Right Wing Smear Machine Takes Down Van Jones

Demagoguery is defined as  ”…a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public — typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes”. Today, with the resignation of Van Jones, we learned again why Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the rest of the demagogues of Fox News and talk radio are the real leaders of the Republican Party.

As George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, the most dangerous form of demagoguery occurs when the personal ambitions of politicians combine with the commercial interests of those who control the media:

But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms.

The prime demagogue in the Van Jones melodrama was Glenn Beck. Few Americans had heard of Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality, until Beck began his smear campaign. Think Progress explains why Beck chose Jones to attack:

On July 23rd, Glenn Beck began his crusade against Van Jones, calling him “a communist-anarchist radical.” He went on to rail against Jones approximately 20 times on Fox News in the past couple of months. Last Friday, Beck cited “former black nationalist, avowed communist Van Jones” as an example of “the true danger” of Obama’s “czars.” Prior to joining the administration, Jones had co-founded Color of Change, an organization that successfully convinced 57 advertisers to drop Beck’s program in just a matter of weeks after Beck called Obama a “racist.”

In recent days, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) called on Jones to resign, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) called for a congressional hearing to investigate him.

That’s correct. Beck went after Jones because Color of Change had helped convince advertisers to drop Beck’s program after Beck called the president a racist. Personal ambition, meet commercial interests.

Of course, the sad story of the attacks on Van Jones is not just about Glenn Beck and his advertisers. The Right saw Jones for what he is, an “uppity” progressive unwilling to compromise his principles. Unfortunately, the Obama administration refused to defend Jones, effectively sealing his fate. For more background of the Jones story, go here and here.

I wonder if Obama will realize that it is impossible to compromise with demagogues before it is too late.

Vallivue Principal warns teachers against showing Obama’s speech

I have heard from a number of teachers that the Principal of Vallivue High School, Richard Brulotte, sent an e-mail to all faculty telling them that they will not be allowed to show President Obama’s national address to students on the importance of taking responsibility for their success in school.

Even though previous Presidents, including Reagan and Bush, have delivered similar addresses, the right wing crazies see this as an attempt by President Obama to indoctrinate innocent high school students into his Godless, Communist ideology.

I am sure Brulotte got a few phone calls from patrons spewing the same sort of pathetic drivel spread by one Werner Strausser in the comments to this article in the Idaho Press Tribune.

According to Strausser, the President’s address must be “kept out of our classrooms” in order to

…prevent the preaching of Marxist-Communist-Socialist religions in general and in particular to prevent the seed of the “Obama Youth (Hitler Jugend)”from taking root.

Sociologists who study schooling make a distinction between the taught curriculum and the “hidden curriculum.”  For students, the “lessons” learned from the hidden curriculum are generally the more powerful. By folding to the pressure of a small minority of vocal patrons and refusing to allow students the opportunity to hear and discuss the President’s address, Brulotte makes a mockery of the values of free speech, critical thinking and civil discourse that are undoubtedly central themes in his  “taught” social studies curriculum. Instead, students are subjected to the hypocrisy of “do as I say, not as I do.”

Every time I hear another example of an administrator making a decision like Brulotte’s, I am reminded of an old, but still relevant, cartoon by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons.

Jerry Brown vs Arne Duncan

If you have been following the legislative circus in California, you might know that the Govinator has called a “special session” to consider enacting a package of education redesign measures—including scrapping a law blocking the state from linking student and teacher data—in hopes of guaranteeing that the state would be eligible for Ed Dept “Race to the Top” funds.

According to the draft criteria for the Race to the Top, states that have a data “firewall” on the books would be automatically disqualified from getting a portion of the $4.35 billion fund.

California Att. Gen Jerry Brown was asked to comment on the legality of the draft criteria and sent a response to Arne Duncan that is reproduced below.  In a few short paragraphs, Brown explains exactly what is wrong with the initiatives that have come from the Department of Education since the first implementation of NCLB under Bush and Spelling up to and including Duncan’s current agenda.

Re: Race to the Top Fund [Docket ID ED-2009-OESE-0006]

In view of the hundreds of comments that are being submitted, I am confining my own to just a few general observations.

1. The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a “one size fit all” approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

2. Inherent in the command and control philosophy of your draft regulations is a belief that everyone agrees on what should be taught–to whom and when–and how the lowest performing schools can best be turned around. Yet, there are so many unknowns about what produces educational success that a little humility would be in order. A better way would be to state what educational outcomes children should reach and then permit state and local flexibility to figure out how to reach the desired outcomes. The current draft regulations conflate what must be done with entirely too much specification about how to do it.

3. Curriculum choices are not just technical and “evidence based” issues, but go to the heart of deeply held beliefs and understandings of what children should learn. California’s current curriculum standards have received high national rankings and there is no evidence that they need a radical overhaul.

4. Your draft also specifies very specific data elements that need to be included without sufficient justification for why all these data elements are essential or how they should be utilized.

5. You assume we know how to “turn around all the struggling low performing schools,” when the real answers may lie outside of school. As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged.

6. Most current state wide tests rely too much on closed end multiple choice answers and do not contain enough written and open ended responses that require students to synthesize, analyze and solve multi-dimensional problems and construct their own answers.

7. There are huge technical and conceptual problems that remain on how to assess the specific impact of individual teachers and principals on the scores of students on annual state tests. Test score increases and decreases can be caused by many factors in a specific year, and it is beyond the current state of the art to sort out what is the unique and independent influence of teachers and principals. Performance pay schemes for teachers based primarily on annual test scores in other states reveal more about how not to structure performance pay rather than show what are viable ways to restructure teacher compensation. Compensation should to be just one element of a broader approach to improving teacher effectiveness that includes initial recruitment and preparation to retention and professional development.

Having $4.3 billion to spend on education in this time of draconian cuts is a godsend. We in California look forward to joining with you in promoting a real love of learning and outstanding achievement in all our public schools.

.

Earth Day

One of America’s greatest philosophers, Walt Kelly, got it right when he had Pogo identify the “enemy.”  We should be more optimistic this Earth Day than at any time in the past as the dark days of Global warming denial are coming to an end. But, all of us need to take action. One simple action we can take this today is to call the Capital switchboard and tell our Congressmen to support the MarkeyWaxman Cimate Bill.

The Problem with the Skool of Hard Knoxs

The right wing Republican members of the Idaho Legislature take pride in their lack of formal education.

Ask a good portion of the Idaho Legislature about their alma mater, and they’ll give you a stock answer that could resemble a school fight song.

“I went to the school of hard knocks,” said Sen. Shirley McKague, R-Meridian, one of Idaho’s legislators without a college diploma.

She isn’t alone.

Nearly 20 percent of Idaho lawmakers don’t hold four-year college degrees, according to interviews with legislators and the Idaho Blue Book, a 400-page guide to government published by the state.

Here are a few courses that were not available to the graduates of the University of Hard Knox: Natural Science 101, thus, they know nothing about Evolution; Physical Science 101, thus, they don’t understand climate change; Economics 101, thus, they don’t understand Kenynesean economics; History 101, thus, they fail to learn from the past; American Government 101, thus, they fail to understand the role govenment should play in a participatory democracy.

The unfortunate irony is that when times are good, we can survive the incompetence of the Hard Knox grads. But when times are really hard, the Hard Knoxers have no answers. They fall back on the “take a bite out of govenment” and “no tax increases ever” ideology that makes for good rhetoric to the folks back home, but is disastrous in a crisis that demands real leadership.

For Sleeping, Jumping or Shooting?

The story is that vaudevillian Eddie Cantor was at a recording session on what turned out to be Black Tuesday, 29 October 1929. In between takes he ad-libbed a monologue that had the musicians and recording engineers cracking up. The head engineer suggested he record his remarks. Not long after, he delivered the monologue on the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre in Times Square. The audience loved the black humor and the monologue became a staple of his act throughout the Depression.

Well, folks,
They got me in the market
just as they got everybody else.
In fact, they’re not calling it the Stock Market any longer.
It’s called the Stuck Market.
Everyone is stuck.
Well, except my uncle.
He got a good break.
He died in September.
Poor fellow had diabetes at 45.
That’s nothing.
I had Chrysler at 110.

Now-a-days, when a man walks into a hotel,
And requests a room on the 19th floor,
The clerk asks him:
“For sleeping, or jumping?”

During the Great Depression, the suicide rate in American rose to 17 per 100,000 citizens. According to NAMI ( National Alliance on Mental Illness) the rate of suicide in the United States in 1995 (the year for which we have the most recent national death statistics)  was 11.1 per 100,000.  It would not be surprising to see that the current suicide rate is higher.

What is more ominous is the current spate of shootings that seem to be related to the current economic crisis. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor notes the disturbing pattern and asks if the economy is a factor.

Details continue to emerge from Binghamton, New York, where a gunman identified as Jiverly Voong, 41, barricaded the back door of the American Civic Association Friday morning, then went in the front door shooting at everyone in the room, killing 13 and then shooting himself.

Early reports say the gunman was deeply upset over being laid off and for being disrespected for not speaking English well.

That event, as well as three policemen wounded in a Pittsburgh shooting after responding to a domestic disturbance call – friends said that gunman was also upset about his recent firing – fit a larger pattern of mass killings which have seemed to proliferate since America’s economic downturn, experts say. Forty-four people have died in a string of five such incidents in the past month, from Oakland, California to Alabama to North Carolina.

In the Great Depression, we killed ourselves. Today, we kill innocents before we kill ourselves. Why this disturbing trend? Experts have some ideas, but resist easy answers.

Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

And in the midst of this downturn, one study released Monday in Florida finds a link between domestic violence and economic tragedies like job loss and foreclosures. The Sunshine State saw an almost 40 percent jump in demand for domestic-violence centers, an increase related to the state of the economy, the study says. George Sheldon, secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, calls the situation “the worst I’ve seen in years,” according to the Associated Press.

The potential link between murder-suicides and the economy is an area of study for the Violence Policy Center in Washington. “We’ve been looking at this issue of whether there are more murder-suicides … [and] a pattern is starting to develop that may point in that direction,” says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the center. “Between the Texas Tower shootings in the 1960s until the McDonald’s massacre in 1984, it was extremely rare to see these types of mass shootings. Now we’re seeing them much more often, and they do seem to happen in spurts.

Here is the latest from TBogg

April Fools

Ah.. the confederacy of dunces extend their foolishness into April.  I am not sure how Betsy Russell can stomach watching this charade everyday, but she reports on this and  this.

Unfortunately, some of the foolishness will have painful consequences.  If you are anywhere near Boise High School this evening at 6:00 pm, stop by to protest the cuts to school funding.

It will be interesting to see who shows up from the Legislature. I am guessing it will be like a school open house. As any teacher will tell you, the parents who should show up usually don’t.

What Brown Has Done For You

You have probably been following the latest outrage on Bill O’Reilly’s part. If not, the Keith Olbermann segment below should get you caught up.

All just the usual wacko give and take between Olbermann and OReilly until you read this.

Since the launch of our Stop Supporting The O’Reilly Harassment Machine campaign on Wednesday afternoon, more than 10,000 of you have taken action. Thank you for all your support! In just two days, here are all the successes we’ve had:

– UPS announced it will no longer advertise on The Factor

Wow! The Think Progress write-in campaign actually resulted in UPS pulling their advertisements from O’Reilly’s show, The Factor.”

This restores my faith in grassroots blog campaigns.  UPS will certainly have my business from now on.

Dim Bulb Award

Dusting off the award

Here we are  deep into the legislative session and I have resisted handing out the “Dim Bulb”  award to anyone this year. This hesitancy was not because there hasn’t been the usual amount of stupidity on display, because, of course there has been.

But you must remember to win the award run-of-the-mill dimness won’t do. Winners must not only display jaw dropping ignorance, but they must also have such a complete lack the self-awareness they have no sense of shame, and, in fact, revel in their dimness.

We shoulda never went there

Today the House passed (51-17) a non-binding memorial sponsored by Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, to declare Idaho’s sovereignty from the federal government and ask the feds to “cease and desist” from violating that sovereignty.

According to Betsy Russell at Eye on Idaho,

Harwood read from the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and told the House, “With them words, the states of this United States created the federal government.” It was meant to be an agent for the states, he said, not the other way around. Harwood decried federal actions that push states to comply under threat of losing federal funds. “They’ve moved us in a direction that we can’t afford to go … and we shoulda never went there,” he said. And he told the House that he believes the United States is not a democracy and not even just a republic, but a “confederacy,” adding, “To be accurate, we’re a confederated republic.”

Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene, a retired high school government teacher, gently pointed out that we are not a confederacy and that we fought a civil war to clarify that point. Not that it did much good.

Harwood is one of those Idaho Republican legislators who graduated from the “School of Hard Knocks.” There is no point in confusing him with facts

Dim Leading the Dim

Two more of the dimmest of the dim followed Harwood’s lead.

Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, spoke out in favor of a return to the gold standard, and said he supported the memorial because of its statements against the federal reserve system. Rep. Lenore Barrett, R-Challis, also spoke in favor of the measure.

UPDATE: Harwood digs the hole deeper. Again from Betsy Russell,

Political scientists said Harwood’s dead wrong, and a longtime Kootenai County human rights activist said the use of the term “confederacy” is offensive. Harwood said, “If I’m wrong, then I guess I’m wrong. But my understanding of it all was that we were a confederated republic.” He said he thought President Lincoln changed things so that states couldn’t secede, but that the nation remained a confederacy. “Lots of things that have happened in the history of our country never get told in college courses.”

That’s right, Dick, stay away from them college courses with their lies and all.

Bloated Floaters and Snouted Sappers

Starting today and running through the end of the month, the Boise Art Musuem features a wonderful exhibit by Idaho artist, Garth Claassen.  The exhibit consists of 85 drawings and is entitled “Bloated Floaters, Snouted Sappers and the Defense of the Empire.”  The title alone ought to be enough to induce you to see the exhibit. Read more about it here.

Who are the Bloated Floaters and Snouted Sappers?  Here is how Garth describes them:

They are people who’ve gotten themselves into some kind of predicament. People who are trying to control this and control that, working so very hard at something that may not have a real point and probably isn’t a good idea.

You look at history, these series of attempts to keep these people penned in or keep those people out, to monitor this or construct that. It’s all done with great energy. There’s a lot of action and dust and everything, and nothing happens.

Garth is a friend. In the fifteen years that I have known him, I have never heard him raise his voice or say a negative thing about anyone. I am beginning to think I understand his secret. He has the artist’s ability to see the absurdities of life and laugh.

Ever since reading Garth’s description of those who attempt  ”to keep these people penned in or those people penned out, to monitor this or construct that” I have noticed a drop in my stress level. Rather that rant and fume about the wingnuts on the right Bloated Floaters and Snouted Sappers, I have made a game out of deciding who should go in each category.

So, here is my take on the difference between the two groups. A Bloated Floater is someone who is full of gas, floating untethered above the fray, spouting “truths” down at the rest of us.  Here is an obvious candidate from the media. Here , here and here are a few more. Notice how addictive this can be. I have barely scratched the surface and haven’t even included politicians, national or local.

Equally odious are the Snouted Sappers. These are people who slither under the radar, poking their snouts into everyone’s business and sapping the life out of their victims with their self-righteousness. Obviously, any religious fundamentalist with a public forum makes this list. We could start here and work our way down to the local level, but there is no point in me providing more examples. The real fun is creating your own list. Give it a try. It is a real stress reducer and worth a few laughs.

I believe, in the final analysis, Garth is right about the Bloated Floaters and Snouted Sappers, “There’s a lot of action and dust and everything, and nothing happens.”