Why Are Things As They Are?

The Little Red Schoolhouse:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7vNuPPKofk

Above, Student Fightback in Puerto Rico. Even these battles do not need to be lost. Watch, and think, how might we win this? Surely, capitalism will not be Transformed by Teaching alone.

Emeritus Prof Morrow vs Quisling Protege Susan Neuman:

One of the first NCLB bombshells landed in our neck of the woods, on a visit to her old stomping grounds, the Pacific campus and local schools. In a much-cited news conference at Clairmont Elementary School, Neuman, said, “The new federal No Child Left Behind Act, if implemented the right way, will put an end to creative and experimental teaching methods in the nation’s classrooms. It will stifle, and hopefully it will kill (them).” (Emphasis added.) Neuman added, “Our children are not laboratory rats.” (The Record, Oct. 25, 2002)…As one of her doctoral dissertation committee members, I’d like to ask her, “Susan, don’t you owe all hardworking, creative, tireless teachers an apology?” www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110205/A_OPINION03/102050308/-1/A_OPINION

Detroit Federation of Teachers membership meeting votes to overturn election but divisions in the ranks still run deep: in the continuing saga of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, a general membership meeting on Thursday, February 10, 2011 appeared to overturn the ruling of the DFT election committee which had certified the run-off election victory of incumbent DFT president Keith Johnson in a tight race over radical challenger Steve Conn. That vote was 1974 to 1933. Later, the count was corrected to reflect a 40-vote difference. www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2001&section=Article

Bloomberg Blasts New Yorkers for Protest about Closings:

Mayor Bloomberg lashed out Friday at the crowds who booed and chanted during this week’s votes to close 22 schools, calling their disruptions “embarrassing” to the country.

“This is not democracy, letting people yell and scream,” Mayor Bloomberg said on the John Gambling radio show. “It’s embarrassing for New York City, New York State, for America.”

The outraged parents, students and teachers union officials, though, said the mayor’s comments were the real embarrassment.  http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/02/04/2011-02-04_mayor_bloomberg_lashes_out_at_embarrassing_protests_of_public_school_closures.html

More  LATimes Lies About School Worker Study: (in fact, the study concluded almost exactly not what they LATimes says here) A study to be released Monday confirms the broad conclusions of a Times’ analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District while raising concerns about the precision of the ratings.

Two education researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder obtained the same seven years of data that The Times used in its analysis of teacher effectiveness, the basis for a series of stories and a database released in August giving rankings of about 6,000 elementary teachers, identified by name. The Times classified teachers into five equal groups, ranging from “least effective” to “most effective.”

After re-analyzing the data using a somewhat different method, the Colorado researchers reached a similar general conclusion: Elementary school teachers vary widely in their ability to raise student scores on standardized tests, and that variation can be reliably estimated.  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teacher-study-20110207,0,2144294.story

The MEAP, the Most Ridiculous of All State Tests (written by morons, Graded by Standard and Poors, Evaluated for years by the Treasury Department, useful only to Real Estate Agents, Gets Harder and Faster: The State Board of Education today approved a proposal to toughen standards for passing state standardized tests.

The proposal raises “cut off” scores for being graded as proficient on Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests taken by elementary, middle and high school students, and the Michigan Merit Exam taken by those in 11th grade. State education officials say they goal is to better prepare students for college. The “cut scores” are the cutoff point where students demonstrate basic knowledge in subjects. www.detnews.com/article/20110208/SCHOOLS/102080413/1026/schools/State-board-votes-to-raise-MEAP-‘cut-off’-scores Link to Ten Years of Calls to Boycott the Meap (schmeap):
www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://richgibson.com/applrdbk.gif&imgrefurl=http://richgibson.com/meap.html&usg=__NzNngwrgt5GcuYHN-rKzudyCiV8=&h=196&w=140&sz=3&hl=en&start=4&zoom=0&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=cKDhLaoYzBz2iM:&tbnh=104&tbnw=74&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dboycott%2Bthe%2Bmeap%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dopera%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26channel%3Dsuggest%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=GWxTTavSEZKesQPL5MmCBA

Teachers Colleges to Hang on their Own Scaffold (deservedly?)

Grades are the currency of education — teachers give them to students, administrators grade teachers and states often assign grades to schools.  Now U.S. News & World Report is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy, marching to the principal’s office to complain the system is unfair.

Numerous education school deans have protested that the ratings program’s methodology is flawed since the program was announced last month. In a letter last week, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools — including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan State and Vanderbilt — denounced an “implied coercion” if they do not cooperate with the ratings.www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/education/09teachers.html?ref=education

More Detroit “public” School Fraud: Mass Grade Changes Teachers who allege illegal grade-fixing in Detroit Public Schools say the pressure to give passing grades to struggling students is ever-present.

High failure rates reflect badly on a school, but kids who are passed along wind up losing in the end: DPS has a 59% graduation rate and some of the nation’s lowest test scores — partly because of the practice of promoting failing students to the next grade, teachers and experts say.  http://www.freep.com/article/20110210/NEWS05/102100562/0/NEWS06/Illegal-grade-fixing-allegations-swirl-DPS?odyssey=mod_sectionstories

Glass 1/4 Full? 28% of Teachers Teach Evolution! e teachers consistently follow National Research Council guidelines encouraging them to present students with evidence of evolution. Thirteen percent “explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.”

These are among the findings of Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer after examining data from a representative survey of 926 high school biology teachers. Writing in the Jan. 28 issue of Science magazine, they report that most science teachers — 60 percent — cheat controversy by such stratagems as telling students it does not matter if they “believe” in evolution, so long as they understand enough to pass a test. Or they teach evolution on a par with creationism and encourage students to make up their own minds. www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/02/04/107949/commentary-the-dumbing-down-of.html

The International War of the Rich on the Poor:

Yes, We Remember Tiananmen Square and we Know that In Egypt, as everywhere, the Core Issue of Our Time is the Potential of Mass, Organized, Class Conscious Activism in the Military and Out, vs the Rise of Fascism as a Popular, Multi-tentacled, Movement:

Yippee! Hooray! Hot Double Damn! Shazam! Gulp.  Military Rule!

Meet the New Boss. Below, Field Marshall Hussein greets US Brass

But the Old Mole, Class Struggle, is at Work, Everywhere.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCcKBc4gwAQ

What Else Happened in Egypt? The Working Class Signed On: Strikes and protests by Egyptian labor are neither novel nor surprising. According to Egypt’s Center of Economic and Labor Studies, there were 478 labor protests in 2009 alone, in which 126,000 workers were laid off, tragically resulting in 58 suicides. It was no surprise that this fervent pro-democracy call ignited a spark throughout Egypt.

Tens of thousands of workers across Egypt responded to this appeal and flocked to the streets. As a strike by thousands of workers in the state defense industries was declared in Cairo, these workers managed to block the streets leading to the factories where no one crossed the picket lines.

Other state-owned factories and government agencies throughout Cairo have declared strikes and took to the streets as well. For example, government employees at the Ministry of Environment, the medical Heart Institute, and sanitation workers were on strike. Similarly, public transport workers went on strike while holding a protest calling for Mubarak’s ouster. Postal workers organized their protests in shifts.

In the cities of Asyut and Sohag in Upper Egypt, thousands of workers in the pharmaceutical factories, state electrical power and gas service companies, as well as university employees declared a strike and marched across their respective towns.

Furthermore, in the Nile delta cities of Kafr el-Sheikh, el-Mahalla al-Kobra, Dumyat, and Damanhour, major industries such as textile, food processing, and furniture, have completely halted all production. The strikes then spread along the canal and coastal towns of Suez, Ismailiyyah and Port Said. Approximately 6,000 workers at five government companies managed by the Suez Canal Authority continue to be on strike, threatening to spread widely, impacting the passage of international shipping through the canal.
acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2742842-Update-from-Egypt-Friday-is-quot-Defiance-Day.-quot

War Forever, Confirmed Again (thanks, Hamid, dude):

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has confirmed US plans to set up permanent bases in his country, enabling its troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 deadline.

The decision comes after negotiations between Karzai and US officials and senators on a range of strategic issues, including the establishment of permanent military bases in Afghanistan, DPA reported.

“Yes they want this (permanent bases) and we have been negotiating with them,” Karzai said at a press conference in his presidential palace on Tuesday.

“We believe that a long-term relationship with the United States is in the interest of Afghanistan,” Karzai added, expressing hope for the establishment of a relationship that brings security and economic prosperity to Afghanistan and an end to violence. www.presstv.ir/detail/164268.html

Fascist Wisner, One Head of the 2 Headed Snake, Backs Mubarak:

At the same Munich meeting on Saturday, Frank G. Wisner, the former ambassador President Obama sent to Cairo to negotiate with Mr. Mubarak, appeared to take an even softer line on the existing government, saying that the United States should not rush to push Mr. Mubarak out the door. He said Mr. Mubarak had a critical role to play through the end of his presidential term in September.

“You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward, and the president must stay in office in order to steer those changes through,” Mr. Wisner said.

The administration later said Mr. Wisner’s comments did not reflect official policy. “The views he expressed today are his own. He did not coordinate his comments with the U.S. government,” said Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman.www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06egypt.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

The Real Truth About who Frank Wisner Jr. Is: …Following the war, Wisner (Sr.)set up “rat-lines,” running frequently through the Vatican, allowing wanted Nazi war criminals to escape prosecution: Operation Paperclip. Thousands of them wound up in the United States where, not surprisingly, they were ineffective against the USSR (Paperclip was riddled with Soviet spies), but pretty effective in continuing their fascist activities in the U.S. and around the world.
We know the German Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood (probably influencing or having membership from about 30 percent of Egypt’s population now) had close ties, the Brotherhood circulating Nazi tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Since the 1970s, a number of books have used declassified
American materials — long before Wikileaks — to describe the relationship between the American CIA and the Nazis.
The senior Wisner, obsessed with the USSR, also set up Operation Mockingbird, a blowback scam organized to, illegally, influence US media. In the fifties, Wisner claimed he ran significant sectors of the media, including writers and editors for the New York Times and the Washington Post. www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1968&section=Article

What Unifies the Muslim Bros, Zionists, and Catholic Zealots ?

Fascism which doesn’t care if the cat is white, brown, or black, as long as it catches profits and protects capital: www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/What_Is_Fascism_Gibson.html

Muslim Brotherhood, Wisner, and Mubarek Hugathon: The shift suggested that Mubarak and his allies may have succeeded in defusing the fiercest of cries from opponents who had insisted that the president resign as a precondition for any talks. It followed the clearest signals yet from the Obama administration that its call for a quick transition in Egypt did not include a demand that Mubarak step aside before elections this fall.

Among those who joined for the first time in talks with Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s newly appointed vice president, were leaders from the banned Muslim Brotherhood movement, along with a loose coalition of political parties, intellectuals and protest organizers. Suleiman said the government would agree to consider broad changes, including constitutional amendments and a possible end to Egypt’s three-decade-old state of emergency.

While the meeting itself was a concession to opposition groups, the setting underscored who remains in charge. The parties gathered around a formal, oval-shaped table as a portrait of Mubarak gazed down on them.  The shift suggested that Mubarak and his allies may have succeeded in defusing the fiercest of cries from opponents who had insisted that the president resign as a precondition for any talks. It followed the clearest signals yet from the Obama administration that its call for a quick transition in Egypt did not include a demand that Mubarak step aside before elections this fall.

While the meeting itself was a concession to opposition groups, the setting underscored who remains in charge. The parties gathered around a formal, oval-shaped table as a portrait of Mubarak gazed down on them. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/06/AR2011020602307.html?hpid=topnews

Hillbillary’s  Boy Who Did’t Make the Final Cut:

Mr Suleiman, above, who is widely tipped to take over from Hosni Mubarak as president, was named as Israel’s preferred candidate for the job after discussions with American officials in 2008.As a key figure working for Middle East peace, he once suggested that Israeli troops would be “welcome” to invade Egypt to stop weapons being smuggled to Hamas terrorists in neighbouring Gaza.

The details, which emerged in secret files obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to The Daily Telegraph, come after Mr Suleiman began talks with opposition groups on the future for Egypt’s government.

On Saturday, Mr Suleiman won the backing of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to lead the “transition” to democracy after two weeks of

Mubarek’s Billions: Embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could have amassed huge sums of money as much as 70 billion dollars during the decades that he has been a top official.

According to analyses by Middle East experts, Mubarak has taken much of the gains overseas and deposited much of his wealth in secret bank accounts in British and Swiss banks, The Guardian reported on Friday.

Observers say the Mubaraks have also invested in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.

Thirty years in presidential office has helped Mubarak have access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits.

Amaney Jamal, a political science professor at Princeton University, said the estimate of $40bn-70bn was comparable with the vast wealth of leaders in other Persian Gulf countries. www.presstv.ir/detail/163881.html

Israel Readies for Conventional War: Israel’s Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi has said that given the recent revolution protests across Middle East, Israel must prepare for a battle in several theaters, Ynetnews quoted him as saying on Monday.

The outgoing military chief also said, “The connection between the different players requires us to contend with more than one theater.”

Ashkenazi warned of the transpiration of a “radical camp” in the Middle East, adding that “the moderate camp among the traditional Arab leadership is weakening.”

“Because of this spectrum, we must prepare for a conventional war…it would be a mistake to prepare for non-conventional war or limited conflicts and then expect that overnight the forces will operate in an all-out war,” he went on to say. www.presstv.ir/detail/164167.html

Obamagogue Grovels before any Form of Capital:

Magical Mystery Tour:

Psychobamagogue Speaking to the Rightist “Family” National Prayer Breakfast:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUiUyVqOuJI

Other than Raping Kids and Collecting $, Why does this cult Exist?

A grand jury on Thursday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after a grand jury report documented abuse by more than 50 priests. www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/11priest.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=philadelphia%20priests%20accused&st=cse Above, happy Priest Ed Avery, charged with Rape.

Netherlands, More Hidden Rapists: A senior figure in the Dutch Catholic Church protected a priest who sexually abused children, Dutch media reports say. Cardinal Ad Simonis is accused of knowing of the allegations made against the priest when he transferred him to another parish, where he abused again. According to AFP, Mr Simonis said that at the time he believed that the priest – who has not been named – had changed. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12429539He said the priest’s renewed abuse in Amersfoort was “lamentable”.

LA Rapist Priest Served on Sex Abuse Panel: A priest accused of having a long-term sexual relationship with a teenage girl, writing her decades later to ask for forgiveness and declare that he was a sex addict, is being removed from ministry in a parish, and the diocese’s vicar of clergy has also resigned, officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said Friday.

The priest, the Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen, was once a leader in his religious order and was appointed to an archdiocesan sexual abuse advisory board, although officials at both the order and the archdiocese knew at the time about his admission of sexual abuse and addiction. He served on the board, which was meant to review accusations of abuse by priests, for at least two years in the late 1990s, according to church and legal documents.

Los Angeles Archdiocese, led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, has been rocked by sexual abuse accusations for years. In 2007, it agreed to a $660 million settlement with 508 people who said that priests had sexually abused them as children. www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12abuse.html?hp

Spy versus Spy

Really, Who is Ray Davis, the Killer “Diplomat” in Pakistan?

His record –10 years in US Special Forces, supposedly ending in 2003–and his shell “security” company in the US, with its faked addresses, suggest strongly that he is working for the US, either in some intelligence branch, or more likely as an employee of some mercenary-for-hire company like Xe (Blackwater). In fact, a former long-time Army Special Forces veteran familiar with black-ops, speculates that Davis may still be in the Special Forces. He says, “Consider the strong possibility of our man being active-duty military, not Agency, not contract. Military people from special units have more and more taken responsibility for covert ops, especially those that involve shooting.”

This veteran adds, “Military folks are sometimes given an “official” cover, ie, a diplomatic
passport and some BS story about what they do (consular section, eg). This is a problem, because it violates agreements with the host nations about reporting how many military are in country, and covers some sensitive operations. Thus the panic of the Department of State et al right now.”

What Davis was actually doing on his ill-fated drive into the commercial heart of Lahore when things went wrong is up for grabs.

There have been several reports in the Pakistani press, unmentioned by Perlez, that the two men he killed were not, as initially reported by the US, petty thieves, but were actually agents working for Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/450

Lies within Enigmas Inside Riddles? Wash Post on CIA/Egypt:
This conundrum – how to work with your hosts and also spy on them – is one of the difficulties facing the CIA as it tries to understand the youth revolution spreading across the Middle East. The agency has cultivated its relationships with people such as Gen. Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s chief of intelligence and now vice president, but it has not done as well understanding the world of the protesters.

It’s a Catch-22 of the intelligence business, especially over the past decade, when counterterrorism became the CIA’s core mission: The agency needed good relationships with Arab intelligence services to collect information about al-Qaeda, but to maintain those relationships, the agency sometimes avoided local snooping. The CIA did recruit some long-term contacts within the Egyptian establishment who are said to have provided crucial intelligence in recent days. But it’s a far cry from the early 1980s, when the Cairo station chief would regularly meet the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/09/AR2011020904531.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Oops! We wanted to Kill your Neighbors! Sorry ’bout That!A former U.S. military interrogator in Iraq says half the raids Special Operations forces conducted during his terrorist-hunting missions hit the wrong house.

Matthew Alexander, the pen name for Air Force Reserve Maj. Anthony Camerino, describes his struggle to provide compensation for the victims of the raids in a new book, “Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist,” to be published today.

“Not a day goes by that we [didn’t] carry out a mission,” he writes of a period in 2006 when his team was hunting for insurgent leaders in Iraq. “More than half of our raids [attacked the] wrong houses.” voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/

Bungling CIA Goons Not Fired, but Promoted by Big Chief!: In December 2003, security forces boarded a bus in Macedonia and snatched a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. For the next five months, el-Masri was a ghost. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan.But he was the wrong guy.A hard-charging CIA analyst had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism. Yet despite recommendations by an internal review, the analyst was never punished. In fact, she has risen to one of the premier jobs in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, helping lead President Barack Obama’s efforts to disrupt al-Qaida.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110209/ap_on_go_ot/us_cia_accountability

CIA’s  Boss Dances on a Wire: “Strong Likelihood Mubarek Steps Down” Panetta said the nature of the transition remains unclear but would likely lead to expanded power for Egypt’s vice president and former intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman.

“I would assume that he would turn over more of of his powers to Suleiman to direct the country and direct the reforms that hopefully will take place,” the CIA chief said.

Panetta also warned of broader instability in the Middle East and the prospect of similar uprisings. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/10/AR2011021003172.html?hpid=topnews

Whining Spook or Injustice? CIA doesn’t Care About its Own: The employee, Kevin M. Shipp, was a veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer. His home was at Camp Stanley, an Army weapons depot just north of San Antonio, in an area where the drinking water was polluted with toxic chemicals. The post includes a secret C.I.A. facility.

Declaring that its need to protect state secrets outweighed the Shipps’ right to a day in court, the government persuaded a judge to seal the case and order the family and their lawyers not to discuss it, and to later dismiss the lawsuit without any hearing on the merits, Mr. Shipp said.

More than half a decade later, Mr. Shipp is going public with his story. He contends that the events broke up his marriage and destroyed his career, and that C.I.A. officials abused the State Secrets Privilege doctrine in an effort to cover up their own negligence. www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/politics/11secrets.html?hp

How Quickly We Forget. Where’s Osama Anyway?

In “Osama bin Laden,” Scheuer aims to re-establish his mastery of the bin Laden phenomenon. The bureaucratic enemies of yesteryear are still the knaves and fools they were, but another class of adversaries is now in the docket — the writers who stepped into the breach without sufficient knowledge or authority. There is Steve Coll, the author of “Ghost Wars,” credulous in his “whole-hog acceptance” of the narrative about Osama given him by Saudi intelligence. There is Lawrence Wright, who in his book “The Looming Tower” is “even more credulous when it comes to taking these spinning Saudis at face value.” Then there is a “legion of pro-Israel writers,” who brought with them into the discussion of bin Laden and the other Islamists “blind faith in the moral superiority of Israel in general and Likudites in particular.” This is not the prettiest, or the most subtle of writing. We had been done in by the “bin Laden experts” (the quotation marks are Scheuer’s); they hadn’t read the man, they hadn’t gone back to his actual words, yet they have come forth with “quasi-psychological explanations for Osama’s behavior.”

Worst Person In History Of the World Goes on Trial in Pa:

Kids in Luzerne County had a powerful incentive to stay out of the courtroom of Mark Ciavarella.

The notorious judge once ordered a 13-year-old boy to spend 48 terrifying days in jail for throwing a piece of steak at his mother’s boyfriend. An honor roll student was sent to the same private jail, PA Child Care, because she gave the middle finger to a police officer. A girl who accidentally set her house ablaze while playing with a lighter languished in PA Child Care for more than a month — forced to shower naked in front of male guards, she says.

She was only 10 years old.

PA Child Care’s beds were filled with young offenders who didn’t belong there, prosecutors allege, because its owner was paying kickbacks to Ciavarella. Today, the disgraced former judge will stand trial in one of the biggest courtroom scandals in U.S. history — a $2.8 million bribery scheme known as “kids for cash.” www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110207/NEWS/102070338

What Would Dickens Say to These POS Judges?

What Would Madame Defarge Say?

FUN