mainstream media isn't accurate. In her short career, Palin has raised taxes, bailed out a failing state-run milk enterprise, and worked to keep federal money flowing to Alaska. She's conservative, but not that conservative. [...]

So how in the world could this 44-year-old woman with no national political experience handle the whole thing with poise and composure and seeming effortlessness? Simple. She's a natural, gifted with the ability to connect with people in a way that few politicians can and to perform under extreme pressure. She has star quality.

It looks to me like the strategy is to paint her as 'true' bi-partisan, willing to embrace Democratic strategies to get the job done, when they finally unveil her to the media. And Leftopia and the media just spent the last week and a half building that narrative for them. Sure smells like a trap from where I sit and we walked right into it.

McCain Hates Cripples!

Back in the day, when McCain would never have been thought to have a chance at running for president because of his hot head and uncontrollable rage, he pushed a woman in a wheelchair, instead of hitting her upside the head!

The Palin Baby Timeline (with wingnut and MSM juxtapositioning)

Politics and Power Blog: vanityfair.com

What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

Eagleton, Ferraro, and Quayle were all interviewed, on national media, within hours of being announced as VP (okay, maybe a day or two). It did not take them, what, 9 days since Palin was announced? And she is supposedly incommunicado for the next couple weeks.

This is not good. The Republicans are using her, hiding her, and touting her as if all we need is their imprimatur. Well, we need PALIN, interviewed, by Maddow (or anyone not on Fox)!

It is unthinkable to me that we may allow this Republican ticket to get away with this end-run around a proper vetting of a Vice Presidential Candidate.

If they get elected, we deserve it.