OlsonOnline

The gods send Tammy Bruce to smite me

Well, not literally.  But after writing the bulk of my post "We versus me", I turned on C-Span only to find Tammy Bruce telling me how wrong I am about advocating for the common good.  She informed me, in no uncertain terms, that such ideas are nothing less than a threat to our very freedom.

That's what I get for mentioning Jesus and Catholic vows of poverty and chastity.  Somehow I knew I wouldn't get away with saying THAT!

Right there on C-Span, Tammy Bruce was lavishing advice on a wide-eyed group of Young Americans for Freedom, telling them to pursue their OWN self interest (so much for team play), and that money was a GOOD thing (no vows of poverty for them.)  Well, I did say that the individualists in our society were likely in the ascendance.   

Who's this Tammy Bruce who dares to say such things?  She's a talk show host in Hawaii, but apparently notorious enough to get an invite from the YAF and important enough to attract the cameras of C-Span. 

She claims to be a Democrat, a feminist, and a lesbian, but she writes columns urging Dems to vote for Bush, attacking illegal aliens, and gushing over Ronald Reagan.  In the writing of these columns she says things like:

"I voted for President Bush because having a Pacifist Internationalist in the White House will only embolden those who salivate at the sight of our blood.

And:

"Having a man in the White House who stands for nothing will only excite Islamic Fascists who revel in torture and the cutting off of heads."

About illegal aliens, she had this to say:

"...the dirty little secret is the fact that illegal aliens are not only destroying our infrastructure by stealing valuable services such as health care and schooling, they're also committing horrific crimes throughout our great nation."

That doesn't sound like a Democrat to me, even a Reagan Democrat.  It sounds like, well, Ann Coulter, who is neither a feminist nor a Democrat.  She's simply crazy.

Tammy Bruce has written some books, which I haven't (obviously) read.  And if they contain no more substance than her columns, I'm apparently not missing anything. 

Perhaps I'm making too much of this Tammy Bruce.  But it is slightly eerie and unsettling that as soon as I write that as Americans we should play team ball and not for just for ourselves, that we're all in this together, there's Tammy Bruce on TV schooling a bunch of future right wingers in the virtue of going it alone and the hell with everybody else.

I mean, there are more serious right wing thinkers out there.

We versus me

That's what it all comes down to in politics, religion, sports, isn't it?  Are you playing for yourself?  Or for the team? 

In sports I've found a new hero, John Goncalves of North Portland who coached his Junior Baseball team to the 9- 10 year-old state championship.  Quite a feat for this real life version of the Bad News Bears, some of whom could barely throw or catch a baseball before the season began.  Perhaps this is a harbinger of the revival of Roosevelt High baseball. 

It ranks right up there with Roosevelt's runner-up finish in the Class 5A basketball championship last March.  That team was coached  by my son's former JV coach at Cleveland, Robert Key.  Key is a good coach and a good person.  He's a team man all the way, in the best sense of the word.

As I said, that's what life as we live it comes down to, in an ethical and moral sense.  You're either a team person or you're in it for yourself.  Take for example the simmering and divisive issue of school choice.  Two of my recent posts have elicited a record (for this site) number of comments on the effect of choice and school transfers on lower class, racially diverse neighborhood schools.

Steve Rawley on his blog provides evidence that the district transfer policy tends to exacerbate school racial segregation.  Earlier studies have also shown that transfers leave already poor schools with an even greater percentage of poor students, regardless of race.  So in effect, parents who choose "better" schools for their children are arguably doing harm to the children of other parents who, for whatever reason, "choose" to stay behind in their neighborhood schools.

In a comment to my post on charter high schools, Rawley points out that, in the scramble to do well by their own children, people tend to "forget about the common good."  I agree.  In fact, the political divide in this country falls squarely between those who believe we should provide for the common welfare and those who believe in individual responsibility.  The "individualists" are currently in the ascendance, and perhaps always have been, which is why we have no European style universal health care and why the schools are under increasing pressure to privatize.

Religious ascetics, Catholic monastics, for example, take vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity for good reason --to serve the greater good.  The last vow, celibacy, enables the devotee to avoid the trap of particular, or exclusive, love*, say for a wife or a child or brother.  That frees him to embrace a greater, more universal love for all people regardless of family, tribe, clan, or ethnic connection. 

Am I recommending that we all become monks and forsake our families?  Hardly. But the ethics --the morality-- of providing for the common welfare should not be ignored.  Even the most irreligious and agnostic among  us should be forced to answer the question asked of Jesus, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

My answer to that, in the Jesus sense of brotherhood, is --yes, I am.

* (love, not lust)

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

What's that you say Mrs. Robinson?  You have no heroes left?  Well, don't feel so all alone, Mrs R.  I'm beginning to feel your pain. 

My favorite football player all time before he murdered his wife and her lover with a knife (shades of Tom Dooley) was O.J. Simpson.  Who knew that O.J. at heart was simply a murderous thug from the slums of Hunter's Point in San Francisco, Joltin' Joe's home town. 

More recently I've admired the  remarkable athleticism of Michael Vick.  I don't follow pro football closely at all, but if the Falcons were on, I'd tune in.  Who knew that he had a fondness for the suffering of dogs in vicious fights to the death?   Is he guilty as charged?  Who cares?  I'll never watch him play again. 

Jim Plunkett, Stanford Heisman Trophy winner, still stands tall.  That's a consolation.

Then there's Barry Bonds, godson of my all time favorite baseball player, poised to break  Hank Aaron's home run record.  He's tainted with steroids allegedly, so Hank Aaron refuses to attend any of the games where he could hit the record breaker, number 756.  Oh well.  It would have been Willie Mays' record anyway if he hadn't played his entire career (almost) in the Polo Grounds and frigid Candlestick Park, which is pretty close to where O.J. grew up.

But for me the unkindest cut of all is the doping scandal that has diminished one of the greatest sporting events of the year, Le Tour de France.  I'm a cyclist and a closet Frankophile, so  I was devastated by the loss of Alexander Vinokourov to blood doping charges.  The loss of the race leader, Michael Rasmussen, a day later was the final straw, a dagger to the heart.  It was almost enough to convince me that Le Tour was no longer worth watching.  Almost.

Let me say this about the race announcers whom I generally think highly of.  They did badly by Rasmussen.  He must be guilty of doping, they all agreed, despite having passed 17 drug tests.   The evidence?  He rode too well. 

Excuse me?  Armstrong rode well in seven straight tours, never showing signs of weakness (except for one case of dehydration.)  Greg LeMonde, among others, accused the great Lance of drug use.  But nothing bad was ever said of him by the race announcers.  Same for Miguel Indurain, the five time champion  from Spain. 

Here's the lesson, Mrs. Robinson.  Our heroes, in sports and elsewhere, are human.  It should surprise no one that many have feet of clay.  Or hearts of stone.

Clinton (Bill) embraces Iraq war

Stories like this are why I read blogs as well as newspapers.  Blogs --a select few anyway, most are crap-- fill in the gaping voids in news coverage by the MSM --the mainstream media.  (of course I also read novels and watch C-Span and the Mariners and le Tour de France.  I'm retired and convalescing.  I have the time.)

The post by Jonathan Schwarz is also a history lesson and political speculation.  It turns out that Bosnia and Iraq aren't as similar as Clinton would have us believe.  As for political motive, Clinton's speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival is clearly an exercise in CHA --covering Hillary's ass on her refusal to apologize for her vote to authorize the Iraq War.  As Kucinich said in the debate the other night, Democrats weren't elected to promote their version of the war.  And he's right, as ususal. 

Here's another blog story.  Do you ever wonder what Elliot Abrams of Iran-Contra infamy did in the wilderness years before he signed on with the  W. Bush Administration?  Well, Fred Clark, the one and only slacktivist, does.  He tells the story in his expose of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which you've probably never heard of.  Here's the bit about Abrams:

"The most egregious such welfare hiring by the center -- and the point at which its name became nothing more than a bitter, hypocritical joke -- was when it hired Elliott Abrams as its president in 1996. Abrams spent the next six years in this rehab assignment, apparently hoping that having the word "ethics" in his job title would somehow erase the fact of his involvement in one of the most unethical, illegal and reckless foreign policy fiascoes in U.S. history: the Iran-Contra affair."

Another history lesson, impeccably written as always by Mr. Clark. 

Bumbling charter high school boots unruly students

A careful reading of today's Oregonian profile of the Leadership and Entrepreneurial Public Charter High School tells you all you really need to know about charter schools, beyond the  fact that the school's originators didn't know what they were getting into (which is almost always the case with charter schools.)

First, charter schools aren't obligated, like real public schools, to deal with students with "persistent behavior problems":

" 'They weren't letting anybody who was putting a big downer on our school stay there for long,'  Nath [an LEP student] says."

Now, wouldn't it be nice, for teachers anyway,  if all public schools could just "dismiss"  unruly students?   

The second thing is that charters are small --really small-- compared to other public schools.  So when Rashika Nath fled the chaos at LEP for Grant and its 1800 students, she lasted all of two weeks:

" 'The teachers didn't care if I was getting caught up or not,' Nath says. 'I kept trying to talk to them, but basically, you were on your own. At (the charter school), they'd help you for hours after school to finish a project.' "

Rashika Nath, by the way, apparently lives in the Jefferson attendance area.  Why she chose Grant for her two week respite over Jeff --low enrollment, small class sizes--  isn't addressed in the O's article.

I'm the first of the baby boomers.  My high school (Cleveland) was larger then than any district high school is now, but it had fairly reasonable class sizes.  I don't remember any classes (other than band) larger than 25 students.  Funding didn't seem to be a problem back in the 60's.  And there were so many electives to choose from.  My older brother actually took Russian.  Me? German.  And, as I've mentioned before in a long ago post, I played trumpet (which I learned to play in elementary school) in the band, stage band, pep band, and orchestra.  My senior year, the school staged Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, still my all time favorite musical.

But back to charters, and their cousins, the various niche schools and so-called 'academies' which are supposedly the answer to all the problems which plague traditional public schools.  Most offer mighty slim pickings in terms of music, art, elective offerings in general.  That's because they're specialized and highly focused and, yes, small.  And unless they are fortunate enough to have wealthy patrons --parents-- who can raise huge sums of money through massive fundraisers, they are also underfunded.

Instead of talking about ridding schools of unnecessary red tape and bureaucratic obstacles --that's the appeal of the charter school movement-- we should be talking about adequate funding (along with good leadership) for all our schools.  And all our students.

Even the unruly ones.

"Gentrifying" neighborhoods, but not their schools

The remarkable thing about Portland, unlike most American cities, is the gradual reintegration of inner city neighborhoods by middle class whites who apparently prefer the city to the suburbs.   Relatively low housing prices in North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods have proven especially attractive.

The schools in those neighborhoods, unfortunately, haven't fared as well.  Too many of the new residents in North/Northeast have availed themselves of Portland's array of school options to avoid sending their kids to the local neighborhood school.   Why?  I've called it "white flight", meaning that concerns about class and race, not academics, drive the search for a "better" school. 

Now parents are trying a tactic other than transferring to achieve their goals.  So says Steve Brand in a remarkable op-ed piece in today's Oregonian.   He claims that parents in the Beaumont -Wilshire attendance area are requesting boundary changes that would keep their children from attending the low income, largely African-American Vernon Elementary in favor of the nearly all white Alameda Elementary. 

Moreover, Alameda feeds into Grant High School.  Vernon is part of the Jefferson cluster.  And who wants to send their darlings to Jeff?

Funny thing is, Vernon's test scores (if you buy into test scores as a measure of school performance) are pretty much the same as Alameda's.  The aversion to Vernon, then, is all about its student demographics.  To be blunt, Vernon is too poor and too racially diverse.

Brand says that a more productive use of the boundary change petitioners energy would be to enroll their children in their assigned neighborhood school -Vernon, volunteer in its  classrooms, attend PTA meetings, and join the school site council. 

Well, I agree.  The question is, will the school board and district administrators see it that way?  Or will they panic at the prospect of losing more middle class families to private schools and charters --or the suburbs-- if they don't cave to the demands of 300 petition signers? 

Time will tell.

Short memories and loose ends

Sen. Gordon Smith's politically opportunistic opposition to the Iraq War is frequently contrasted with former Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield's "principled" opposition to war, particularly the Vietnam War.  For example, Steve Novick, the only announced Democratic candidate for Smith's Senate seat, said recently that "Gordon Smith is no Mark Hatfield."

Problem is, Mark Hatfield is no longer Mark Hatfield either.  As I pointed out here and again here, Hatfield supported not only George Bush's re-election in 2004, he also has become an enthusiast for the war in Iraq.  So maybe it's time to forgo any further references to St. Mark's "principled pacifism."
*******************************

Thom Hartmann's featured guest this morning was Bruce Fein, the conservative Constitutional scholar who seriously advocates the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.  Air America doesn't have transcripts, but you can listen to the Fein segment here.  Or you can read about Bush's impeachable transgressions on Fein's own American Freedom Agenda website.
*******************************

I've always been dubious about relying on the kindness of others to fund our public schools, as in accepting corporate donations from Nike or grants from outfits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  I've always preferred the old-fashioned and more straight-forward approach, like using tax money from citizens.  Tax revenue, however, is harder to come by nowadays, largely because corporations (like Nike) shoulder an increasingly smaller share of the overall tax burden.  So we turn of necessity to charity.

But what about that foundation money?  Wacky Mommy has a post up that starts out as a book(s) review but  ends up exposing the Gates Foundation not only as a tax dodge, but as a doer of more "UNgood" than good in Nigeria (polio and measles vaccinations.)  How so?  By investing its billions in companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil, oil behemoths that turn out to be heavy, health-damaging polluters.  Here's the LA Times story to prove it.

There's a lesson to be learned somewhere in that revelation.  Like, maybe, be careful who you take money from.   

Regarding impeachment

Senator Ron Wyden, according to Blue Oregon, is sitting on the fence regarding impeachment.  And Earl Blumenauer, like DeFazio, opposes impeachment on political grounds, claiming it "...would hinder the time and efforts of our slim Democratic majority in congress."

Echoes of the Bill Moyers interview of Bruce Fein and John Nichols ring throughout the comments on the Blue Oregon post.  And they did again this morning on Thom Hartmann's national show.  Hartmann quoted the conservative Fein at length, and gave Nichol's toolbox metaphor of excessive executive powers passed along to the next President the importance it deserves.  Hartmann rightly concludes that impeachment is not about "slapping down" Bush and Cheney for "bad behavior."  It's about "preserving the republic of the United States."

I urge you to read the comments on the Blue Oregon post and even contribute your own.  Himself, who blogs at More Hockey, Less War and comments frequently here, has some particularly astute observations. 

For those of you that argue Bush hasn't broken any laws, Hartmann reminds doubters of Bush's contravention of FISA in conducting his secret wiretapping program. He also brings up Abraham Lincoln's opposition to President Polk's illegal war against Mexico which bears an eerie similarity to the invasion of Iraq.  In this letter to his law partner, Lincoln lays down would could easily be grounds for impeachment:

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,--I see no probability of the British invading us; but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don't.' "

Moyers presents the real case for impeachment

Blue Oregon's most recent post is a tongue-in-cheek demand from Congressman Peter DeFazio for an investigation into  the "travesty" of naming a town in Vermont the real home of The Simpsons, not Springfield, Oregon. 

Cute.  Or at least it would be if Defazio hadn't spoken out in opposition to the impeachment of the man who has committed real "travesties" against the Constitution of the United States --George W. Bush.  DeFazio apparently agrees with Blue Oregon contributor Todd Barnhart that impeachment would jeopardize Democratic chances for winning the Presidency in 2008, which they view as the most effective cure for the crimes of the Bush Administration. 

I wonder if either Defazio or Barnhart watched Bill Moyers Journal last night.  If so, they would have heard conservative Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, and the very liberal author of The Genius of Impeachment, Jon Nichols, both argue eloquently and convincingly for immediate impeachment hearings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.  Waiting for the expiration of their terms in a year and a half, they argue, is not enough to rectify their clear assaults on the Constitution which they swore to defend and uphold as recently as 2004.

In fact, Fein and Nichols  agree that a political resolution of the Constitutional crisis precipitated by the "monarchical" arrogance of Bush-Cheney would further undermine the rule of law and Constitutionally mandated governmental checks and balances.

A simple summary wouldn't do Fein and Nichols justice, so I recommend that you read the entire transcript of the Moyers interview.  Here are a few of the salient points:

FEIN:  "This is something that needs to set a precedent, whoever occupies the White House in 2009. You do not want to have that occupant, whether it's John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or John Edwards to have this authority to go outside the law and say, 'I am the law. I do what I want. No one else's view matters.' "

NICHOLS:  "Let's start to use the 'i' word. Impeach is a useful word. It is a necessary word. The founders in the Constitution made no mention of corporation or political parties or conventions or primaries or caucuses. But they made six separate references to impeachment. They wanted us to know this word, and they wanted us to use it."

FEIN:  "You have-- you have to have a certain depth of conviction about philosophy and what the Constitution means, why those people died. They reached that last full measure of devotion, Cemetery Hill, ... because there was something higher. ... you know the danger of unchecked power 'cause you read history. ... There isn't anybody in the Congress who's able to do that because they don't have that background."

NICHOLS:  "--there may be such people but their first step, their first step must be something that is very hard in these days of extreme partisanship and these days of money and politics and a media that doesn't cover politics very well. Their first step has to be to say, 'I cherish my country more than my party and more than the next election.' "

Nichols uses a toolbox metaphor to suggest what would happen without impeachment. If Bush and Cheney "are not appropriately held to account",  that toolbox of excessive executive power would be handed over to the next president, Democrat or Republican.  And, he reminds us, power once obtained is not easily given up.

Lastly, Fein revisits the Nixon impeachment.  Because Nixon resigned before the impeachment and trial were able to run their course, "Nixon was never compelled to renounce what he'd done":

"And after which he boasted that what the president does it it's legal. He wasn't repentant at all. If we had insisted maybe as a condition of the pardon or otherwise, you need to repent. We are a government of laws, not of men. And it's wrong for anyone to assert unchecked power. That would have had such a pedagogical effect that would have deterred anything in the future."

A mere twenty-five years after Nixon's pardon, George W.Bush was elected president, and we see the same sorts on Constitutional transgressions taking place. 

We have the opportunity to get it right this time.  Let's take advantage of it.

 

Media miss the point on teacher merit pay

I heard Michael Moore say the other day that he blames the media more than Bush for the war in Iraq.  He's got a point.  Without the cheerleading of the NY Times and the Washington Post in the lead-up to the war, we may not have charged, guns blazing, into what has turned out to be a military quagmire every bit as disastrous as Vietnam.

But as bad as the mainstream media is on foreign policy (and health care), it's nothing compared to the ignorance of the press when it comes to educational issues.  Even the best reporters often merely parrot what they've heard somewhere about "failing public schools" and the power of teacher's unions.  Here's a case in point.

Yesterday on MSNBC's Tucker, host Tucker Carlson turned the attention of panelists Eugene Robinson --black and left-leaning--  and Pat Buchanan --wrong on every issue except the war and free trade-- to teacher merit pay.  He asked why the Democratic presidential candidates can't agree with Barack Obama that good teachers ought to be paid more.  Robinson replied that merit pay is "anathema" to the teacher's unions, and then elaborated, as you would expect of a good lefty reporter,

"It‘s the idea that the teachers would be paid differentially based often on circumstances that are not in their control."

By which he meant, I'm sure, test scores.  Good start.  But then Robinson inexplicably executed a complete 180 in the face of Buchanan's onslaught --all good organizations, Microsoft, the NFL (?) pay their best people more blah blah blah.  Instead of merely retorting that schools aren't businesses, Robinson retreated:

"I‘m not arguing with you.  I‘m explaining why the Democrats can‘t, because the teachers unions are an important Democratic constituency. And they do not want to offend.  We‘ll see.  Obama has opened the door."

And then this:

"I‘m apostate on this.  I don‘t think a generation of kids can be written off for the sake of teachers unions or any other unions or for the sake of failing public school systems.  Kids should be able to go to schools where they can be educated.  So, if it‘s a chartered; if it‘s a public school; if it‘s a private school, you know, a voucher; let‘s just educate the kids."

So what we end up with is a liberal media voice supporting vouchers, charters, merit pay, whatever works, on national TV! 

Geez Louise!  Even PPS board member David Wynde doesn't support merit pay.  He told me so.

I've written on many occasions that merit pay is a bad idea.  For those of you who who may be wavering on the issue, here's a post I wrote back in March, 2005, about the special idiocy of test-based merit pay.