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I consider this a Radical Gumbo, with many varied ingredients making more than the sum of its parts. We are no-holds barred, passionate and not overly PC here. Yes, Liberals can have Fangs. Jump in and be part of the cutting edge!
A Rhode Island school board fired all the teachers in a school, in a dispute over working more hours without any more pay, and Obama says, that's just great, while the right wing applauds.
To get a share of the $3.5 billion in what are known as School Improvement Grants, school officials can choose to transform the learning environments in failing schools by extending instructional hours and making other changes, converting them to charter schools, closing them entirely or replacing the principal and at least half the staff.
The Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, initially chose the first option this year, but after a dispute arose with the union over extra pay for adding 25 minutes to the school day, she broke off negotiations. Backed by the local school board, she announced the firings on Feb. 23. Last Monday, Mr. Obama supported the board's action in a speech to a dropout prevention group.
Of course, it's just fine to militarize the schools:
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well....
The battle for America's future is being played out in the schools, charter schools, and Texas-approved textbooks, and the left just doesn't seem to care. For 30 years, the right is pushing the schools ever further right, although they don't plan to send their own kids their-- many have pulled their own kids out- for those that can afford it to expensive private schools, and those that can't, to homeschooling (82% of home-schoolers are Christian right) .
War Criminal Torture Champions roam free, teach Law, and show up as guest/experts on the Sunday Talk Shows, but failing to teach all those brown kids to pass those tests is just ... wrong!
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - President Barack Obama says a Rhode Island school that recently fired all its educators is an example of how there needs to be accountability.
He made the comments Monday in Washington at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He called for "accountability" if a school continually fails its students without improvement.
He said that is what happened at Central Falls High School, where the school district's board of trustees voted last week to fire 93 teachers, administrators and other staff. No more than half could be hired back under federal law.
Obama pointed out that just 7 percent of students at the high school have tested proficient in math.
Right. That'll fix it. Fire them. Just fire them all.
(NOTE: updated to better video quality- not so blurry now, so you can really get a good look at the dead kids!)
This is not a typical post.
Instead of writing a blog post and further destroying my wrists in the process, I thought I'd try something a little different.
Below you'll find a video that I cobbled together from pictures I found online and designs created by my partner. I am not a film director, nor do I desire to be one. It shows.
The song, however, is one that I think many people here will enjoy. It's called "Money Machine", and it was recorded live at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta. The album is entitled Jeff's Last Dance, by Kahler & Mullins. I was at this show. It's just two guys singing, one of whom plays the hell out of the congas. I suppose my affinity for this song results from the fact that I do possess an inner hippie (shhh!). The song is all about corporate greed & US militarism, but it actually manages to not be cheesy. IMO. it happens to rock. I hope you enjoy my amateurish iMovie editing, which was intended to convey visually the sentiments expressed in the lyrics (with a bit of snarkiness). Even if you dislike the editing, I hope you'll enjoy the tune.
From a commenter at reddit, on the subject of Associate Attorney General David Margolis, with Holder's approval, reducing the conclusion of the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility report on Yoo and Bybee's Torture Memos to Bush to say that they showed only "poor judgment":
If Obama's 'Justice Department' had conducted the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, all of the Nazis would have gone free - 'Merely Poor Judgement, the Holocaust was just a policy mistake'!
There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone...
Instead of getting Sunday talk-show gigs, Dick Cheney should be put up against a wall and shot as the war criminal he is - no charges, no trial, just BLAM! If it's good enough for the 'terrorists' it's good enough for evil incarnate; Dick Cheney.
The fact Dick Cheney not only lives but is free to spread his evil is proof God is Dead.
(Gottlieb is ALWAYS fp material! - promoted by Diane G)
The classic Ambrose Bierce short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has a man being hung and miraculously the rope breaks and he escapes and has an adventure only to find in the end the rope didn't break and his escape was a dying dream of desperation. In the end the man hangs from a stiff rope, dead of a broken neck.
(H/t to Stu Piddy.) Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair on Wednesday confirmed that President Obama can and does authorize assassinations of U.S. citizens, if those citizens are overseas. Are we all OK with this? Why no protest from progressive leaders within the Democratic Party? Progressives, leaders, within the Democratic Party? How can anyone still sane and moral in this country not agree with Glenn Greenwald (emphasis added):
Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?
I'd like for you to try a little experiment for me.
It's a very simple experiment, one that doesn't involve stoichiometry, Bunsen burners, p values, test tubes, or access to hydrochloric acid. It'll be fun, I swear.
Ready?
Fantastic! Let's begin.
Step 1: Think of five "liberal" or "progressive" Obama supporters you know. Try to include as many queer and transgender Obama supporters in that list as possible. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of ardent queer and transgender Obama supporters in the wake of the Pope of Hope's hope-inducing HRC speech, not to mention his current--and sudden--almost deafening screeching about his plans to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (which is in no way a cynical effort to shift the national debate away from his "failed" "attempt" at health care reform, nor is it a strategy to prevent "progressives" from starting to notice that over the past year he has fought--with a Democratic super-majority in Congress--to advance a hawkish neo-liberal agenda that is breathtaking in its scope; and no, it has nothing to do with the U.S. military's inability to recruit and retain enough prospective corpses for his ongoing wars of aggression).
Step 2: Call each of the Obamaniacs on your list and read the following statement to them:
"Obama has been President for one year now, during which time the Democrats have had a super-majority in Congress. Candidate Obama presented himself as a harbinger of change: the anti-Bush, if you will. Yet over the past year, Obama has (1) continued and/or strengthened a range of the very Bush administration policies that, as a "liberal/progressive", you once ardently opposed; (2) Enacted (or threatened to champion) paleoconservative policies that, had they been enacted by Bush, would have pissed you off so much that you just might have snapped and thrown down the gauntlet by attending a peaceful protest or a candlelight vigil. Here are just a few examples:
If the new administration is keenly interested in reversing the misfortunes of that region, it has to understand the uniqueness of every country and appreciate the untold harm inflicted on civilians by the US and other militaries. Only dialogue and truly respecting the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Pakistan can begin to stabilise the fractious situation.
U.S. drones killed 123 Pakistani civilians and three al Qaeda in January, the largest death toll ever for a single month. 17 more died today, some low-level militants, most civilians. Apparently the sharp increase in drone attacks is motivated by revenge, for the late December suicide attack that killed seven CIA drone-targeting experts in Afghanistan. All this in the context of the just-released Pentagon budget, which features a 75% increase in funding for drone production and operations.
What a moral low America has reached, to be doing what we are doing to Pakistan's innocent civilians. But the perp country's people and media ignore the crime because, after all, no Americans are dying. Admittedly, we seemingly have no control, so what is the point of protesting? So a quiet but ugly war guided by the lowest of motives, simple revenge, takes over, bullies against bullies, civilians be damned.
LAHORE: Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans.
At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.
How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales, became more public. This sh__ has GOT to end.
Two broad categories here; that which I am labeling as "useful" concerns an design competition open to professional and student teams alike. The purpose:
designers were asked to envision a new legacy of publicly-supported infrastructure, projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities.
MSNBC's Ed Schultz talking at the AM950 Blue State Bash on Saturday night to a crowd of progressive talk radio fans in Minnesota lets go with both barrels at Robert Gibbs, at Barack Obama, at the "people who have infiltrated the Democratic progressive movement", and at the whole delusional idea of bipartisanship.
"I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him," Schultz said. "And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, 'I'm sorry you're swearing at me, but I'm just trying to help you out."
"I'm telling you, you're losing your base," he continued. "Do you understand that you're losing your base? And that the American people don't want public option, the American people want single-payer!?'"
Republican Scott Brown's victory may ironically turn out to be a victory--in certain respects--for the pro-choice movement as well as for the poor and working class. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate have devised dueling health care reform bills that amount to little more than full body massages with happy endings for the health insurance industry and the Conference of Catholic Bishops. With Brown's Senate victory, we may now find ourselves in the perplexing situation of possibly being temporarily saved from the ravages of messianic crony capitalism thanks to misguided, xenophobic teabagger charges of "socialism" and the Republican wing of our one-party system's willingness to undermine at any cost the center-right President's health care agenda--even if that agenda actually benefits their masters in the medical-industrial complex in the short term.
The best health care reform bill our Democratic-controlled House could come up with (a) contained the Stupak amendment; (b) included a "generous" expansion of Medicaid eligibility criteria to include individuals and families with incomes up to 150% of the federal poverty line--a family of 4 with two adults working full-time earning minimum wage would likely not qualify (150% of the federal poverty line for a family of 4 is $22,050); (c) imposed a mandate on the public to purchase health insurance from either a private insurer or the "public option", where the most affordable plans would be those with the highest deductibles and worst coverage; (d) omitted the Kucinich amendment despite popular support for such a provision; (e) punishes the uninsured by imposing a 2.5 % penalty tax on income up to the average cost of an insurance policy.
The Senate's health care reform bill was worse, and it was crafted in the context of a filibuster-proof Democratic supermajority. The Senate version (a) would finance health care "reform" by imposing a 40% tax on high-cost health insurance plans--so fuck all of you blue collar union workers who opted for a lower salary in exchange for better health insurance for your families, you are going to have to foot the bill for these "reforms"; (b) doesn't even pretend to include a public option; (c) includes a less "generous" expansion of Medicaid coverage to individuals and families who earn up to 133% of the poverty level--one is forced to wonder why they even bothered; (d) requires everyone to be covered by private insurers and imposes a $750 per person annual penalty up to $2,250 per family or 2% of taxable income, whichever is greater; (e) would let states opt out of including plans with abortion coverage on the exchanges and require anyone with abortion coverage to write two separate premium checks -- one for the abortion coverage and one for the rest.
In yet another "teachable moment", Obama stated that he preferred the Senate version to the House version because he favored financing these reforms via a tax on so-called Cadillac coverage insurance plans--regardless of an individual's income--to imposing a 5.4% tax on individuals earning more than half a million dollars per year and couples earning more than $1 million per year.
Let that fact sink in for a moment. Allow it to stew for awhile. If you aren't furious, you should re-evaluate your claim of being a "leftist".
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 20, 2010
Filed at 9:44 a.m. ET
MUMBAI, India (AP) -- India's top three outsourcing companies are ramping up hiring and increasing pay as global corporations, mainly from the U.S., send more work offshore to cut costs as they emerge from the downturn.
Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro expanded their global workforces by an average of 5.1 percent last quarter, together adding 16,701 employees, company documents show -- an early sign that the Great Recession may ultimately benefit India as cost-conscious companies outsource more work, just as they did after the dot-com bus....
Heck of a job there, O.
Contrast the US response /stim to France:
Ghosn was summoned to meet Sarkozy after France's second- largest carmaker floated the idea of shifting production of the next Clio compact car to its plant in Bursa, Turkey. The suggestion came after France spent about 600 million euros to boost car sales and provided Renault with 3 billion euros of aid in the face of the worst recession since World War II.
"We haven't invested all this money supporting our carmakers just to see all the factories moved overseas," Sarkozy told lawmakers in the National Assembly Jan. 13. The French state is also Renault's biggest shareholder with a 15 percent stake.
It's a big, bad, nasty dangerous world out there. Full of fanatical killers who hate you because you're free. You got to make sure you're safe. That's the most important thing, right?
Everything else ain't worth sh*t without you're safe and secure, right?
Right. No question.
I heard on the news today that they're closer now. In my town.
Sh*t. Now what? I've got it! I'll put up a steel fence around the house. To be safe and secure.
Officially, the unemployment rate is now 10.0%. But, realistically . . .
. . . the true unemployment rate --which I define (as I think most would) as ALL people who want work but just can't find it -- probably lies somewhere between 11.6% and 13.2%. If you consider individuals working part-time for economic reasons as unemployed, you get an unemployment rate north of 17.4%.
Counting the people who have given up looking for work and the part-time workers who would rather be working full-time, the so-called underemployment rate edged up to 17.3 percent in December.
Gripped by uncertainty over the economic recovery, employers chopped 85,000 jobs last month, and difficulty finding work helped chase more than half a million people out of the job market.
The unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent. It did not creep higher only because so many people stopped looking for work and are technically not counted as unemployed. . . .
[Essay removed at Diane's request. However, for the record, when somebody says something that is not true, and we respond with calmly stated facts, I do not view that as "calling out" or "abusive" -- I view that as civilized discussion.]
-- Just Call Me Jay
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