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The good news, potentially, was the release last week of new national standards for math and reading by a panel of experts convened by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. I say potentially because the standards have to be accepted and adopted by individual states, two of which (Texas and Alaska) have already refused to participate in the process.

The bad news is that to get to this point, it has taken us exactly ten years since the last effort, initiated by President George H Bush (America 2000)  continued under Bill Clinton (Goals 2000) and killed by George W Bush, who replaced it with the disastrous No Child Left Behind.  Where his predecessors’ efforts focused, in part, on encouraging all states to adopt rigorous educational standards while providing federally funded but independent reviews and assessments of the results, Junior’s NCLB has had the opposite effect. Its perverse incentives actually encouraged states to dumb-down their standards, and the tests that stem from them, so as to show illusory improvements in performance. Conversely, states that maintained high standards, such as Massachusetts, have been punished by NCLB.

The pace of reform in this country since ‘A Nation At Risk’ was released during the Reagan years makes a snail look like a sprinter.  It really is enough to make you want to scream in frustration. 

The issue of standards is a case in point. How can anybody actually think that it makes sense to have fifty different sets of standards to determine the appropriate reading level of our ninth-graders, or what our sixth-graders should know in math? Yet the move to national standards has been bitterly resisted, primarily by Republicans in congress who have clung to the manifestly erroneous belief that all educational decisions were best left to individual states and local school districts.  If states were competent to handle it alone, we wouldn’t be lagging most advanced countries in the educational performance of our children 25 years after ‘Nation at Risk’ sounded the warning bell.

It’s heartening that a bipartisan consensus among the nation’s governors has prompted this very significant and long overdue step which could have enormous future benefits for our children. Rigorous national standards will, hopefully, lead to common if not identical curriculum and tests, and a measure of coherence may yet emerge from the patchwork quilt that is the American K-12 education system. 

 That’s definitely worth a loud cheer.

The New York Daily News reported last week that former President George W. Bush said:

Sure, we waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former President George W. Bush reportedly said on Tuesday.

And he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush and his military advisors adhered to the morally misguided “intelligence at any cost” school of thinking.  Bush was too stubborn and dumb to realize that the costs of obtaining intelligence through torture was too high. 

There’s a very well researched article in Military Review by Major Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, that examines the Bush way and the more dominant American tradition of the “shining city on the hill” way. 

The article includes a summary of email exchanges between military officers who approved of torture and those who opposed it.  The ethical side was represented by Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote:

We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought—that is part of the very nature of war.  We also inflict casualties, generally many more than we take.  That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.   We have NEVER considered our enemies justified in doing such things to us.  Casualties are part of war—if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war.  Period.  BOTTOM LINE: We are American Soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.

Pryer writes that  those who say that the use of torture saved lives (as Bush stated last week) are wrong:

Tragically, interrogators at Abu Ghraib, in the 3ACR, and at FOB Iron Horse had HUMINT leaders who felt morally justified in sanctioning enhanced interrogation techniques, and this belief led their interrogators to use techniques that slipped into truly serious abuse at Abu Ghraib and in the 3ACR.  Furthermore, due to personalities unique to Abu Ghraib, abuse descended further still into the sadistic, sexualized violence that shamed our Nation and nearly led to our defeat in Iraq.  In retrospect, it is ironic that, while these leaders had meant to save lives via enhanced interrogation techniques, their actions helped to destabilize Iraq.  This destabilization, in turn, created thousands more casualties than these leaders could ever have prevented through tactical methods.

Andrew Sullivan was on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday, and he observed that most former presidents advocate human rights, but this one advocates torture, proving he is truly a monster.

In this video game based on George W. Bush’s yet-to-be-released book, the 43rd president is your avatar so, unlike most video games, this one does not start at level one.  You begin at Level 13.  From there you encounter people and situations requiring you to make decisions that will drop you down to the lower echelons.  The savviest players will be able to plunge into sub-zero levels previously explored and understood only by George W. Bush himself.

You’ll start your journey as a young George born to an aristocratic political family in New Haven, Connecticut.  See how quickly you can get through Houston’s public elementary schools, then Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, and move on to Yale and Harvard.  Find out what decisions you must make to become a prep-school cheerleader and a face-busting rugger.  Who must you befriend to lead you on a path to alcoholism and drug abuse?  What are the lessons you learned in business school that you must unlearn later in order to bankrupt your first oil company?  What baseball managers and what player trades must you approve as a managing partner of the Texas Rangers to make them a lower-tier baseball team that turns you a $15,000,000 profit when you sell your interest?

Learn how to avoid Vietnam and your obligations to the Texas Air National Guard that you joined to keep you out of the jungle.

Who do you choose as a mentor when embarking on a political career?  Do you choose the honest agent or the evil, squinty-eyed, rotund man who promises you votes, votes and more votes by whatever means necessary? 

Should you agonize over moral standards like hard work, honesty, compassion and fairness or move glibly ahead in pursuit of large campaign donations from evil greedheads? 

What must you do as governor of Texas to make your state the most polluted in the nation? 

Once president, how quickly must you act to reward your “base” with federal budget busting tax cuts that plunge the country into decades of debt?

Feel the vacuum forming in your head as you read The Pet Goat to elementary school children just as the country is attacked by al Qaeda on September 11th.

Observe the minion from Hell disguised as the human known as Dick Cheney emerge from a deep dark hole in the Badlands of Wyoming.   Feel your mind erode as he rips the remaining shreds of decency from your receding brain matter and convinces you that the Geneva Conventions are for pussies and that due process and the right to privacy are reserved for idealistic fools.

It is at this point where you must make decisions that common men are incapable of comprehending.  How do you convince people in spite of the evidence and what you know to be true that invading a secular country in the Middle East that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks is the right thing to do?

Yes it’s a game, and if you can meld minds with George W. Bush in your quest to descend to the lowest levels of human existence ever imagined, you to can know what it’s like to be the WORST PRESIDENT EVER!

From 11Alive.com in Atlanta, Georgia:

HENRY COUNTY, GA — Out of jail and doing community service, Clifford “T.I.” Harris made a trip to Woodland Middle School in Henry County on March 5, an unwanted surprise for one family.

Tom Myers was surprised when his daughter came home and told him that T.I. had been the speaker at the assembly on anti bullying. Myers told 11Alive News that had he known T.I. was speaking, he would not have allowed his daughter to attend. So he wrote an e-mail to Woodland’s principal, Dr. Terry Oatts.

“The first e-mail I sent to him was to ask that from now on we have some kind of parental input whether or not a speaker is appropriate. If I don’t want my child to be there, just give me the right to opt them out,” Myers said.

Myers also wrote in the e-mail, “How about next time, let him mow the grass or pick up the trash around the school grounds? If the kids see that they might understand that what he did was wrong.”

In e-mails obtained by 11Alive News, Oatts replied in his e-mail, “I thought about asking a guy who snorted cocaine and got arrested for DUI when he was 30 to come and speak to our kids, but President George W. Bush was not available.”

John McWhorter dissects Palin’s style of speech in this article for The New Republic.

Part of why Palin speaks the way she does is that she has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete.

Thus after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Congressman Charles Eaton of New Jersey said:

Mr. Speaker, yesterday against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every land.

He meant this straight. He had it composed the night before and when he stood up to talk, he read, and it was prose that almost sounds like he wanted to set it to music. Sixty-one years later, Senator Sam Brownback gave his thoughts on the wisdom of invading Iraq, and my, how times had changed:

And if we don’t go at Iraq, that our effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation. We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: We are serious about terrorism, we’re serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil.

…

Brownback was perfectly comprehensible, and intonation does a lot of what indirect quotation and parataxis do on the page. Yet it wasn’t a polished performance — but if he had given one, he’d look in our times as peculiar as, well, Robert Byrd does. Byrd is old enough to have minted in the days when making a speech meant clearing your throat and reading a prepared statement bedecked with ten-dollar words, and it qualifies today as an eccentricity. The practice will die with him.

…

What truly distinguishes Palin’s speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance — Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended “there,” as in “We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there…” But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to “forge that peace.” That peace? You mean that peace way over there — as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She’s far, far away from that peace.

All of us use there and that in this way in casual speech — it’s a way of placing topics as separate from us on a kind of abstract “desktop” that the conversation encompasses. “The people in accounting down there think they can just ….” But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about what’s going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there.

This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.

You see this in one of my favorites, her take on Hillary Clinton’s complaint about sexism in media coverage:

When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, ‘Man, that doesn’t do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country.

…

I don’t think Palin’s phraseology is actively attractive to her fans.  Rather, what is remarkable is that this way of speaking doesn’t prevent someone, today, from public influence.  Candidates bite the dust for being untelegenic, dour, philanderers, strident, or looking silly posing in a tank.  But having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered a mark against one as a figure of political authority.

Actually, among my circle of friends, when we hear a political figure who has ”trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together” we reach for our big fat El-Marko pens.   Bush’s prepared speeches were pretty bad, and his extemporaneous speaking was atrocious.  Palin’s speaking ability is even worse. 

Why would anyone with even just a cursory understanding of the complexities involved in governing the largest economic entity and most powerful nation in the world want someone lacking any semblance of forethought running our country?

RUFKM?

Do I miss a president who had no regard for the Constitution?

Do I miss a president who gave away trillions in tax cuts to the super rich?

Do I miss a president who started two wars and didn’t finish one of them?

Do I miss a president who authorized torture?

Do I miss a president who lied about wiretapping U.S. Citizens without warrants?

Do I miss a president who spoke English like it was his second language?

Do I miss a president who appointed two Supreme Court Justices that built the majority opinion that says corporations are people?

Do I miss “heh heh heh…?” (well, a little maybe.)

Do I miss a president with a callous disregard for those less fortunate than himself and “his base?”

Do I miss a man with the morals of a laughing hyena?

No!!!  I don’t miss him one little bit.  In fact, I miss a migraine headache more than I miss him. 

Minnesota Public Radio story here and here.

Washington Post story here.

President Obama must have read Paul Krugman’s January 18th column in which he wrote about how “Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter,” which led into:

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

Obama got the message:

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit, it’s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves. It’s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve, and one that’s been subject to a lot of political posturing. So let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight.

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

Now — just stating the facts. Now, if we had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit. But we took office amid a crisis. And our efforts to prevent a second depression have added another $1 trillion to our national debt. That, too, is a fact.

That’s a fact he needs to wield as a hammer far more often than he did during his first year in office.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a way bigger deal than the outcome of the Massachusetts election. 

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

…

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, an author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, called the ruling “a terrible mistake.”

“Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns,” said Mr. Feingold, a Democrat.

Giving corporations the right to fund election campaigns is an absurdity.  This kind of ruling is what I feared most following Bush’s Supreme Court appointments. 
 
Corporations have been around far longer than our country, and our founding fathers were very wary of extending privileges to economic entities.  They were way more concerned with living, breathing human beings.  The Bill of Rights was written for the benefit of people, not companies – and there lies the ultimate irony of this ruling. 
 
The driving force behind getting this case to the Supreme Court came from The Right, and they are the faction that, when it comes to appointing Supreme Court Justices, scream for “strict constructionists.”  Nowhere in the Constitution are there any rights granted to corporations.  Why?  Because corporations can amass huge quantities of money and they can live forever.  Our founders did not approve of giving such entities a voice in electing representatives of the people, because they knew that corporate contributors would fund campaigns of candidates that, once elected, would satisfy the wants and needs of business, not people.
 
Goldman Sachs is huge and they reported $13.4 billion in profits today.  They should not be allowed to fund the campaigns of congressmen because their interests and the interests of your average American are vastly different.  As a result of today’s ruling, one huge corporation like Goldman Sachs will be able to blast the grassroots campaigns of reform candidates clean out of the water. 
 
The Plutocracy just got way bigger today.  Say goodbye to the Republic, because it’s a thing of the past.  It’s a sad day in the history of our country.  A travesty.

In the wake of the Christmas Day effort by Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to destroy an in-flight airliner over Detroit, Republicans are hammering home with renewed vigour the myth that Democrats are weak on national security.  Yet by any reasonable measure the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of congressional Republicans, has proved to be a national security as well as a foreign policy calamity.  And whilst it’s true that many Democrats voted for the Iraq War resolution, there can be no real doubt that the quest to invade Iraq was driven by the Republican Bush administration and its right-wing supporters in the GOP. 

Even setting aside the human and monetary cost, the adverse consequences to America have been severe indeed.  Perhaps the most serious is the fact that our failure to implement and sustain long term security and reconstruction in Afghanistan after driving out the Taliban has enabled the latter to rejuvenate and return as a more formidable enemy; one that we must now commit almost 100,000 troops to combat just when we were getting out from under the crushing Iraq commitment.  And the refusal of General Tommy Franks and then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to commit American forces such as rangers to the effort to trap and destroy the remnants of al-Qaida in the White Mountains at Tora Bora, which stands as the best opportunity we’ve had to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, must rank as both a colossal error of judgment and failure of nerve that ensured the terrorist organization’s survival.

Not only did our focus on Iraq divert needed military expertise and resources away from Afghanistan but, as we’ve learned to our cost recently, it also resulted in neglect of countries such as Yemen where branches of al-Qaida have taken root and flourished. 

If invading Iraq had truly been part of the war against al-Qaida rather than a fantasy and hoax peddled subliminally to the American people by the Bush administration and its right-wing cheer leaders at Fox News, maybe it could be forgiven.  But Saddam Hussein was hated by Islamic extremists and he, in turn, hunted them down as ruthlessly as anyone else who potentially threatened his hold on power.  Our invasion of Iraq may have unseated a tyrant but it also replaced an Iraq that represented a bulwark against al-Qaida with one in which a branch of the latter was able to establish and operate with devastating consequences, not least to the Iraqi people.

The Bush administration made other bone-headed decisions in the name of national security: Guantanamo and the secret CIA  prisons in Eastern Europe, torture, electronic domestic surveillance without court supervision to name but a few.  Along with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq they represent a darker America, one that is less than what we aspire to be.

Al-Qaida cannot destroy America but they can inspire a reaction that might change us into something we would hardly recognize.  Dick Cheney and the Republicans started us down that path in the panicked aftermath of 9/11 when what we showed was less strength than fear and weakness. President Obama and most Democrats recognize that in our quest to stay safe from attack we must not surrender what it is that makes us proud to be Americans in the first place.  That would indeed give the victory to al-Qaida.

Via Paul Krugman’s blog, via Frank Rich’s column, I came upon a study of income gaps titled Striking it Richer.  The report includes several graphs of income disparity, including this one that shows what percentage of total income the top o.o1% took from 1913 through 2007:

The top .01% (top 14,988 US families, making at least $11.5m in 2007) share increased from 5.46% in 2006 to 6.04% in 2007 leaving well behind the 1928 peak of 5.04 percent (Figure 3). This shows that 2007 was an incredibly good year for the super rich.

2007 wasn’t too bad for the rest of us either, but not near as good as it was for our overlords.

Everything changed in 2008, but the data is not available yet, so no graphs.  The report does make a prediction though.

The economic landscape has obviously changed dramatically since 2007 which marks the peak of Bush expansion. We know from National Account statistics that real incomes per family will fall in 2008 and 2009. Evidence from past recessions suggests that, in general, the top percentile income share falls during recessions, as business profits, realized capital gains, and stock option exercises fall faster than average income. Therefore, the most likely outcome is that income concentration will fall in 2008 and 2009. 

Based on the US historical record, falls in income concentration due to recessions are temporary unless drastic policy changes, such as financial regulation or significantly more progressive taxation, are implemented and prevent income concentration from bouncing back. Such policy changes took place after the Great Depression during the New Deal and permanently reduced income concentration till the 1970s (Figures 2, 3).

Last week the House passed a financial regulation bill that not one Republican supported.  Apparently everything is okay with the Repugnicans.  They think we don’t need to do anything prevent another financial catastrophe that will require the bottom 90% of us to bail out the billionaires who gamble with our money and lose.

Krugman explains:

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

Come on Democrats!  That includes you Blue Dogs in the Senate.  Start acting like you won something last November.  We voted for change, and we want it.