Month: February 2013

Conservative Myopia

by

Posted by Bob Lord

I recently put up a short post regarding the Boy Scouts anti-gay policy. The post generated quite a few comments, although I admittedly fueled that by continuing to reply to comments, especially those from the right. 

This is obviously anecdotal, and anecdotal evidence always has the risk of being misleading, but the eye opener for me was how differently the vision of commenters on the left was from those on the right. I've noticed this in casual conversations with progressve and conservative friends, But the difference seemed starker when reading the written comments. Those on the left could see clearly that homophobia in America is receding at a rapid pace. Consequently, they saw the Boy Scouts' policy as increasingly out of touch. The commenter on the right, by contrast, was riveted on the present. He seemed to look at the world only through the lens of where we are now. He believed, in his mind of minds, or so it seemed, that because the Boy Scouts' anti-gay policy was upheld in a court decision a decade or so ago, the policy was validated forever, and was very unlikely to change. The idea that as society's attitudes evolved a future court might reconsider and overturn that decision seemed not even to be a possibility.

The New McCarthyism of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Calgary)

by

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Screenshot-9I suppose we are to be grateful that this Canadian-American Tea Party tool from Texas is ineligible to run for president.

During his few short weeks in the U.S. Senate, chickenhawk Ted Cruz (R-Calgary) has been channeling the ghost of Joe McCarthy in over-the-top fashion during the confirmation hearings of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, who is a decorated Vietnam war veteran and advocate for veterans.

Brent Budowski at The Hill lets Joe McCarthy Ted Cruz have it for crossing over the line. Sen. Ted Cruz slanders war hero, embarrasses Texas and violates Armed Services Committee tradition:

The hearings to consider the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel
(R-Neb.) began with two great statesmen endorsing Hagel and ended with a
freshman Republican senator embarrassing his state and the Armed
Services Committee with a performance that illustrates why Republicans
have lost three of the last four national elections and why Texas
Democrats have good odds of a historic revival.

The support for Hagel was offered by former Sens. John Warner (R-Va.)
and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), both onetime Armed Services Committee chairmen.
The cheap shot slander of war hero Hagel was offered by Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas), whose service in the Senate is measured in days, not decades,
and who was properly reprimanded directly by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)
and indirectly by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who vouched for the
intense patriotism of Hagel.

Education shorts

by

by David Safier

Education_shortsA bunch of ed stories are taking up space on my desktop waiting for me to do them justice, which I won't get around to doing, so here's a collection of ed shorts.

  • Texas "copy" charters: Four potential charter schools turned in applications with identical sections in each of them, "even [claiming] parts of another school's public hearing summary as their own." Each of the charter hopefuls signed the applications attesting to their accuracy. I assume they'll give students the same copy latitude on their essays.
  • Great Hearts, small feet: Arizona's Great Hearts charters tried to open a school in Nashville, Tennessee, but the school board nixed it because the school would have been located in an up-scale area, limiting its social and economic diversity (exactly what Great Hearts and BASIS do here in Arizona). Angry conservative state legislators have created a bill saying the state government can grant charters, bypassing local school boards. But the law only applies to Nashville and Memphis, since lots of conservative lawmakers "don’t think it’s such a great idea for the state to big-foot their local school boards."
  • Jeb Bush push for virtual schools, privatization: When Maine's Commissioner of Ed wanted to expand and deregulate virtual schools, he didn't have the staff to write and push the legislation. Who you gonna call? Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education. At a summit (paid for by FEE), the commissioner was told, don't worry, we'll "suggest policies, write laws and gubernatorial decrees, and develop strategies to ensure they were implemented" by Patricia Levesque, head of FEE. Funny thing, though. Levesque is actually a private lobbyist who doesn't take a salary from FEE, which instead pays her firm for its services. (A cache of FEE emails have been made public recently, detailing the Foundation's behind-the-scenes support for vouchers and other privatization measures.)

About that minimum wage increase proposal

by

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In his SOTU Address last night, President Obama said, "let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on earth, no one
who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the
federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour." (The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour).

Now that may sound like a dramatic increase in the minimum wage, but if the policy goal is that "no one
who works full-time should have to live in poverty," that $9.00 an hour will still not achieve this goal.

Dean Baker writes at Firedoglake today, The Minimum Wage and Economic Growth:

The purchasing power of the minimum wage peaked in the late 1960s at
$9.22 an hour in 2012 dollars. That is almost two dollars above the
current level of $7.25 an hour. Most of the efforts to raise the minimum
wage focus on restoring its purchasing power to its late 1960s level,
setting a target of around $10 an hour for 2015 or 2016, when inflation
will have brought this sum closer to its previous peak in 2012 dollars.

We don’t need another election commission, we need legislative action

by

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

When Congress wants to kick the can down the road and do nothing, it forms a commission to talk it to death while the media loses interest. Unfortunately, this is what President Obama proposed to do in his SOTU Address last night with our broken elections system he had promised that "we need to fix that." His choice of chairmen to lead this commission, in particular Ben Ginsburg, is unacceptable.

Ari Berman writes Obama Appoints a Controversial GOP Lawyer to His Voting Commission:

President Obama embraced the cause of voting rights in his State of the
Union speech, which he called “our most fundamental right as citizens,”
and spotlighted 102-year-old Desiline Victor,
a naturalized Haitian immigrant from Miami who waited three hours—and
had to make two trips—to cast a ballot. He also proposed a new voting commission headed by lawyers from the Obama and Romney campaigns.

* * *

Unfortunately, Obama’s solution was less than inspiring. Another
election commission is a pretty tepid response to the magnitude of the
voting problems we face. And Romney campaign lawyer Ben Ginsberg is a puzzling choice to be its co-chair.