Beyond School

Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened. Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album [↩]
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.” [↩]
3. I actually use that phrase in class [↩]

I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place.

Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in this case, Photoshop technique — while at the same time adding a creative element that makes the content-master stand out from the equally masterful but unimaginative competition. Point blank: in the hands of this guy, something as dull as “how to use layers” becomes a vehicle that screams, “Hire me to write for ‘30 Rock‘!” He proves he can turn lead into gold, which is a real-world skill not many people have. Alchemists like that deserve the chance to display their creative magic in school.

The Mental Work is Hard….

“You Suck at Photoshop” displays that creative magic in the form of fiction (see the Wikipedia entry on the series for  more). The host of the tutorials is a persona named “Donnie,” a loser stuck in a lousy life with a lousy wife. We learn about Donnie’s life through a series of such sometimes-subtle details as his choice of photos for the tutorial — “Say you want to use a photo of the Vanagon your wife meets her high school boyfriend in on Friday nights….wait, I’ve got one right here” (scroll past other photos of — gulp — handguns, and one of the high school boyfriend labeled — gulp — “douche-b.png”) — and such sometimes-over-the-top details as the wife barging in to kvetch at him in the middle of his tutorial, or his loser friend Skyping in with a loser-emergency while Donnie is making his screencast.

The creator of this project not only demonstrates his literary creativity by creating the fictional “Donnie” persona and populating his Photoshop folders with props like the pictures mentioned above; he takes it further with his dramatic creativity as he acts out the role of that persona with his voice-over. The vocal acting covers a broad emotional terrain, from dude in his basement chillaxing with his laptop to powder-keg psychopath struggling to keep the flame from his fuse. The acting is just awesome.

….The Tech is Dead Easy

The beauty of the project technology-wise is that it requires nothing more than a screencasting program like the free Jing or Screencast-o-matic, plus a webcam and microphone — your standard kit in most computers today. So the technical hurdles for students to do such a project are basically nil.

That leaves the whole of their energies to devote to the other two aspects of the project: mastery and critical understanding of the content, and creative concept development to deliver that understanding.

Too Beautiful for School?

So I’m wrestling, as usual, with the ways this wonderfully simple approach to creative learning will be complicated by the forces of schooliness:

• Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”?
• Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?
• How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?
• How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?
• Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the attempt?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know how to adapt this for a history classroom. Can “You Suck at Photoshop” become “You Suck at History”? How? How can this be used for Europe from the French Revolution to the present, or the complete history of China?

My recent brainstorm on giving a conceptual purpose to learning Chinese history by “interpreting it for historically-ignorant Westerners” seems to have some openings. God knows, there are ample websites of Chinese and Western art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and more that students could tab through on their screencasts as they provide their commentary like “Donnie” does to his open Photoshop on his desktop. But the maker of “Donnie” has the luxury of revealing that persona through the image “props” in his folders, while history students wouldn’t have as easy a task of  revealing persona if they were forced instead to work with history websites in their screencasts.

One solution I’m considering is making it a summative, end-of-semester project, in which students have most of the semester to let their creative juices stew and come up with their own ideas over the first few months. Then give a couple of weeks of class time to a workshop in which they design and execute those ideas.

Otherwise, I’m mostly adrift. Maybe you can help.

But if you watch the three-minute first episode below, you should see why I’m bewitched by the idea:

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole playlist. Then help me figure out how I can make this work?

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

• I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
• I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days,  even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [↩]

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on it.)

I’m having a conversation with Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” post.

It started with Nathan saying,

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

Monika seconds that claim, and adds:

The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows – to knowledge via people. People aren’t buying in because we’re missing the point. Learning how to learn.

And I just replied to Monika with this — which I hope some of you, again, will chime in on to show me the error of my ways:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”¹

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

I think it helps to fine-tune the discussion a bit: “content” breaks down into your “core” disciplines — maths, sciences, social studies, language arts — plus your electives in arts, technology, languages, and so forth. Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Open Thread: School Me

Whatever your subject matter, I’d love to see specific examples of digital tools and practices that, either through research-based evidence or your own direct observation, you think enhance the learning of content or the development of skills in the classroom.

1. I think this whole post is influenced by my recent viewing of the film, Idiocracy. If you haven’t seen it, it presents a future world in which everybody is hi-tech, but their favorite TV show is called “Ow! My Balls!”, and their language and lifestyle have degenerated to a pastiche of FOX Tea-Baggers and Live Wrestling aficionados. It’s hilarious, if you haven’t seen it. [↩]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated [↩]

(This post is dedicated to the aspiring writers out there.)

Today, January 1, 2009, is the second birthday of Beyond School.

What a short, strange trip it’s been.

I’m not superstitious, but I love coincidences, synchronicities, and patterns as much as the next guy. So I’m going to trace those two years up to an announcement about some ch- ch- ch- ch- changes in my writing and non-writing life that will start this week. It’s not quite the death of Beyond School, so much as maybe growing beyond it. I’m not sure. Maybe I will be by the end of this post.

In my dreamer’s twenties, I often fantasized that….

….could I but scrawl across the sky, in letters stratosphere-high and coast to coast broad, an unknown writer’s plea to the world to discover my words – with contact info at the bottom – then some patron would do so. I had no connections, no money, no idea how to manifest my potential to the world. (College essays with a red “A” across the top and encouraging scribbles on the last page did not seem like manifesting to anything larger than the usually tired hired reader at the front of the classroom.)

That was in the ’80s. It lasted into the ’90s. And I’m fully aware of how lame that dreamer was, when others with more gumption did the work to figure out the publishing game, and got published. But that was me.

Then I collided with a White Rabbit in Shanghai,

- Jeff Utecht – around the autumn of 2005, and followed him down a certain rabbit-hole, and into the wonderland of blogging. (I still hate that word.)

During the winter break of that same year, Karl Fisch, who maybe knows this, and maybe doesn’t, offered me a Fischbowl full of red pills, blue pills, new-colored pills, and I fisted them up and gulped them down. For a couple of weeks, I read everything he wrote and started having trippy visions of an education that could be. I started a blog on Live Journal, of all things, and wrote a good twenty posts in a week. (I was single then, and it was an easy pleasure.) On New Year’s Day 2006, I waved a magic mouse and zapped those posts from Live Journal to Blogspot.

I wrote and wrote and wrote for months, mostly to nobody. The  occasional comment in those days was like a gold coin from the sky. I wrote visions of world-writing wikis that would turn into blog-book “blooks” and French Revolution wikis that made my head swim. I wrote about dystopian edu-futures in which teacher-vampires “sucked classroom blogging dry,” turned it into “a new way to turn in the same old homework.” I wrote and I wrote, for nobody and everybody.

By the end of the first year, I had written – and read, oh yes, so many of you – my way into ways of teaching that were candle-flames to my moth. I’m not saying they were anywhere close to great or perfect; they were just beautiful, bright forms of inventive play that frequently drew me too close and, because they were usually too ambitious and too big, burned me out.

I’ve always agreed with whoozits the great writer who said, “It’s better to burn than to rot,” so that was okay.

A healthy schizophrenia came….

….a Nietzschean “ball of snakes” of the mind, each contending for control of this here space. I was tired of writing of Things Two Point Oh. It felt like writing about the joys of a honeymoon, long after the newness had worn off. But I was an “edublogger,” a self-taglined “kicker of addictions to 20th Century teaching.” Stuck wriggling on my pin, how could I presume to write beyond Beyond School?

But the literary snake ascended triumphant. I started writing mad long posts about Gilgamesh, touching taboos untouchable in the schoolroom (possibly only because of my own ex-Southern Baptist unconscious).  I asked students to stay and teachers to leave. I wrote ten thousand words about an epic of about ten thousand words, and only got a quarter of the way through it.

The funny thing about succumbing to that snake: it worked. More people read those Gilgamesh posts than all the rest of my 600 posts combined. It made me want to stop writing about school(iness) altogether, and just write readings of the heights of human art.

Then Sarah Palin winked up the world,

and too many seemed seduced. Another snake ascended the ball, a political one, fangs thirsting to sink venom into that catastrophic hockey-mom’s neck – for the sake of America and the world. Grandiose, yes, but aren’t all our evangelisms? I wrote about nothing but politics for the next many weeks. (And if McCain dies, goodness forbid, in the next four years, don’t make me say “I told you it was important.” That Saks Fifth Avenue demagogue would be ruling the world – including that “country” she knows as Africa.)

Fully expecting my subscribers to unsubscribe in droves, I could only hope others would come to replace them. Water seeks its own level and all of that. (And I thank all of you who stayed.)

And then one day,

after weeks of nothing but manic and stentorian political blogging, I got an email from somebody about an editing / writing position opening up. It involved educational politics and activism. “I thought of you instantly,” he said. (And I thank him, and he knows who he is.)

I applied, interviewed, interviewed again. Glacial, painful waiting (and contemporaneous with the radio job I’d also been interviewing for).

And I got the job. Stay tuned for the URL when the site is ready to launch later this week. And expect me to pull many of your sleeves to help me push that vision of an education that could be – and that, because of so many of you, already is for a few lucky students.

Have I mentioned that long ago….

….I fantasized about writing in letters as large as the sky, “I write, I write – find me”?

That was B.W. (Before Weblogs).

Now, A.W., that fantasy has become possible. Instead of scribing on the sky, we write and write  on screens of light. And if we do it long enough, hard enough – instinctively enough – we can, with the right timing and wind conditions, be found.

This isn’t crowing, mind you. I’ll still need a day job. What this is, for any who need it spelled out, is a T-E-S-T-I-M-O-N-Y of the potential of writing yourself out there. Maybe those students who never believed it when I talked myself red in the face about all of this in theory will see it now. I started Beyond School with a freshman class two years ago; I wish I had them as juniors this year.

~   ~   ~

In the future,

I’ll be writing more on my new space than here. I want to continue making time to write the Unsucky English Lectures, but am not sure if I’ll post them here, or on a new blog, and just leave Beyond School as an artifact of teaching ideas.

(I wonder what Christian Long would advise. He bowed out of Think:Lab recently, if I’m not mistaken. And my god, I just searched for his blog and it seems he deleted it. Is that true? What a loss.)

Photo:
“Escribiendo el cielo” by anikaviro

Ben Grey’s “21st Century Confusion” post asks a simple question that I’ve often toyed with too:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

I’ve often wondered the same thing: “What’s all this talk of ’21st century literacy’? (Ben somewhat conflates “literacy” and “skills” in his post.)  Is there anything really new here?  My comment:

The only uniquely “21st century literacies” I can think of involve the web.

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

Hm. What else. Co-writing might be new. “How to participate in collaborative writing communities.” Wikipedia, for example. I know I don’t know how to do that.

Could we even go so far as to say that social networking online is itself a “new literacy”? That networking is (or may be) an essential skill for adulthood in the 21st century?

Hm. Searching. That’s new, yes? How to effectively search for good, timely information online, and do so efficiently. I know I’m still not great at that.

I’ll stop there. Thanks for the prompt. I agree the “21st c.” buzz can be as tiresome as the “2.0.” But I think the Berners-Lee Revolution has created some unique changes, just as Gutenberg’s did. Can you see any I missed?

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think.

I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list my favorite ways of using blogs for both Learning to Write and - a very different thing – Writing to Learn.

Here goes:

Jan’s Opening Question and Comment:

My First Reply:

Re: factual accuracy: maybe a sidebar disclaimer saying “I’m young and possibly wrong sometime.” (If only FOX would do that. Or me.)

Or maybe just trust to the two-way nature of this medium to allow people to push back/correct errors  in comments.

The whole accuracy thing can be skirted by doing more creative stuff – personal narrative and so on, too.

And maybe a wiki instead of a blog so students can correct their stuff.

Re: conventions and mechanics: I’m a six traits guy myself, and am more concerned with the first five – ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency – than I am with grammar/spelling/punctuation. So I grade far more heavily for notable attention to those first 5 traits.

I want students to write freely and ideally discover they enjoy it. Perfectionism and fear of errors won’t create the conditions for that to happen. We’ll talk about errors after I’ve read enough volume from you to do an error analysis of your most frequent _serious_ grammar/spelling problems, which I’ll prioritize and teach to you one on one down the road.

Then you can select your five or ten favorite posts – which maybe I’ll score as a single test grade – and _correct those errors on only those posts_ to apply what you’ve learned/I’ve taught you to look for and correct.

I know this is sloppy, but it’s 1.40 a.m. and I’m replying to your contact communication.

Afterthought: I think students should have the option of not publishing if their work is too sub-par.

But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they?

–

(To Add More:)

Since you told me in a private email that you were looking at the French Revolution Ant Farm Diary (right?), I’ve got more to say:

That was a formative project using “Writing to Learn” pedagogy. The point of the writing, above all, was for students to learn the material in this active way, rather than listening to lectures, reading the textbook, or other passive ways of learning. So the writing in this approach is secondary to the learning.

The summative assessment was an essay that did hold accuracy and writing at a premium.

And every time I use WTL, I’m amazed at how much deeper and broader the retention, comprehension, and insight are, compared to when I lecture, they discuss, or just read or watch stuff.

Have you ever used WTL? I’d be interested to hear your (and everyone’s) experiences with it.

Second Exchange:

Jan replied:

Clay,
Your approach is terrific and I am not questioning intent.

I teach high school & college English, media literacy, speech & debate, and have taught in all grade levels. I have used 6 traits and don’t think of myself as a grammar nazi.

Lately, I have been concerned with the declining (even by current standards) level of writing and content information that seems to be fostered by the web. Blogging, IMing and texting encourage stream of consciousness-type of writing; with no regard for logic, facts or conventions. I think this is fine for drafts and, well, this conversation.

I often tell my students, “Remember, you are writing for a college graduate, NOT your girlfriend,” in an attempt to make them slow their thoughts and process their communication. Still, I get final drafts that need additional editing, presentations with missing capital letters and assorted other errors that, when I point them out, they say, “Yeah, well, you know what I mean…”

I find this attitude in college writing, too. I have students of 20-30 even 40 years old who write without thinking of editing, who think that whatever they write should be accepted as their ‘best’ and who have little sense of thinking about WHO will read their work.

For me, it’s even become about respect. If I respect you, I will do all I can to make sure that my communication is clear and accurate. but if I don’t care who reads this, I can spel anway i want sdo touy will no whut i mean…

Don’t misunderstand that I am critiquing your projects, nor the work of your students. It’s that your projects got me thinking about this issue, and I used it as an example.

When we publish something, especially to the web, as a teacher, do we have the obligation of editing, or do we just post ‘as is’? Your comment (But realistically, practically nobody will find and/or read their blogs beyond other students, will they? ) begs the question of who is the audience?

My reply:

I sympathize with your concerns, Jan, and hope I didn’t sound defensive when I, oops, defended Writing to Learn.

I’ve seen the chatroom-ese on student work on blogs, forums, and wikis when I introduced them, but didn’t have much problem rooting them out with discussions of the respect you mention (and self-respect, since using “cuz”, e.g., in a public writing is like going to a job interview in dirty clothes). Most students got it and met the standard after that, and those that didn’t woke up after a few shocking bad grades.

But that could be specific to my private school students, whose moms rip them new orifices at the first A-, much less C-.

Online writing is definitely no silver bullet for writing, as I’ve argued a million times. Over time, though, and – crucially – in conjunction with 6-traits rubrics that set the standards for their writing from the quality of Ideas on down the line to Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions and Mechanics, AND Presentation, I really have seen marked improvement in quality in all those traits, overall, AND in engagement. Wake-up grades, again, given early, were also key.

But we’re talking students here, so I’m not claiming miracles (and not suggesting you’re implying I am).

It’s the “over time” thing that’s key, to me.

I do think students who write because they’re forced, and probably see no lasting value in most cases to what is still, in the end, mere homework to most of them, will have a different attitude about what they publish compared to people who, like us, write voluntarily about things we care about.

And since it’s 9.24 a.m. this brisk Saturday morning, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee as I start the day thinking with you (which I enjoy too), I’m going to ramble a bit more.

There are so many different approaches to assignments, we both know, to inculcate whatever habits of mind or skills we’re working on in a given week. So I just want to toss off a few that come to mind:

1. The “comment on the teacher’s post” assignment:

Rather than students writing on their own blog, they do a specific task in the comment thread to the teacher’s. That way they see their work standing alongside that of their peers, and may be more motivated to look better and work harder, in order to avoid looking weak. I’ve done that with:

a. Syntactical variation exercises (sentence openings, e.g.): “Take this sentence and re-write it, using only the words in the sentence, in as many ways as you can.” If you moderate comments, they don’t see other students’ work until all have done the assignment. Then they can see and learn from other students’ responses. That’s a wickedly powerful affordance of online writing that is hard to duplicate offline. I posted about it here.

b. Introductory paragraphs (hooks): Copy and paste your “hook” from your first draft, and the revised version from your latest draft, into the comment thread, and briefly explain your writer’s decision that guided your revision. (There’s an entire class discussion of authentic writing right there, which my students enjoyed, because they were seeing what others had tried. The few successes were great cases of student modeling, and the weaker ones were great cases of cliche or otherwise dead introductions.) (You can see my Seoul and a flat world teacher’s Hawaii students doing this here.)

c. Titles. (Titles are a pet peeve of mine. “My Essay” from high schoolers makes my blood boil.)

2. Critical Thinking:

My latest Diigo Daily Reads auto-posts feature highlights (basically copy-pastes, though Diigo does that work for me by publishing only what I highlight from a web page) that I then respond to with sticky notes that do NOT summarize the reading, but instead either “challenge, extend, or qualify” the point. That’s an “ideas” sort of assignment that simply forces students to THINK about what they passively read. (See this post for a screencast on this approach.

3. Trait-based assessment of x number of student blog posts per unit for a test grade:

The biggest bear, for me, about student blogging and wiki work is the sheer volume. When I assign regular posts, I normally can’t assess them all with any depth. But I still want regular writing in the same way a PE teacher wants regular running to keep his/her students fit. So to allow students to self-select 3, say, while you randomly select 2 (whatever you work out, obviously), to grade by the rubric – either for all traits, or just one or two un-disclosed ones (since they won’t know, they’ll ideally give more care to all the traits), is the best solution I’ve come up with for this dilemma. The “teacher choices” keep them from shamming on the posts they won’t self-select.

Closer, for now: I haven’t taught long enough to be able to compare this generation of student writers from previous ones, so I don’t know whether their skills are any better or worse than in the past.

I do know that the elitist side of me wants to use student blogs in a highly selective writing elective class – see For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging for more – to simply rid myself of the headaches of dealing with the bums, so I’ve got my Delta Force of real writers who want to train.

I guess that’s my way of saying, “I hear you.”

I share this simply because I think Jan asks good questions, and I’m sure others have valuable input to add. Here’s hoping they do.

A reader last week mentioned this “Wordling Political Speeches” as a NYTimes lesson plan, so I Wordled McCain’s stump speech in Colorado this week.

I thought I’d have fun with it by turning it into an open thread for readers to play with.

Here are the rules:

Write your own caption in the comment thread, based only on words in the image (click image for larger view). I’ll select the winner and add the caption, with credit, in a couple days.

Example:

“Applause: McCain people going Obama.”

There are zingers galore in here, but I hope you’ll have fun with them, so I’ll leave the pickings to you. Please lighten your day and ours with a laugh.

[Update: And the winner is: one very creative Vincent Robleto, whose Kerblotto blog screams "Subscribe" for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Really, check it out. (And Vince, I can only imagine how honored you must feel, considering the vast field of competition you edged out for this award. ) Thanks for playing to both you, Diane, and the thousands of others!]

• kdka.com – McCain Campaign Worker Confessed To Making Up Story Of Attack

  BAM. Can things get any worse for the GOP?

  It will be interesting to read the comment threads full of racist anger over this “assault,” with nary a hint of skepticism. Will there be any reflection?

  tags: hoax, mccain, elections08

  • A Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Ashley Todd confessed to making up the story & is facing charges

    PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―

    Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter “B” in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

    Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

• The Busman’s Holiday: UPDATE 3 — Questions Raised About McCain Volunteer’s Alleged Knife Mutilation

  EXCELLENT example of CITIZEN JOURNALISM: this blogspot blogger used Google Maps to embed images of the site of the crime, got comments from people familiar with the crime scene, and linked to updates that add more evidence this is a WILLIE HORTON-style deception.

  tags: hoax, mccain, elections08

• Ashley Todd Photo: ATM Video Proves Assault Lies Hoax? – Original News: The Post Chronicle

  The B, backward _or_ forward, is _not_ something an “angry big black assailant” would carve in somebody’s face WITH A KNIFE. There is not a single knife-slice on her cheek. The B looks _rubbed_.

  And rubbing takes a longer time to do, and hurts less, than using the knife to cut.

  The sad thing? I”ve seen many comments believe this hoax _without question_ – which means, as usual, _without thinking_.

  tags: elections08, racism, hoax, mccain, democracy, usa

  • 

• Police say inconsistencies in McCain staffer’s story

  If this 20-year-old McCain volunteer from Texas is lying about this, serious charges should be brought against her. She’s doing it in a battleground state, first of all.

  Second of all, many reporters are reporting her _allegations_ as _facts_, despite the lack of corroboration. And many people are reacting with “white rage” in the comments to those reports.

  Her TWITTER page is a key piece of evidence, btw.

  tags: democracy, elections08, hoax, conservative, mccain

  • Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a “B” on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

    Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

    Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn’t mention in the initial report.

    Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn’t show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera’s range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.

• Teaching “controversial” topics | Get Schooled – Annotated

  If a kid cries in a Psychology class because it disagrees with her belief in Astrology as an explanation of human behavior, should we “teach _that_ controversy” too?

  Prayer didn’t work during the Bubonic Plague as well as Science would have. Why do religious people insist on resisting Science? Why do schools let them?

  It kills me that the most powerful and influential nation on the planet is among the most extreme in this respect.

  How can Americans go through 12 years of basic education, and exit without a _basic_ understanding science and its method?

  tags: science, evolution, usa, religion, creationism, culture, christianity

  • I spent Thursday at Emory University attending a workshop on teaching evolution. Every high school biology teacher is required to teach evolution, but the topic has faced challenges.

    Back in 2004, State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proposed striking references to evolution and other related concepts from the state curriculum. She changed her mind after a public backlash.

    Cobb County schools faced its own battles over placing stickers in textbooks questioning evolution.

    At the Emory conference teachers shared stories about students crying in class when the evolution unit started. Others said some students received training on what questions they could ask to challenge and disrupt the lessons. A few admitted they dread the unit because of the number of complaints they get from parents and others in the community.

    I don’t want us to get into a debate over evolution vs. creationism vs. intelligent design. Instead, I’m curious as to what teachers and schools do with lessons considered controversial.

    For example, do you send notes home to give parents a heads-up? Do you address the controversy with students in class or do you go about your lessons like it’s any other activity?

    Is there a way to remove the controversy – whether real or perceived – from our classrooms?

    • Why not simply say, “Evolution is science, and as ‘true’ as Gravitation. Creationism and I.D. are not. End of discussion.” ? – post by cburell

• McCain’s Warning on Voter Fraud Gets Details Wrong: Ann Woolner

  ACORN is a red herring. Here’s what really threatens democracy (although it doesn’t mention the DIEBOLD and other electronic voting machines).

  tags: elections08, democracy, usa

  • Phantom Voters

    The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
    or ACORN, has a nasty habit of hiring day workers who register
    thousands of phantom voters, often in swing states. ACORN denies
    responsibility, insisting it culls for bogus names, fires whoever
    turned them in and flags any irregularities to authorities.

    If you doubt ACORN’s story and worry that fake registrations
    can lead to false voting, I don’t blame you. But you will
    probably strike out if you try to find phony votes that were
    actually cast. Officials verify registrations before accepting
    them.

    Whatever you make of ACORN, don’t let its misdeeds blind you
    to the rest of the picture.

    Consider Nathan Sproul, former Republican Party chief for
    Arizona, who ran a multistate voter drive in 2004. Some of his
    former employees have told reporters that his group destroyed
    registration forms filled out by Democrats, fired canvassers who
    turned them in and submitted to state authorities only the
    registrations of those who said they were Republicans. Sproul
    denied the allegations.

    Oregon Probe

    An Oregon investigation into Sproul’s 2004 operation there
    confirmed “instances of wrongdoing” but found insufficient
    evidence to prosecute, according to the state’s Justice
    Department.

    Bad as it is to submit fake registrations, no harm is done
    unless one of those made-up registrants gets approved by the
    state and then shows up at the polls and votes.

    “Keep in mind with these stories about potentially bad
    registrations, they don’t equal bad votes,” says Terri Enns, a
    senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, out of Ohio State
    University.

    But if you register voters and then shred their registration
    forms because they support the wrong candidate, you rob
    legitimate voters of their ballots in an attempt to tilt the
    election result.

    Ancient history, you say? This year Sproul has a new group
    which the Republican Party and the McCain campaign have hired for
    voter drives.

• John McCain Implodes: Dead Cat Bounces, Making Excuses & Uppity Negro Voters

  tags: mccain

  • The excuses for McCain’s great unraveling are flying fast and furious, and most of them lead back to Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, his tone-deaf campaign managers, because of their obsession with tactics over substance, notably Schmidt’s snap selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate without even a cursory examination of who she was.

    If McCain has been in the thrall of his handlers, then he is even more befuddled than I have feared. If that is false, then McCain is even less prepared for that 3 a.m. phone call than I have feared.

    Pick one. Nah, go ahead and pick both, kind of like McCain having more than one position on so many issues.

    Yes, it’s that bad.

• Freddie Mac Money Trail Catches Up With McCain | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com

  Rick Davis again.

  tags: elections08, mccain

  • Few advisers in John McCain’s inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis’s high-powered consulting firm. “Rick is a friend, and I trust him,” McCain told NEWSWEEK last year.

    Last week, though, McCain’s trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager’s firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008.

• The punditocracy’s Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election | Salon News – Annotated

  A great review of how wrong the media bobble-heads are when they play expert on teevee.

  tags: media, politics, democracy, elections08

  • But that’s Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
    • God, I wish I’d written that line. – post by cburell

• Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad – Politico.com Print View

  Great title for a devastating article. Epic disarray in the McCain campaign team.

  tags: mccain, elections08

• Leslie Harris: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Try To Fix It

  Webheads and techies who think politics are unimportant should read this series.

  tags: web2.0, technology, education, privacy, elections08, democracy, politics

  • [The Internet is at a crossroads. Down one path lies a future where digital technology enhances constitutional freedoms; spurs innovations in expression and entrepreneurship; and fulfills its ultimate promise of connecting and empowering the world. Down the other? A future where the Internet is turned against users; where government spying runs unchecked, and where innovation is stifled by a closed and locked system, controlled by a handful of entrenched players. The next president will play a key role in determining which path we take. This is the fourth in a series of entries over the next couple weeks about the critical technology and civil liberties choices facing the next president of the United States. You can read more on our complete transition guide for next president.]

• Edward Lifson: Studs (Terkel) for Obama

  Terkel is still amazing, after all these years. He gives Obama advice I hope is heard, and faults Obama for not being Progressive ENOUGH.

  tags: obama, elections08

• Michelle Malkin » Why that McCain volunteer’s “mutilation” story smells awfully weird; Update: Police to administer polygraph; conflicting evidence at scene

  When even the venomous Michelle Malkin says Obama supporters are innocent, surely you’ll believe it.

  Like me, she smelled a fish in the “WILLIE HORTON PLOY” of the Texas girl “MUTILATED” by a “6′4″ BLACK MAN” in Philadelphia yesterday.

  Really interesting role of Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter here – along with Drudge Report wearing egg on the face for swallowing this one, and fellow traveller Malkin calling him on it.

  The nice thing is the circus, thanks to netizens, seems to be over before the media had a chance to run too far with this HOAX.

  tags: mccain

  • Scroll down for updates…”Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said”…and more below on following her MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook trails…

• Does McCain think America is too ignorant to know theft? – Annotated

  Good facts to refute the silly (but still effective) “SOCIALIST” label the desperate McCain/Schmidt/Davis camp is throwing at Obama, and which the least intelligent are parroting.

  Since these people don’t seem to read basic facts, maybe you can read the following from the Congressional Budget Office to them:

  tags: taxes, elections08, economy, mccain, bush

  • Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.

  • I’m guessing the latter, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

    In the last eight years, we the little people have been forced to provide more and more of the taxes fueling America’s redistribution machine. As the Congressional Budget Office reports, the $715 billion in tax breaks that President Bush gave to those making more than $342,000 a year began dramatically shifting the overall tax burden from the rich onto the rest of us. Meanwhile, because of lobbyist-crafted loopholes, most corporations pay zero federal income taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The result is what Warren Buffett admits: When counting all taxes (income, payroll, property, etc.), billionaires and Big Business often pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

    The output of the redistribution machine is becoming just as regressive. In the age of Halliburton fraud and ExxonMobil subsidies, our government spends $93 billion a year on corporate welfare. (For comparison, that’s roughly three times what it spends on a traditional welfare program such as food stamps.) That doesn’t include the recent bailout giving $700 billion to the same banks doling out $70 billion in executive pay and bonuses – a scheme the Financial Times says “amounts to a large transfer of resources from lower to higher income earners.”

    Thanks to these redistributive policies – policies McCain championed in Congress – the richest 1 percent today owns a larger share of America’s wealth than at any time since before the Great Depression.

    The Republican standard-bearer likely knows all this, but his fetish is fact-free fairy tales – the kind presenting seven houses, a beer-industry fortune and lockstep conservatism as mavericky Joe-the-Plumber populism. When it comes to economics, McCain is banking on Americans believing similarly inane myths – specifically, those portraying obscene affluence as the commonplace achievement under royalist rule.

    • –the rest is worth a read. – post by cburell

• Spending rose in Palin’s Alaska administrations – USATODAY.com

  Oh, those pesky facts. So much for “Palin the reformer and fiscal conservative.”

  tags: palin, elections08, economy, usa, mccain

  • WASHINGTON — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin calls herself a fiscal conservative who wants to “rein in government spending.” She says she “reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state.” Republican John McCain said during the last debate that his running mate has “cut the size of government.”

    But Palin didn’t cut the size of government as mayor of Wasilla, and she hasn’t done so as Alaska’s governor, city and state budget records show. Spending in fast-growing Wasilla increased by 55% during her tenure from 1996-2002, records show. In nearly two years as governor, she has presided over a 31% spending hike by a state government that sought earmarks from Washington even as it reaped billions from higher oil prices and Palin-backed tax increases on oil companies.

• Jeffrey Feldman: Drudge Puts Dangerous Spin on Mugging, Implies Violence Targeting McCain Volunteers

  A GREAT ARTICLE FOR CLASSROOM USE about HOW HEADLINES, FRAMES, AND OMISSIONS OF FACTS CAN CHANGE A NEWS STORY.

  This is dangerous stuff.

  tags: elections08, media, journalism, rhetoric, democracy, propaganda

• Will Ferrell Back As Bush With Tina Fey’s Palin On Thursday’s “Saturday Night Live” (VIDEO)

  Hilarious and smart. So good to see Will Farrell doing Dubya again.

  tags: elections08, humor, bush, palin, mccain, video

• E. J. Dionne Jr. – Civil War on the Right – washingtonpost.com – Annotated

  This really is one of the most interesting, and most potentially historical, side-stories of the election: the possible fall of the GOP and rise of an INTELLECTUAL conservative party to take its place.

  tags: elections08, mccain, palin, conservative, history, usa, democracy, politics

  • Conservatives are at each other’s throats, and here’s what’s revealing about how divided they are: The critics of John McCain and the critics of Sarah Palin represent entirely different camps.
  • Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party” (David Brooks), as someone who “doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin” (Kathleen Parker), as “a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics” (Peggy Noonan).

  • For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

    The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

    • I’ve been noting this all week. The originally intellectual Conservative movement has campaigned itself over the decades into an anti-intellectual party. The crows have come home to roost.

      It would be nice to see a new party of philoophical, not brand-name, conservatism replace the GOP. Those debates can only enrich the political discourse by debating the liberal point of view, instead of demonizing it. – post by cburell

  • Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

    It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

    • We can only hope.

      But schools have apparently done a horrible job of teaching blue-collar white people to think clearly enough to see through demagoguery and propaganda. I fully expect millions of white Americans to vote against their own interests because of their trust in FOX. – post by cburell

  • Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

    It isn’t working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

    postchat@aol.com

• Op-Ed Columnist – Rebranding the U.S. With Obama – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:

  • She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?

    Me: Yes, exactly.

    She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?

    Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.

    She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.

    Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.

    She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?

    Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.

    [Long pause.]

    She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!

    We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.

  • Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.

    “It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.

    Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.

  • As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.

  • Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.

    In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.

    Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.

    • Wonderful reality-check on the fact that other countries are better at religious and racial tolerance than the USA. – post by cburell

  • Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.

    Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.

    • Well-said. Brains, not race, should decide our vote.

      Race is no reason to vote for a candidate. BUT IT’S ALSO NO REASON NOT TO. – post by cburell

• McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4 | ajc.com

  Two words Krauthammer fails to mention in his ode to McCain: SARAH PALIN.

  Next.

  tags: mccain

  • McCain, the stalwart, gets my vote Nov. 4

• Salon.com Books | Stephen King’s God trip – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • Beyond the pop culture feast, at the novel’s heart resides a much older myth, our founding myth, you might say, the tale of a manifest destiny, steeped in Jesus and gone horribly wrong. In the age of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, faced with the prospect of another Great Depression, I can’t think of a more relevant fantasy with which to chase away — or embrace — the gloom.
  • I just finished reading a book called “Nixonland,” and the parallels to the Nixon campaigns and McCain campaigns are just depressing. He’s doing a lot of events that are supposed to be populist but are in reality completely managed. He’s got a vice president who’s Joe Six-Pack. The parallels just go on and on. You’ve got the unpopular war, economic problems, gasoline problems. Whatever goes around, comes around. “The Stand” even says that. Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

  • Questions of politics are never very far away in “The Stand.” Once the plague has come and gone, society has to be reformed. Do you think of it as a political novel, in any sense?

    I did see it that way. I’ve always been a political novelist, and those things have always interested me. “Firestarter” is a political novel. “The Dead Zone” is a political novel. There’s that scene in “The Dead Zone” where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war. Around my house we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, “That’s Greg Stillson as a woman.”

  • I was the guy who wrote best-selling books who had also marched in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I brought that sensibility first, whether it was foremost in my mind first. A lot of people reacted to that, the idea that here was somebody who was writing about pop music that they knew, for instance.

    Earlier in my career, I was just excoriated by the critics. I was just drubbed unmercifully, and I think I got more of it because the books were successful, and they were just horrified because they sensed it was something that was working in the popular context. It was different than what had gone before. And the thing they settled on was all the brand names. There was review after review that said this can’t be up to anything serious because it’s so ephemeral, because he’s talking about Excedrin, he’s talking about Prestone antifreeze, whatever it was. What they never took into consideration was that there was a whole generation, a huge generation, suckled on television.

  • What did you learn while writing “The Stand”?

    I wrote the book in Colorado for the most part, and at that time, there was a lot of discussion on the news, and on local TV stations about chemical dumps and chemical weapons in Nevada, and so that played a constant background in my thoughts while I was writing it, and at the same time, that’s the edge of the Bible Belt, and there were a lot of radio preachers, and one night I heard this guy raving about once in every generation, a plague will fall among them, and I started to think about that dichotomy between the spiritual and the technological, and that became the great subject of the book.

  • In the introduction to the expanded edition of “The Stand,” you also called the novel a work of “dark Christianity.” What did you mean by that?

    I was raised Christian, and I was raised to believe in the idea of the Antichrist. My wife said that — she was raised a Catholic — the attitude of the Catholic Church is, give them to me when they’re young, and they’ll be mine forever. It isn’t really true. A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

    I’m interested in the concepts. I’m particularly interested in the idea that in the New Testament, you’re suggesting a moral code that’s actually enlightened. Basically what Christ preached: get along with your neighbor and give everything away and follow me. So we’re talking pretty much about communism or socialism, all the things that the good Christian Republicans in the House of Representatives today are railing about in light of this bailout bill.

    • Oh, the anti-Chrstian capitalist Church-goers. Good for you, King.

      As Max von Sydow says in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “If Jesus were to come back to America today, he would vomit over what’s being said and done in his name.” – post by cburell

  • I was able to use all those things in “The Stand.” It’s an effort to say, let’s give God his due here. Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite, and that’s about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where someone dumps a crucifix in Count Dracula’s face, and he pulls away and runs back into his house. That’s not religion. That’s some kind of juju, like a talisman. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to explore what that means to be able to rise above adversity by faith, because it’s something most of us do every day. We may not call it Christianity. I wanted to do that. I wanted it to be a God trip.

  • Running throughout your body of work, there is this thread, a running internal argument about God. I’m thinking, in particular, of the story “Ayana” in the new collection.

    It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously. I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I’m very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we’re living in, it’s very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that’s running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause.

    The other thing that’s interested me ever since I was a kid was the idea that’s baldly articulated in “Desperation,” and that is that God is cruel. I always in my mind equated Mother Abigail with Moses, and the story of Moses taking credit for the water coming from the rock and being forbidden to get to the Promised Land because of that one thing, that one slip, where God is cruel, and I wanted to use those things and say two things. First, that the myths are difficult and suggest a difficult moral path through life, and second, that they are ultimately more fruitful and more earth-friendly than the god of technology, the god of the microchip, the god of the cellphone.

    • Interesting. – post by cburell

  • A personal question about the apocalypse. If you had to handicap which major catastrophe will take down human civilization in your lifetime, where would you put your money?

    Nuclear weapons. No doubt about it. There are days when I get up and say, I cannot believe, I cannot fucking believe that it’s been more than 50 years since one of those things got popped on an actual population. There are too many out there. One will get away, or someone will make one from spare parts and put it in a knapsack or blow it in Bombay or New York or San Francisco.

• McCain volunteer claims attacker cut ‘B’ into face | AP Texas News | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – Annotated

  We have to ask if this is a Willie Horton variation. See below for the annotations of the fishy details.

  tags: elections08, racism, mccain, obama

  • PITTSBURGH
    — A campaign volunteer for John McCain told police she was robbed at knifepoint at an ATM and knocked down by a man who then carved a “B” in her face after noticing a sticker for the presidential candidate on her car.
    • Question 1: CNN also covered this story, and said “after noticing the McCain bumper sticker on her car, the thief _punched her in back of the head._”

      This implies the assailant was _behind_ the Texas girl, since he punched her from behind. So: HOW COULD SHE KNOW HE “NOTICED HER BUMPER STICKER”?

      Did he preface his punch to the back of her head with a narrative statement – “Excuse me, miss, but I notice a McCain bumper sticker on your car.” – BAM.

      For that matter, how did he know the alleged car was hers?

      We don’t have details so far. – post by cburell

  • Police said the woman, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of College Station, Texas, refused medical attention.
    • Why would she refuse medical attention? – post by cburell
  • Todd told police she was withdrawing money just before 9 p.m. Wednesday when a man approached her from behind, put a knife to her neck and demanded money, police said. She said she gave him $60.
    • Okay, I live in Asia, where stuff like this doesn’t happen often at all.

      So is a 9pm attack on a city street so easy to believe in Pittsburgh? – post by cburell

  • The robber then noticed the bumper sticker, punched her in the back of the head, knocked her down and used the knife to carve a “B” on the right side of her face, the woman told police.
    • See question 1. – post by cburell
  • It was unclear what the “B” was meant to symbolize, Richard said.
    • CNN adds: “Richard said the woman described her alleged attacker as a dark-skinned African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.”

      Hello, Willie Horton. A tall one, at that. Big black man – perfect. – post by cburell

    • But we’re all supposed to infer “Barack,” surely?

      Or “Bigot”? – post by cburell

  • McCain spokesman Peter Feldman confirmed that the woman is a campaign volunteer but declined to comment further.
    • What will the investigation of this woman reveal about her background? Here the whole DIGITAL FOOTPRINT angle becomes fascinating. She’s going to be so scrutinized. – post by cburell
  • The Republican candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, called Todd on Thursday afternoon to express their concern, the campaign confirmed.
    • So McCain and Palin decide with this call to connect their campaign with what, if true, is a street crime, and make it a campaign issue.

      Now they’ve got a red herring to bring up when people mention the “kill him,” “traitor,” “Muslim,” “socialist,” “off with his head,” “Arab,” and other comments coming out of their supporters’ mouths at rallies. – post by cburell

  • Police said no police photo had been taken of the woman Wednesday, but by Thursday afternoon a purported picture of a woman with a “B” scratched into her cheek was circulating on the Internet.
    • So the police take no photo, but a photo is circulating on the internet.

      Then who took the photo? Why didn’t the police take one? Who decided to put it on the internet? Why?

      And why was the “B” scratched backwards? – post by cburell

• Editorial – Barack Obama – Editorial Board – Endorsement – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  A fine analysis of the issues, how the candidates compare on them, and an evaluation of them.

  I usually hated teaching editorial writing to high school classrooms, because either the subjects were lame – freaking school uniforms – or the kids were too dumb to know about real-world issues (which is the usually the fault of schools, which don’t require them to know about current events, and thus looses a herd of ignoramus graduates into the adult world annually).

  Editorials like this and so many other this election year, though (and ESQUIRE MAGAZINE’S is my favorite so far), remind us what a noble form the editorial can be.

  tags: obama, elections08

  • In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

    Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.

    Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.

    • Nice metaphor in that last paragraph. – post by cburell

  • In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

    Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.

    • No, no, no. He’s a socialist. We need to trust Wall Street and the Free Market to correct themselves and save us all. – post by cburell

  • The Economy

    The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain — a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” — is still a believer.

    Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.

    Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.

    Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.

    Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.

    • Please, Joe the (non-)Plumber fans, read that last paragraph. Don’t be taken by the promises of the plutocrats. – post by cburell
  • Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible.
    • I disagree. McCain knows that if his 72-year-old body gave out, THERE IS NO PERSON MORE FIT TO ASSUME THE PRESIDENCY AND LEAD THE WORLD THAN SARAH PALIN.

      I trust John McCain’s honor. He chose her because he knew it was right for America.

      (If you are irony-deaf, please ask a friend whether I mean this.) – post by cburell

  • Both presidential candidates talk about strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia, including NATO, and strongly support Israel. Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that — and not just because the first black president would present a new American face to the world.

    Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.

    Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives.

    Both candidates talk tough on terrorism, and neither has ruled out military action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Obama has called for a serious effort to try to wean Tehran from its nuclear ambitions with more credible diplomatic overtures and tougher sanctions. Mr. McCain’s willingness to joke about bombing Iran was frightening.

  • The Constitution and the Rule of Law

    Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.

    • And shame on you, New York Times, for betraying your duty to democracy by withholding information that would have exposed Bush’s lies until after the 2004 elections.

      This would be a good place for you to endorse a change in your own lowered standards of jouranalistic integrity as well. – post by cburell

  • The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
    • I disagree. Back-room abortions are good for America. More pregnant teens due to abstinence-only sex education is good for America too.

      And if we’re really lucky, McCain/Palin will appoint judges who favor the teaching of the book of Genesis as a science textbook. Fossils and genetics are just tricks of Satan. – post by cburell

  • Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

    He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.

    Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”

    • McCain, seriously, must be saddened to realize what he’s done to his reputation for posterity – and all for a cynical cause that lost anyway. – post by cburell

  • Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”

    This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.

    • Deservedly scathing.

      Will anybody hire Bush/McCain/Palin’s campaign team in future elections? Let’s hope this is end of days for Rick Davis and company. – post by cburell

  • The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.
    • –the end.

      So why do I fear the election might still go to McCain/Palin? – post by cburell

• Polls Show Obama Gaining Among Bush Voters – NYTimes.com

  I’ve been thinking about PRAYER more lately. While it still seems as effective as throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, I’ll do it in asking Whatever Is Out There to save the 21st century from DOOM due to the SWING VOTES OF BIGOTS.

  God save us all if Americans vote based on a COLOR instead of a BRAIN.

  And the funny thing? It seems the CHURCHGOERS – a certain type, anyway – are the ones most likely to be the RACISTS. Don’t you see that too? Mainly poor, uneducated white people.

  I’m on my knees, Jesus. Tell them AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE GOD’S CHILDREN TOO.

  tags: obama, racism, elections08

  • Of potential concern for Mr. Obama’s strategists, however, a third of voters surveyed say they know someone who does not support Mr. Obama because he is black.

• Elana Schor: Sarah Palin won’t be the Republican nominee in 2012 | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

  A laundry list of reasons Palin 2012 is not as realistic as the pundits make it sound. Nice analysis. Possibly because it’s from the UK instead of the FOX or CNN.

  tags: palin, elections08

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