Beyond School

Decrepit Old Fool shares this video setting the record straight about ACORN, and the Republican Party’s history of attacking voter registration drives among the working classes with the admitted purpose of discouraging large voter turnouts:

DOF concludes with this paragraph containing links worth checking out:

The GOP tries to discredit ACORN every election cycle. The last thing they want is poor people voting. If you wanna talk about election fraud, look at voter roll purges and polling complications. And read Blogula Raisa’s Now THIS is voter registration fraud.

–but his entire post summarizes the under-reported details of the ACORN ploy in a bullet list worth reading.

A democracy is a terrible thing to waste with this stunt, which offers no solutions to our country’s problems and, worse still, breeds a divisiveness that adds one more problem to the future.

It’s exciting to see so many people turning onto democracy now anyway, despite the efforts of the losing McTeam.

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To riff off Bush/McCain’s mantra until they woke up last week: The fundamentalisms of our economy are strong.

So here’s to some economic heresy.

With Bush, Obama, McCain, and most of the media all urging us not to think there are alternatives to Main Street paying taxes for Wall Street - being economic fundamentalists spouting suddenly bi-partisan, pro-banking dogma - hats off to Lou Dobbs (and I didn’t think you’d ever hear me say that) for giving a solid chunk of time to listen to an alternative “No Bailout Plan” by my old congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio.

I’m sorely disappointed in Obama, particularly, for joining the Bush stampede to give $.7 trillion to an egregiously corrupt Wall Street. 1 + 1 always equals 2, but this economic crisis isn’t a math problem with only one solution. Obama should show that, his over $9 million in campaign contributions from the banking industry notwithstanding, he can lead against it when appropriate.

As for McCain? He’s put deregulation first for 26 years - enough said.

So give a listen to these good economic heretics, and consider joining them in urging the Congress not to rush us all into a give-away that may not even solve the problem. See my last post for more.

h/t to Crooks and Liars’ very lively comment thread for tipping me off, way out here in Korea, to this CNN clip:

Thom Hartmann has yet another take on a possible “No Bailout” plan:

How Wall Street Can Bail Itself Out Without Destroying The Dollar

For Grover “Drown Government In The Bathtub” Norquist, this bailout deal will work out very well. At a proposed cost of $4,780 per taxpayer, it’ll further the David Stockman strategy of so indebting us that the next president won’t have the luxury of even thinking of new social spending (expanding health care, social security, education, infrastructure, etc.); taxes will even have to be raised just to pay for the bailout. It’ll debase our currency, driving up commodity prices and interest rates, which will benefit the Investor Class while further impoverishing the pesky Middle Class, rendering them less prone to protest (because they’re so busy working trying to pay off their debt). It’ll create stagflation for at least the next half decade, which can be blamed on Democrats who currently control Congress and, should Obama be elected, be blamed on him.

But there’s another way: Create an agency to fund the bailout, loan that agency the money from the treasury, and then have that agency tax Wall Street to pay us (the treasury) back.

It’s been done before, and has several benefits…..(read on)

I’m no economist. But judging by the inability of the experts to explain their plan’s superiority to other plans, I’m not convinced blindly following their rush to a hand-out is the sensible thing to do. Shouldn’t we at least consider the argument that drastic measures should come only when more moderate, less expensive, and more just ones fail?

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A little ice-breaker after my fear-frozen last post: CollegeHumor.com also found noteworthy Matt Damon’s comments about Palin leading the US government and military. But they had fun with it, bless ‘em. Enjoy (and h/t to Crooks and Liars).

(And on an educational note, if any of you have student films that so creatively comment on history or current affairs, feel free to drop a link to them in the comment thread. I’d love to see students given the freedom to make this kind of commentary in the classroom.)

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[Update: To learn more about Palin's ties to a disturbingly extreme, theocratic wing of Christianity, see these articles from the Christian website, "Talk to Action: Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith." They substantiate all claims with sources, and are very fair. This article is a good, comprehensive start.]

From CNN: A Feature on Palin’s Church:

From MSNBC: A Feature on Palin’s Witch-Hunting Guest Pastor:

From Palin’s Church in 2005, the Witch-Hunter’s Theocratic Sermon, Followed by His Blessing of Front-and-Center Sarah Palin:

Speaking in tongues is not gibberish; it is talking to God. Bush knew that was true, that God’s hand directed him to invade Iraq and otherwise lead the United States. Bin Laden is equally certain he knows God Allah. Faith healing works. Witches and demons exist in our world and we must engage in magical warfare against them. Creationism is truer than evolution, and should be taught in science classes. Dinosaurs roamed the world 6,000 years ago, at the same time Adam and Eve did. Books should be banned, and librarians that don’t want to ban books should be fired. God wants oil pipelines in Alaska. God supports American wars. Women impregnated by rape or incest should not be allowed to terminate the pregnancy. Alaska is a refuge for the Tribulation during the End Times prophecied in the book of Revelation. People voting for Kerry in ‘04 would go to hell. A witch-hunter’s prayer to a Roman Empire god will influence democratic elections in the 21st Century Space Age.

It’s good to see CNN give scrutiny to this, though it’s far less of a media issue than Obama’s pastor Wright. Why? Wright was criticizing America’s history of racism and imperialism, which are issues reasonable people can disagree on. Palin’s 2005 preacher¹ believes in - and hunts - witches, the existence of which reasonable people, by definition, should agree is not supported by any solid evidence.

Does anybody else find it weird that a Hollywood actor - Matt Damon - offers more relevant questions about all of this than the mainstream media does? (h/t to Undiplomatic)

And does anybody find it equally weird that Rolling Stone Magazine, as far as I’ve been able to see, has best expressed the outrage any sensible person should feel? Here’s a clip:

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night [that Palin addressed the Republican National Convention], I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman — reportedly his real preference — by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here, I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin’s speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker - and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. It was a virtuoso performance. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, “five children later” is “still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

– and here’s the rest - well worth the read for both its writing and its diagnosis of a super-power become hellishly frightening.

Don’t believe me? Look at what many parents are doing to their children before they ever enter school:

And America wonders why it has fallen behind the world in science.

What do you think: will this topic be addressed at the VP debate this Thursday? Should it be?

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1. and yes, he was a regular guest preacher, but we don’t invite unwelcome guests to speak to us [↩]

1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge.

(click for larger image)

Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most:

a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ‘98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US news or TV as a habit since then.  I get my news primarily from political and cultural blogs.  Yet I scored 11/12 correct, compared to 7.4/12 correct for US college graduates.  The question:  What does this say about the US mainstream media’s performance in contributing to an informed citizenry? (I assume most Americans still watch and read mainstream US news.  Maybe I’m wrong.)

b) How does our e-blogosphere and -twittersphere measure up against these results?  If we educators are similarly uninformed, are we connecting at the expense of staying informed?

The State of the Republic reflected in these results makes the following two entries a bit more understandable:

2. Texas Board of Education Approves Bible Study Elective Class

Here’s FOX News on the story

(Historically-informed people will notice that the blond “expert” perpetuates the fallacy that America’s founding fathers were Christians, when many of them were either partly or fully Deist, believing little of the miracle stories or other magical claims of the Church. And she’s going to be teaching the classes )

The New York Times adds this bit of research, to pre-empt the “there’s nothing wrong with teaching it as history” argument:

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Since Texas shares with California the biggest sway in national education issues, this bit of nose-thumbing at the Constitutional separation of Church and State is not trivial - instead, it’s a retreat from the third millennium to the first.

Secular and non-Christian parents in Texas must be thrilled to pay for religious indoctrination in their schools.  And perhaps the money should go instead to basic geography and geopolitics, as the next item shows:

3. McCain Looks at “Struggle” on the “Iraq-Pakistan Border”

So okay, forgive him on his internet illiteracy, his fifth-from-the-bottom GPA from the Naval Academy, his admitted “need for education” on economics.  As he says, he’s still better at foreign policy, right?

I hate to say “wrong,” but jeez, watch this 20-second interview clip and tell me how not to?

McCain: We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

–what else can I say, as a social studies teacher, but sheesh: wrong.  There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. (Unless he plans to create one by occupying Iran - surely the most justifiably nervous country on the planet. Sandwiched between the US occupation of Iraq on the west and of Afghanistan on the east, and sitting on some massive oil deposits, wouldn’t you be paranoid about your defense?)

Defenders will say this was maybe a slip-up, or his advisers are there to save us from his “knowledge”-base, or whatever, but I don’t buy it for two reasons: first, we’re seeing a pattern and a history of what I’ll politely call “deficient understanding of basic things” in this candidate; and second, we ignored similar warning signs from the last president and elected him based on his persona instead of his intelligence - and look where that got everybody.

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