September, 2012 archive

I was planning not to mention 9/11. There is little I can say that I haven’t already said, and I have tired of those who use it to boost ratings or website hits or to support some unrelated and commonly noxious position.

But . . . .

Dick Destiny reminds us, not of the legacy of the victims on that date, but of the travesties committed under cover of their names.

In the Guardian, Michael Paarlberg wonders why teachers and their profession have become objects of scorn, certainly in the eyes of wingnuts.

Then, at a certain point, teachers’ unions woke up to find their favorability rating hovering somewhere between al-Qaida’s and herpes. This didn’t happen overnight, but a confluence of state budget crises, urban blight and suburban flight, a well-funded school reform movement and private charter school industry created the need for a scapegoat for bad public schools. Could it be their financing structure, dependent locally on grossly unequal property tax revenues? Or their unaccountable school boards, such as the one appointed by Rahm Emanuel? Might poverty and unemployment not be to blame? The drug economy? Poor parenting?

No, none of the above. It’s teachers and their pesky insistence that they know how best to educate kids simply because they spend most of the day with them.

I think there is another factor at work, the desire of some persons to force teachers to teach fiction. For example.

Read the rest. Then check out Will Bunch’s take.

Addendum, While Cooking Supper:

Freddie deBoer at Balloon Juice:

In this capitalist system of ours, what people make is a statement about how much society values what they do. Honey Boo Boo Child will make more this year than most Chicago teachers, and our friends in the media think they make too much. That’s all you need to know. If you think that people should be willing to teach for less, than shut your mouth and go apply to teach in Chicago yourself.

Follow the link. Now.

Also, what the hell is a Honey Boo Boo?

On second thought, I don’t want to know.

This is why.

President Barack Obama, Republican challenger Mitt Romney and Virginia’s two U.S. Senate candidates, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican George Allen, will spend millions of dollars on ads in an effort to influence voters before the Nov. 6 election. But the candidates aren’t the only combatants in the ad wars being waged in this big election season.

There are groups such as Crossroads GPS, a conservative advocacy operation co-founded by Republican strategist Karl Rove that has produced ads skewering Obama and Kaine. And there are “super PACs” such as the pro-Democrat group Majority PAC that has sponsored ads promoting Kaine and attacking Allen.

Independent political and interest groups have bought $37 million worth of television advertising time in the state’s top four media markets, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. About half of the money has been spent by groups that don’t disclose their donors to the public. And the vast majority of the ads have been negative.

The ads from Karl Rove and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, in particular, go beyond “slanted” to fantasy. That’s just how they roll.

The Booman explains.

Just two steps beyond Fred Flintstone:

Men have gained at women’s expense by controlling them, making them dependent, making them work, ignoring many of their needs, accumulating two or more women as sex or marital partners, coercing them into sex, and even kidnapping them from their villages, in which case they really are over the next hill. Often in the historical and anthropological record, this last tactic has been a byproduct of xenophobia—you attack the enemy, try to kill the men, and take their women for yourselves.

In fact, the whole of human evolution and history can be seen as the playing out of strategies by which men tried to control uteruses.

Read the rest.

Addendum, Later That Morning:

The prosecution rests.

Jimmy Fallon:

H/T Heather for the link.

Via ABLC.

In the Guardian, Michael Cohen compares the two recent political conventions and what they might indicate about the parties. A nugget:

Quite simply, Democrats and Republicans operate in two completely distinct realms, one that is defined by an attachment to reality and one that is increasingly detached from it.

If their three-day convention in Tampa is any indication, Republicans reside in a fantasy world where government plays no role but that of malevolence, where the free market is the salvation to all that ails this nation and where the country is locked in a Manichaean struggle between the forces of freedom and a failed, socialist interloper named Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, Gary Younge wonders whether that bell you hear is finally tolling for the odious Southern strategy:

This could be the final hurrah for what became known as Nixon’s southern strategy in what is shaping up to be the most racially polarised election ever. Black support for the Republican party literally cannot get any lower. A recent Wall Street Journal poll had 0% of African-Americans saying they intend to vote for Romney. At 32%, support among Latinos is higher but still remains pathetically low given what Republicans need to win (40%) and what they have had in the past – in 2004 George W Bush won 44%. As a result, the party of Lincoln is increasingly dependent on just one section of the electorate – white people. To win, Romney needs 61% of the white vote from a white turnout of 74%. That’s a lot. In 2008, John McCain got 55% from the same turnout. “This is the last time anyone will try to do this,” one Republican strategist told the National Journal. And Republican consultant Ana Navarro told the Los Angeles Times: “Where his numbers are right now, we should be pressing the panic button.”

Follow the links. Read them both.