Obama Is A Disaster

This is the first and probably only time you will see me agree with Peggy Noonan:

Peggy Noonan: "The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But--it has to be repeated--they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it."

Incompetent beyond belief.

This is the same president who came to P-Tech this week to brag about his education reform agenda and how it was making education better for students all across the nation.

But of course his education reform agenda is a disaster of monumental proportions, just like Obamacare.

The consequences are being seen in the numbers of parents across the nation joining the anti-Common Core and anti-testing movements, the numbers of children saying they hate school and never want to go back, and the numbers of teachers quitting the profession or looking to quit it because of the scripted lessons, the teacher evaluations tied to test scores and the harmful Common Core standards, the idiotic curriculum that has been developed around it, and the damaging tests created to "assess" whether it has been learned by children.

This man has been a disaster as a president, as bad as George W. Bush.

And don't even get me started on the spying, the drone bomb killings, the war on whistleblowers, etc.

Democrats Keep Conceding - Obama Wants To Cut Social Security

 Same old same old.

Democrats keep conceding on all their so-called deal-breaker issues and keep giving the GOP everything they want in this fake "fiscal cliff crisis."

President Obama said he wouldn't accept any fiscal cliff deal that didn't raise taxes on families making more than $250,000.

Republicans balked at that level, so Dems raised that threshold to $400,000

But that wasn't good enough for Republicans either, so now Dems have agreed to raise taxes only on people making more than $450,000.

But that still isn't good enough for Republicans.

The Washington Post reports they are holding out for a $550,000 threshold, and since Dems have conceded on almost every other point, Republicans think they can get it.

In addition, Dems were demanding estate taxes go up from their low levels, but Republicans have fought that and the Post reports the following:

Democrats also relented on the politically sensitive issue of the estate tax, according to a detailed account of the Democratic offer obtained by The Washington Post. They promised instead to hold a vote in the Senate that would guarantee that taxes on inherited estates remain at their current low levels, a key GOP demand.

One point Dems have so far held their ground is on Social Security - but only because they plan to use Social Security cuts as a future bargaining chip.

Republicans want to change the way inflation increases are calculated so that Social Security recipients will get less money each year - this way, there will be more money for tax cuts for rich people.

President Obama is a big fan of this change as well, having made the offer as part of the Grand Bargain he tried to make with John Boehner a few years ago as well as part of the Grander Bargain he tried to make with Boehner a few weeks ago.

But Senate Dems fought changing that calculation in this part of the fiscal cliff negotiation and Republicans dropped the demand, realizing that fighting to cut Social Security while simultaneously fighting tax increases on rich people wasn't a winning political strategy.

Don't worry GOPers - according to the Washington Post, the president and his merry men and women plan to give you those cuts to Social Security in short order:

 Obama had offered to include chained CPI in the big deficit-reduction package he had been negotiating with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) earlier this month. Obama endorsed the idea again Sunday, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” calling it a tough decision he was willing to make “in pursuit of strengthening Social Security for the long term.”

But many Democrats say they would go along with the idea only as part of a far-reaching deal that also included at least $1.2 trillion in new tax revenue over the next decade. The deal under discussion Sunday would raise far less than that, somewhere between $600 billion and $800 billion.

“Chained CPI should be part of the larger discussion about the future of Social Security,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), “not just a casual bargaining chip here at the last minute.”

So Obama and the Dems plan a sell-out on Social Security and they, like Republicans, want to make sure older people live on generic dog food and food pantry offerings - they just want to get more from Republicans in the bargain.

Where are all those liberals and progressives, the ones who said they would hold Obama to his alleged progressive principles after his re-election, the ones who said Romney would be an "unthinkable" alternative to Obama?

They are effectively silent as Obama and the Dems concede on every major point and get ready to sell out working and middle class Americans so that the wealthy and the corporations - the 1% - can continue to rape and pillage the rest of us.

So far, Obama has cut food stamps in order to fund his Race to the Top education reforms, is going to force Americans without health care to buy shitty private insurance, is looking to cut Social Security and Medicare, and has promoted public school privatization.

In the foreign affairs sphere, Obama murders innocents every month in drone bombs strikes - including children just like the ones killed in that awful Sandy Hook shooting earlier in the month.

He has a "kill list" and has declared he can murder any American at any time for any reason if the government suspects - just suspects - that person is guilty of terrorism.

He has extended warrantless wiretapping and expanded the state surveillance apparatus in the name of "keeping us safe," and has condoned the torture of Bradley Manning after declaring publicly that Manning is guilty of a crime the government hadn't yet tried him for.

And let's not forget how Obama's DOJ and DHS helped coordinate the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns all across the country.

I get the part about Romney being a horrific president.

But considering his record in both domestic and foreign affairs, Barack Obama is pretty horrific too.

Oh well - thank God we got him re-elected instead of that "unthinkable" alternative.

We'll make sure we hold him accountable to his campaign promises and alleged progressive principles, won't we?

NY Times: Obama Looked To Codify "Kill List" Before The Election In Case Romney Won

Believing few things are more important than institutionalizing his drone bomb campaign that slaughters innocents the world over in order to keep us "safe" from terrorism, President Obama and his advisers worked very hard to codify the rules of the program pre-election:

 A report in the New York Times on Sunday describes how, leading up to the recent US election, the Obama administration made a determined push to codify guidelines for its targeted assassination (aka 'Kill List') program and clarify rules for the use of US predator drones strikes overseas.

 Critics of the US drone program have long made the argument that Demoractic supporters of the President would perhaps lose their enthusiasm (or passive acceptance) for the "kill list" program if it was placed in the hands of a Republican president like the party's most recent hopeful, Mitt Romney.
The Times reporting on Sunday seems to indicate that the fear of handing over an amiguous and secretive assassination program to a Republican administration was also shared by some top officials in the Obama administration.

Reported by the paper's Scott Shane, the article says that the "attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes."

Though the Obama administration has continually sought to protect the secrecy of certain details of its program, it has simultaneously defended its usefulness in combating international terrorism. This contradiction has been seized by international human rights groups, US civil libertarians, journalists, and the United Nations, calling on the US government to come clean on how it justifies the extrajudicial killing of individuals--both foreign citizens and American nationals--in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and others.

Shane reports that "the president and top aides believe [the programs] should be institutionalized," and that efforts to do "seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency."

The hypocrisy of liberals and progressives on this issue astounds me.

Change one word in the Times article - switch "Obama" for "Bush" - and you can bet that liberals and progressives would be up in arms over this program.

But because it's their guy in charge, it's a good program, a necessary program, one that is used judiciously by a judicious president.

Bullshit.

Read this Glenn Greenwald column from late September on a Stanford/NYU study of the consequences of the drone bomb campaign on civilians, on the propaganda the Obama administration uses to justify this slaughter of innocents, on their targeting of funerals and even emergency responders to initial drone attacks, on the complicity of the media in this propaganda campaign and then tell me this program is less harmful and murderous because a Democrat is heading it as opposed to a Republican.

Here is a taste:

Significantly, the report says the prime culprit of these evils is what it calls the "dramatic escalation" of the drone campaign by the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate - escalated not just in sheer numbers (in less than four years, Obama "has reportedly carried out more than five times" the number ordered by Bush in eight years), but more so, the indiscriminate nature of the strikes. As Tuesday's Guardian article on this report states: it "blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of 'signature strikes' in which groups are selected merely through remote 'pattern of life' analysis."

 The report is equally damning when documenting the attempts of the Obama administration to suppress information about its drone victims, and worse, to actively mislead when they deign selectively to release information. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the number of civilian deaths with exactitude - due to "the opaqueness of the US government about its targeted killing program" as well as the inaccessibility of the region - it nonetheless documents that "the numbers of civilians killed are undoubtedly far higher than the few claimed by US officials." In other words, the administration's public statements are false: "undoubtedly" so. As the LA Times summarizes the study's findings today: "Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged."

Before the election, I attempted to ask a few people who claimed they were voting for Obama over Romney despite his education policies because on other issues, he was the clear moral choice about the immorality of the drone bomb campaign.

I didn't get much response from anybody.

I suspect it's because they either live in denial that this is happening or know it but do not wish to acknowledge it publicly.

The hypocrisy Obama supporters, liberals and progressives on this issue is just infuriating.

As Greenwald notes, not only do these people ignore the crimes and murders perpetrated by the Obama administration under the guise of the War on Terror, but they actively cheer them (as at the DNC.)

And again, it's with this moral superiority complex - we're more reflective and thoughtful about this stuff then the Bushies, Obama reads Aquinas before ordering the strikes, so somehow this has a moral justification that Bush's policies didn't.

I don't see anything moral about this drone bomb campaign or the man in charge of it.

Rather I see a war criminal who is murdering lots of innocent people on a weekly basis who belongs in a jail cell next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley, Yoo, et al.

Death From The Skies: U.S. Kills 13 In Pakistan In Three Separate Drone Attacks

To celebrate the end of Ramadan, President Barack Obama ordered some drone attacks on Pakistan:

A flurry of US drone attacks pounded northern Pakistan over the weekend, killing 13 people in three separate attacks, officials and witnesses said on Sunday.

The attacks came as Pakistanis celebrate the end of the holy month of Ramadan with the festival of Eid al-Fitr.

A drone killed five people and injured two in North Waziristan early on Sunday morning, an intelligence official said.

He said the death toll was based on intercepted conversations between the militants.

Later on Sunday, another drone attack killed two people and injured two others near the site of the previous attack, said two intelligence officials.

On Saturday, a drone attack killed six people and injured two.

The dead were local Taliban and fighters from the southern province of Punjab, said security officials and a tribal source.

Sure they were local Taliban fighters.

I believe everything my government tells me.

Except when they, you know, lie and cover things up.

Notice how they pick celebratory times so they can maximize the killing?

Or better yet, how they pick funerals of drone bomb victims as perfect opportunities for another drone bomb strike?

Or best yet, how they target the rescuers who flood the scene of a drone attack to help the victims?

What great American efficiency! Kill the people who show up at the scene of a drone attack with another drone attack!

Remind me again how the murderous fucker in the White House won a Nobel Peace Prize?

Actually I guess he fits in with another murderous fucker who won the Nobel Peace Prize - Henry Kissinger.

Obama, Bloomberg Talk Education And Other Matters

Monday morning scary story:

They traded thoughts about education, ruminated on the state of immigration and discussed the federal deficit.

But most intriguingly, they talked about the future. Over a long private lunch at the White House, President Obama posed a question to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: what are you interested in doing next?

Mr. Bloomberg’s precise response is unknown. But their meeting a few weeks ago, confirmed by aides to both leaders and previously undisclosed, was potentially significant for both men, as Mr. Obama seeks support for his presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg ponders his post-mayoral career.

Mr. Obama, facing a bruising re-election fight, is eager to attract the kind of centrist, independent voters drawn to Mr. Bloomberg’s brand of politics.

Mr. Bloomberg, confronting the end of his career in elected office, is grappling with how to exert the kind of influence over public discourse that he has had as mayor of the nation’s largest city.

The lunch invitation is striking because Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Obama are thought not to be particularly close — nor to have an especially warm relationship. But the White House seems intent on courting Mr. Bloomberg.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said the lunch was part of a continuing dialogue that the president very much valued. Over the last two years, Mr. Obama has invited Mr. Bloomberg to play golf on Martha’s Vineyard and has dispatched Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Gracie Mansion to seek the mayor’s views on the economy.

“They speak from time to time,” Mr. Carney said. “The president always enjoys an exchange of ideas and insights with Mayor Bloomberg and is appreciative of the mayor’s leadership on immigration, the economy and education, as well as his commitment to New York City.”

This is why the president's education policies and the mayor's education policies are inseparable - fire teachers, close schools, add standardized tests to every subject in every grade, tie teacher evaluations to those scores using an error-riddled VAM formula, tie teacher pay to those test scores.

When Mayor Bloomberg closes 33 SIG schools this year and fires half of the teachers, he will be using a policy developed and promoted by Barack Obama.

I just want to remind people of that fact as the 2012 campaign gears up.

People love to demonize Bloomberg as the villain in the Ed Deform World, and there is no doubt that Bloomberg relishes playing that role (see here for his star turn.)

But after eight years of the Obama administration, the same policies that Bloomberg pushes - school closing, teacher firings, charter school openings, testing, teacher evals and pay tied to scores - will be enshrined in every state in the nation as education policy by Barack Obama and his USDOE.

Duncan Claims Education Is Civil Rights Issue, But Promotes De Facto Segregation, Other Harms, Through Education Policy

The NY Times runs a story today that says black students, particularly boys, receive harsher discipline in public schools, than students of other backgrounds:

Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

Then the Times offers the obligatory boilerplate quote from the cliche-meister at the USDOE:

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

Do you mean like segregated schools, Secretary Duncan? You know, like all those charter schools you promote?

Or schools where white teachers drill students of color on how to behave or toss them out of school?

Or schools where white teachers do nothing but teach to the test so that students do not learn critical thinking skills?

Or promoting policies that target black educators for firing?

Because if those are the things you mean by your boilerplate quote that “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise," then look no further than at yourself and your boss, President Obama, as the prime culprit for this at the federal level.

Ironic that the first black president promotes policies that are re-segregating schools and diminishing the kinds of educational experiences and critical thinking skills so desperately needed by young people in a time of social and economic change like we have today.

But that's exactly what President Obama is doing, through his education policies.

And the damage from these policies is horrific.

As Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Radio put it:

Educational policy in the Obama era isn’t about education at all. It’s about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

So Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan can bemoan how public education is harming students of color and offer platitudes about civil rights all he wants.

The fact of the matter is, he and his boss are at the vanguard of the destruction.

Obama Lies About His Education Policy

The lies about education came fast and furious from Obama last night during the State of the Union speech:

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning – the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies – just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

What?

Stop bashing teachers?

Stop making teachers teach to the test?

Who do you think has put in place an education policy "for less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year" that institutionalizes bashing teachers and forcing them to teach to the test?

Who do you think leads the charge toward destroying the teaching profession AND public schools by forcing states to tie teacher evaluations and pay scales to test scores?

Who do you think is forcing states and districts to add tests to every subject in every grade, K-12, and putting such high stakes on them that teachers will do nothing BUT teach to the test?

Who do you think is forcing states to take money out of the classroom and put it into test development, data tracking systems, PD classes, outside education consultants and other jive that robs children and teachers of the necessary classroom materials needed for a quality education?

Who put in place the policy that brought about the firing of all those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island and is now bringing about the policy that allows Bloomberg to shutter 33 "persistently low-achieving" schools in NYC and fire 1,750 teachers?

Who is STILL blaming teachers in his SOTU speech by ending all of his education drivel with this: "let’s replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn."

The truth is, the evaluation mechanisms you have helped to put in place are not going to tell you whether the teachers you fire are ones who "aren't helping kids learn."

They will help districts and states shed expensive teachers, however.

Which is the point.

Obama invited an educator from Pennsylvania to sit with Michelle Obama in her box for the speech.

The teacher was part of a group who continued to work even after the district could no longer afford to pay them.

The message from Obama on that is clear - teachers are missionaries who MUST give everything of themselves, even their livelihoods, if they want respect from the establishment.

The Obama policies are certainly helping states to do just that to teachers.

Had I been that educator, I would have spent the entire time explaining to dear Michelle just how full of crap her husband is, how he lies every time he opens his mouth on education, how his education policies are so destructive they are starting to make the Bush education policies look like Waldorf schooling.

I would have made her regret inviting me to that box to play teacher public relations figure for an administration that is the most anti-teacher, anti-education in history.

And it would have taken all of my effort to not stand up during Obama's speech and shout "You lie!" when the president spoke all these lies about teachers and education.

Nobel Peace-Prize Winning Obama Continues To Have Innocents Slaughtered

While Obama enjoys his mac&cheese, ham, turkey, and seven kinds of desserts at his Thanksgiving dinner at the White House, here is what he is ordering the U.S. military to do:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Six children were among seven civilians killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Thursday.

The deaths occurred on Wednesday in Zhare District of Kandahar Province, an area described by coalition forces as largely pacified in recent months, and two insurgents were also killed, the Afghan officials said.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, said the authorities were aware of the episode and had sent a team to the district to investigate. He said ISAF had not previously issued a news release on the deaths.

Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar, said that a NATO reconnaissance aircraft spotted five militants planting mines in the village of Siacha, in Zhare District on Wednesday. The plane targeted the insurgents, killing two and wounding a third, and then pursued the other two suspects as they carried their injured comrade away.

“The plane chased them, the insurgents entered a street where children were playing and as a result of its shooting, seven people have been killed, including six children, and two girls also have been injured,” Mr. Ayoubi said. The victims were members of two families.

Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.

His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter, who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.

“There were no Taliban in the field, this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines,” Mr. Samad said. “I have been to the scene and haven’t found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven.”

This guy won a Nobel Peace Prize?

What a joke.

Obama ought to be in a jail cell for war criminals, right next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the rest.

You can imagine the names people would call any terrorist who was responsible for the killing of innocent American children.

But what do they call Obama, a man who is responsible for just that, sans the "American" part?

Nobel Peace Prize winner.

OWS Protesters Heckle Obama

Now THIS is change I can believe in:

Hecklers occupied some of President Obama's time Tuesday during a speech about the state of the economy.

As the President began his remarks in front a crowd packed into a Manchester, N.H., high school gym, Occupy Wall Streeters could be heard chanting, "Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested while 'banksters' continue to destroy the American economy."

Obama's water carriers in the crowd quickly chanted louder than the OWS protesters, but even Obama had to acknowledge the OWS message:

"Listen, I'm going to be talking about a whole range of things today," he said. "I appreciate you guys making your point. Let me go ahead and make mine, all right?"

As the 2012 campaign goes on, it is vital that Obama be made to face his failures and sellouts on jobs, the economy, the bank bailouts, the trade agreements and the rest that has helped make income inequality the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression.

I would love to see OWS people show up at both Obama and Romney events and disrupt the proceedings, but I think it is particularly important that Obama not get to play populist or progressive this time around.

He is a corporatist president who has run a corporatist administration.

Make him defend that.

Obama The Dictator

He's more and more like George W, isn't he:

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

If the president does it, it's legal.

That's the Obama theory of executive power.

That was George W Bush's too.

And Nixon's.

No wonder Arne Duncan thinks he can extort states to agree to his Race to the Top guidelines if they want waivers to the NCLB regulations that will soon have 90% of the nation's schools declared "failing."

Under the Obama theory of governance, cabinet secretaries get to make law or change the ones they don't like.

But that just ain't right.

As Rick Hess pointed out here, cabinet secretaries are not given the constitutional powers to make law.

Neither is the president.

The Congress is.

And even if the president or his cabinet secretaries think that the Congress is not acting in a timely manner to legislate, the Constitution does not give them the power to create law in the Congress's place.

Just as the Constitution doesn't give the president the right to declare war.

But I guess following the Constitution is an archaic practice these days.

People who want the president to follow the Constitution in matters of war and domestic policy are hopelessly wedded to the status quo and just don't care about the nation's security and welfare.

And one only have one shot to educate our kids or save the Libyan people, so we just can't afford to wait for the Congress to act on these matters.

This is what empire looks like when it is heading toward fascism and autocracy.

Arne Duncan: Give Us What We Want On Merit Pay, Charters And Teacher Evals Or We Declare All Your Schools "Failures" Under NCLB

The fascists at the USDOE have decided that since NCLB isn't going to be re-authorized in the way that Obama and his education reform jackboots want, they're going to by-pass the legislative process completely and resort to bribery and extortion to get their way on "reform":

Unless Congress acts by this fall to overhaul No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signaled that he would use his executive authority to free states from the law’s centerpiece requirement that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

The Obama administration has been facing a mounting clamor from state school officials to waive substantial parts of the law, which President Bush signed in 2002, especially its requirement that states bring 100 percent of students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014 or else face sanctions. In March, Mr. Duncan predicted that the law would classify 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools as failing this fall unless it was amended.

But his efforts to address the problem have gained little traction on Capitol Hill, where several attempts since 2007 to rewrite the sprawling school accountability law have failed.

“We’re not going to sit here and do nothing,” Mr. Duncan told reporters on Friday in a conference call that was embargoed until midnight Saturday. “Our first priority is to have Congress rewrite the law. If that doesn’t get done, we have the obligation to provide relief in exchange for reform.”

While the secretary said it was premature to lay out specific plans for potential waivers, his aides said that the 100 percent proficiency standard would be the main target, and that restrictions on how federal money is spent could be relaxed. Mr. Duncan said in exchange for such flexibility, states would have to embrace President Obama’s education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition, which awarded money to those that opened new space for charter schools, toughened teacher evaluation systems, and remade their worst-performing schools, among other things.

...

Mr. Duncan said the administration would immediately reach out to governors, state school commissioners and other leaders to begin negotiations over the potential waivers, asking which provisions of the law they consider the most serious obstacles and what kinds of school improvement policies they would be willing to undertake in exchange.

Give Obama and Duncan what they want on "reforms" or you get no waiver and your entire state education system gets declared "failing" and closed down under the law.

That's the threat Duncan just issued.

At what point do people in this country say "Enough!" of these Washington jackboots deciding what is good education policy and shoving it down the throats of all 50 states?

For that matter, how will this play on Capitol Hill where the Obama administration has just said "If you don't act on our timetable, we're going to supersede you and the legislative process"?

Isn't that what Obama just did on Libya?

And now he's doing it on NCLB.

Don't think that hasn't gone unnoticed:

Sandy Kress, an Austin lawyer who as a senior education adviser to Mr. Bush helped devise the No Child Left Behind law, said he saw trouble in the administration’s new stance.

“This idea of, ‘if you don’t act, we’re going to go do these massive things’ — to me there’s the feel of a threat to Congress in it,” Mr. Kress said.

Chester E. Finn, a Republican who is president of the Fordham Institute, an education research group, said the Congressional inaction was leading to an increasingly serious impasse in American government.

“If you believe in the rule of law, this is not good,” Mr. Finn said. “If the Congress can’t fix, after 10 years, something that is widely seen as in need of repair, and the executive takes the law into its own hands, then we are looking at a dysfunctional government and a disruption of our separation of powers.”

But Mr. Duncan said his authority was clear, and his aides sent reporters an e-mail copy of the legislative language: “the secretary may waive any statutory or regulatory requirement of this act.”

Mr. Duncan said: “What I want to see in the fall is real action. It’ll either come from Congress or from us. It’s got to happen in real-people time, not Washington time.”

If Obama decides he gets to make the law and the hell with the Congress on this, then the time has come to impeach him.

It's that simple.

Failed President

Heckuva job, Barack!

The public opinion boost President Obama received after the killing of Osama bin Laden has dissipated, and Americans’ disapproval of how he is handling the nation’s economy and the deficit has reached new highs, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey portrays a broadly pessimistic mood in the country this spring as higher gasoline prices, sliding home values and a disappointing employment picture have raised fresh concerns about the pace of the economic recovery.

By 2 to 1, Americans say the country is pretty seriously on the wrong track, and nine in 10 continue to rate the economy in negative terms. Nearly six in 10 say the economy has not started to recover, regardless of what official statistics may say, and most of those who say it has improved rate the recovery as weak.

New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.

Overall, about six in 10 of those surveyed give Obama negative marks on the economy and the deficit. Significantly, nearly half strongly disapprove of his performance in these two crucial areas. Nearly two-thirds of political independents disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, including — for the first time — a slim majority who do so strongly.

In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue.

The president has sought to point to progress on the economy, particularly in the automobile industry, and to argue that the policies he put in place at the beginning of his term are working. But the combined effects of weak economic indicators and dissatisfaction among the public are adding to the political pressures on the White House as the president’s advisers look toward what could be a difficult 2012 reelection campaign.

Let's run down the failures of this president to put things right with the economy:

1. Stimulus too small
2. Stimulus gave us garbage like Race to the Top instead of a jobs bill that would have put people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of this country
3. Renominated Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, doubling down on the print and mint monetary policy
4. Bought into deficit reduction frame of economic story long before recovery took hold, legitimizing all the downsizing that is now leading to mass layoffs and budget cuts which are further damaging a weak economy
5. Held NOT one Wall Street criminal accountable for financial collapse of '08, instead handed out trillions in bailout money and rubberstamped Wall Street criminal activity in the process as A-OK
6. HAMP mortgage mess which made things worse in the housing market for many homeowners

And those are just the ones I can of off the top of my head.

So if the president's re-election chances are going from slam Arne Duncan to ruh-roh Shaggy!, it's really his own fault.

The theme for the administration should have been jobs, jobs, jobs.

It should have been protecting the middle and working classes from the economic ravages of globalism.

It should have been rebuilding this country's infrastructure and putting people to work with good paying jobs while doing it.

Instead we got TALF, HAMP and RttT.

Maybe Obama will get a trip back to RahmEmanueland for his arrogance and short-sightedness.

More About The New City Tests

The writer of this morning's Times piece about the new battery of city tests the Mayor and his ed deform braintrust plan to add to the city school system in order to evaluate teachers adds a little more to the story:

Officials at the New York City Department of Education provided some more information on Tuesday about the potential cost of the up to 16 new tests they are developing to grade teachers.

Instead of spending up to 25 percent of its $256 million in Race to the Top grant winnings to develop the new tests, the city will spend at most $25.6 million, 10 percent, on the tests, officials said on Tuesday. They will spend another $38 million on other aspects of the development of the new principal and teacher evaluation system.

And as a debate over the merits of the tests takes place on our Web site, we also wanted to offer some more information to fuel the discussion. For example, while the tests will count for up to 20 percent of a teacher’s annual evaluation, schools will be able to decide how much the tests count for the children who take them. That means the exams may carry the same weight, for example, as a regular classroom assignment, or a unit test, or not at all.

Daniel Koretz, a Harvard University testing expert whose analysis of the state standardized tests in English and math helped lead New York to acknowledge that scores had become inflated through test preparation, has expressed concern about the proposed design of the city’s new tests, because, he says, they are trying to do many things at once. The city wants to use the new tests both to transform and improve instruction and hold the teachers accountable for their students’ performance.

But Jennifer L. Jennings, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who also studies tests, also raised another issue last week about the proposed design of the exams that we did not get to explore. She expressed concern that giving the test in two parts and judging the teacher on how much improvement is made could influence teacher and principal behavior in an unusual way. “You have a huge incentive to have your kids underperform on the first test,” she said, “and then maximize performance on the second test.”

Some readers have expressed concern that the students in a class might purposely do poorly on a test to punish a teacher they did not like. That concern was shared by Diane Ravitch, an education historian critical of high-stakes standardized testing, who feels such tests “give the students the power to fire their teachers.”

So here are some questions to ponder:

• What other consequences, unintended or otherwise, do you think the tests could have?
• Does their lower cost projection affect your opinion?
• Could they make a positive addition to instruction, by pushing teachers to focus on writing and other higher-order skills?
• If you were a principal or teacher, how much would you recommend the tests count for students?

You can leave a comment at the end of the post - so far, most of the comments I read to both this morning's story and this one are negative toward the city's plans.

If Bloomberg gets away with this (and remember, the UFT has the ability to make sure he doesn't by refusing to okay the tests), you can be pretty sure that the teachers who remain in the system will be forced to teach to both the state and city tests and nothing else.

You can be sure that students with behavioral problems will be bounced around like pinballs because no teacher in her/his right mind is going to want to have to deal with behavioral issues if they have even one iota of an effect on other students in a class.

You can be sure that the evaluation system will be rife with mistakes and excellent teachers will be labeled "ineffective" and fired, after they are publicly humiliated in the newspapers and the media.

Remember that the UFT is currently litigating the right of the DOE to release the TDR's to the media for widespread dispersal. The UFT has already lost the first case, is appealing, but could lose that case on appeal.

If so, teacher evaluations will be in the newspapers every year, even though the value-added measurements used to grade teachers are rife with error.

This is a mess, for sure, and while Bloomberg and Klein and the rest of the ed deform proponents of this testing claim it will improve education and hold teachers accountable, it is not meant to do any such thing.

It is meant to destroy the public education system as currently constituted - to force schools to spend millions on test prep and test prep materials, to give districts the tools to fire as many expensive vets as possible and clean the system out of anybody with any seniority whatsoever.

The 25/55 agreement of a few years ago changed how long it takes teachers to get vested into a pension. It's now 10 years.

You can be sure that the city and state politicians want to fire as many vets as possible, replace them with newbies or computer programs, then fire those newbies before they make it to ten years (and a pension.)

The new system allows that to happen, as tenure no longer means anything under the new evaluation rules.

Get declared "ineffective" two years running and you're gone. And you just have to be declared ineffective on 40% of the evaluation to be declared "ineffective" overall.

If the value-added measurements - so complex that even the city admits they have a 25% margin of error - show that you have not "added value" to your students test scores, you're gone whether you have tenure or not.

This is EXACTLY what Cuomo, Bloomberg and the Regents were cooking up over the past few weeks, aided by the Obama administration last year and its Race to the Top Social Darwinist jive.

So now we have the logical extension of the city tests - the tests will only count for teachers, not for students, unless schools declare that they count for students.

In addition, the state is adding tests as well to the year, so a typical high school student could be subjected to fifteen high stakes tests a year or more, depending upon how many classes he/she is taking.

But the stakes are not truly high for the student, they're only high for the teachers who teach him/her.

This is absurd on the face of it, but so far, Bloomberg, Cuomo, Obama and the other proponents of these reforms are getting away with it.

We'll see how this plays out. Bloomberg is gone in 2 and a half years. Mayoral control will be changed next time the law is up for renewal. It is still possible to change the trajectory of this standardized test rocket ship.

But right now, we're headed straight for a system that no one in their right mind would want to either teach in or send their kids to.

As one commenter at the Times said:

As a Brooklyn middle school parent I am seriously considering our family's options. Despite assurances from NYC Education Department "leaders" that teachers won't teach to the test, this new evaluation will ensure it. If a teacher knew that my child's score might affect her salary, his tenure, their future, they will junk traditional methods and make sure our kids know what they'll be tested on and practice, practice, practice. Shame on our schools for not providing a strong, rounded, vigorous curriculum at every school, regardless of privilege or neighborhood. You will let the country know that you put our kids future at stake so you could play the stupid test game.

Indeed.

Obama Touts School With High Attrition Rate Of At-Risk Students As What's Right With Education

Obama hails Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis as the future of education:

President Barack Obama on Saturday called on Congress to overhaul the No Child Left Behind legislation this year, arguing that school systems around the country need the flexibility to tailor education programs to each community’s needs.

“We need to promote reform that gets results while encouraging communities to figure out what’s best for their kids,” Obama said in his weekly address. “That why it’s so important that Congress replace No Child Left Behind this year — so schools have that flexibility. Reform just can’t wait.”

In his remarks, Obama talked about Booker T. Washington High, the Memphis, Tenn., school where he spoke on Monday. He lauded the school for transforming its curriculum and culture in just a few short years and raising its graduation rate from half the student body to four out of five students — achievements that helped the school win the 2011 Race to the Top Commencement Challenge, which challenged schools across the nation to demonstrate their commitment to preparing students for college and a career.

This year, about 70 percent of Booker T. Washington’s students will continue to pursue higher education — a dramatic increase from just a handful who would go on to college in the past.

“So Booker T. Washington High School is no longer a story about what’s gone wrong in education,” Obama said. “It’s a story about how we can set it right.”

But Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post noted this troubling point about the Booker T. Washington High School:

Some things, as we sometimes find out after the fact, are not always what they originally seemed. That may be the case at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, where President Obama is delivering the commencement address today.

The school won the administration’s Race to the Top Commencement Challenge, in which hundreds of schools competed to win an Obama apperance by showing how they have worked to increase their graduation rates and improve student achievement. Obama picked the winner himself from three finalists chosen by the public.

...

The school says its graduation rate jumped from 55% in 2007 to 81.6% in 2010, an accomplishment that would certainly appeal to Obama, who has made increasing high school and college graduation a key education priority.

But here’s the thing: Veteran teacher and author Gary Rubinstein looked into the graduation rate rise and discovered something that casts a different light on that achievement.

Rubinstein, a Teach for America alumnus and author of two books on teaching -- “Reluctant Disciplinarian” and “Beyond Survival” -- wrote on his blog that he looked at demographic figures for Booker T. Washington and found this:

I found that there was a lot of attrition over that four year period. The school enrollment was 760 in 2007, 732 in 2008, 649 in 2009, and then in the ‘miracle’ year 2010, down to 566. So the school had lost nearly 25% of its students in that time period, which is also the exact percent that the graduation rate climbed by.

I looked into this sudden drop in enrollment to find if I could learn if the 200 students who disappeared were the ones who were less likely to graduate. It didn’t take long for me to locate this article, which explains that two housing projects right near the school were torn down, thus displacing the 200 students that account for the drop.

The actual demolition of the projects didn’t happen until a few months after the miracle, but surely people started leaving once they found out about it. Though some of the displaced kids, as the article states, found a way to continue going to their school, most didn’t.... The poorest, and thus least likely to graduate, kids were exactly the ones that the school lost.

The video Booker T. Washington submitted to the contest begins with images of the demolition of one of the projects so this is not something they were trying to hide.

There is more in his blog post about dropout rates and cohort rates that you can read here.

So this leaves an open question as to just how the graduation rate rose at Booker T. Washington.

Asking the question does not negate the real achievements at the school, or make it any less eligible for a presidential visit.

But it does raise the issue of how much stock we put in statistics when we aren’t sure how they were calculated or what they really mean.

25% attrition rate of the most at-risk students.

High poverty projects demolished, the area around the school gentrifying.

And suddenly - it's a miracle!!! - the graduation rates at the school soar.

And this is what Obama touts as "What's right in education!"

Displacing the most at-risk students, phonying up the stats by failing to state the attrition rate and explain the significance of it, then smear the schools those at-risk students eventually wind up in as "drop-out factories" when graduation rates drop there.

This is education reform in a nutshell.

So the president is wrong when he says reform cannot wait.

Reform like this can wait since it doesn't actually solve the problems - it just moves them.

Co-Dependent Teachers Unions: NEA Edition

Obama has been bashing teachers since he got elected.

He cheerled the firing of the Central Falls, Rhode Island teachers.

He put into place the policies that led to those firings and the policies that are now leading to the firing of teachers all over the country.

He denigrates public schools in high poverty areas as "drop-out factories" and calls teachers who work there "failures."

Because of the Obama education policies, NY State teachers will now be evaluated using test scores.

There will be tests added to every subject at every level.

Obama's Secretary of Education Privatization works hand in hand with the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and Pearson Education Services to bring standardized national tests to the country based upon a standardized nation core curriculum that will also will be used to bludgeon teachers and schools and further disempower both.

And yet, the co-dependent National Education Association is set to endorse the president already. Here is what the NEA President, Dennis Van Roekel, said:

This is the time to make decisions about the direction of our country, and we have real choices to make. As activists, engaged educators, we should get involved now. Will we allow Congress to gut Medicare, slash education and cut Social Security, and continue to make it just fine for hedge fund managers and corporations to sidestep paying taxes? Or will we act and assert the real American values of hard work and responsibility, a commitment to a vibrant middle class, to college affordability, and the opportunity to reach the American Dream? It is time to stand strong for what we believe in and what is right for students and families, schools and the nation. President Barack Obama has proven he deserves a second term

.
No wonder Obama relishes abusing unions and teachers. He punches them in the face and kicks them in the teeth over and over, and they can't wait to go and endorse him and work for his re-election.

I for one will NOT be voting for Obama or working for his re-election.

I don't give a shit WHO is running against him.

This "You better vote for Obama or somebody WORSE will win" shit doesn't work with me anymore.

After TALF, after Race to the Top, after Obama's NCLB Jr. blueprint, after Obama's mandated health care that sees people having to buy shitty health insurance they cannot afford to use after the premiums, after Geithner and Summers running the economic policy for the first three years, after the Bernanke renomination, after Obama's silence on Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida, after Obama shared a stage with corporate ed deformer Jeb Bush in Florida and praised the corporate ed deforms Bush is promoting, after Libya, after 9% unemployment FOREVER, and after Obama framed the economic debate in such a way that workers were blamed for the mess and not the banksters and hedge fundies who created it, there is NO FUCKING WAY I am voting for this war criminal/bank bailout dude.

Stop the madness, teachers unions - only support politicians who support you.

Obama does NOT support either teachers or unions.

He is using you.

Wake up and walk away from the abuse.

Glenn Already Said It

I was going to write another Osama post, but Glenn Greenwald already said everything I wanted to say only better.

So please read Glenn.

How Is The Mitch Daniels Education Policy Different Than The Barack Obama Education Policy?

In short, it isn't.

Progressives are all up in arms over the privatization plan Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed into law this week.

Here is the program, via Blue Texan at Firedoglake:

The legislative reform package backed by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels opens the door to more charter schools; creates the most expansive private school voucher program in the country; and limits teachers’ collective bargaining to wages and wage-related benefits. Also, Daniels on Saturday signed legislation that overhauls teacher evaluations and links teacher pay to student performance.

The Barack Obama Race to the Top policy has also opened the door to more charter schools and helped link teacher evaluations and pay to test scores in many states (including my own - New York.)

In addition, by demonizing the public school system as a "drop-out factory" and public schools teachers as "failures," Obama and his Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan have set in motion an environment where public schools that serve high needs students and communities are starved of needed funds and resources and eventually closed.

In some cases, those closed schools are replaced by for-profit charter schools. In some cases the cases the money that was going to the closed schools now goes to a voucher school program.

In either case, traditional public schools and teachers are demonized, marginalized, and eventually replaced by either non-unionized charters or voucher programs.

How is any of this stuff different than what Daniels is now doing in Indiana (or Christie in NJ? Or Scott in Florida? Or Snyder in Michigan?)

To be frank, the pro-privatization, pro-corporate education reform policies of Barack Obama are quite similar to the are the pro-privatization, pro-corporate education reform policies of Jeb Bush - which is why Obama was so comfortable sharing a stage to talk about education reform with Bush not all that long ago.

Union members in Florida were furious that Obama was so excited to share a stage and extol the pro-privatization, pro-corporate education reform policies of Jeb Bush - but why wouldn't Obama be comfortable doing this? While Obama's rhetoric toward unions and unionized teachers is nowhere near as incendiary as the Bush/Daniels/Scott/Christie/Snyder contingent, the policies have been ALMOST as damaging.

So if you're going to get upset about Daniels, Scott, Snyder, Christie, et al. when it comes to education policies, to be consistent, you have to be upset at Obama and Duncan too.

There is STILL too much water carrying in progressive circles for Obama on this.

Obama is a neo-liberal corporate education reformer out to destroy the public school system, bust the unions, turn teaching into an at-will job full of Teach For America missionaries on a three year hitch in the inner cities, and finish opening up the public education sector to the Wall Street and hedge fund crowd.

If his NCLB Jr. blueprint passes as currently constructed, that will happen.

If Obama gets his way, there will be federalized tests in every subject at every grade levels (which his cronies at the Gates Foundation, McGraw-Hill and Pearson Education will stand to make billions on), teachers will be evaluated using value-added methods on those scores, teachers will paid by "merit" (again, using only test scores), scores of schools will be closed and scores of teachers fired EVERY year, and the primary mode of operation in the public schools system will be FEAR and PROFIT.

Change we can all believe in?

Nope - just more corporatized, neo-liberal evil.

Whether it's Mitch Daniels or Barack Obama pursuing this course, the result is the same.

It would be nice if some water carrying progressives would drop the buckets and live in reality about this administration and its neo-liberal policies.

Freedom Bombs

So glad I voted for Change We Can All Believe In - it's such a different governing style than the Compassionate Conservatism that it replaced:

Embattled Libyan despot Moammar Khadafy's youngest son and three of his grandchildren were killed Saturday in a NATO airstrike, officials said.

Sayf al-Arab Khadafy, 29, and the three unidentified grandchildren were inside a large residential villa in Tripoli when it was hit.
Khadafy was also inside the building at the time of the attack, but escaped uninjured, a Libyan government spokesman said.

Spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said the villa was attacked "with full power."

"This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country," Ibrahim told the BBC.

"The leader with his wife was there in the house with other friends and relatives. The leader himself is in good health, he wasn't harmed."

NATO warplanes pounded Libyan targets Saturday after Khadafy called for a ceasefire but refused to step down.

Is Khadafy and his son a murderer?

You betcha.

Should the United States be leading the NATO effort to murder him?

Uh, I can think of better things we could be doing with our time and resources.

But one corporatist president has replaced another and this is all about hanging onto the vestiges of empire.

Hope President Accountability and his kids sleep well tonight in the bosom of that empire.

Maybe they'll go and take a look at his Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow.

Corporate Fascist Control Comes To Michigan And New Jersey

Via Queens Teacher, here's the Rachel Maddow Show on what the future will look like when the autocratic corporate managers take over cities:



Maddow reports that the Michigan governor plans to have corporate managers take over 23 school districts in the state in addition to the one that has already been taken over.

Here's the rationale:

Mayor Virg Benero: "Billions of dollars at stake, billions of dollars being spent and Wall Street can't wait to sink their fangs into it. They couldn't get a hold of Social Security but by gosh they've got a way to get in. And even with a president and secretary of Education under the guise of "Waiting for Superman", they can come in and look like a savior but dig right into those piles of cash and at the same time help wipe out the public unions that are a part of the public school system."

Meanwhile Schools Matter points out that Governor Chris Christie plans to abolish school boards in New Jersey.

Another part of the corporatization plan for schools.

Take away any vestige of democratic control.

Give one man the power - whether it's the Mayor of Money in NYC or Christie in Jersey or a corporate manager in one of 24 school districts in Michigan.

One man, no democratic say from the community, no democratic say from voters.

This is fascism pure and simple.

Glad to see Maddow taking on this issue.

I WISH she had taken it on when it was Obama and Duncan laying the groundwork for this by demonizing teachers and schools and schools districts as "failing."

You think that the firing of all those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island and the codified teacher demonization that is the Obama Race to the Top policy (not to mention his No Child Left Behind blueprint) didn't lay the rationale for all this corporatization and privatization?

I think it absolutely did.

Unfortunately Maddow only seems to care when it's Repubs doing the privatizing.

Until "progressives" like Maddow become willing to take on corporate pols no matter the party, I am afraid the corporate fascism is going to continue.

Yes, Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie - Republicans all - are a big part of this problem.

But so are "Democrats" like Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, Rahm Emanuel, and Arne Duncan.

Take on THEM too, Rachel.

Ron Paul Vs. Barack Obama

Interesting article at Common Dreams about the "liberal" Barack Obama and the "wingnut" Ron Paul.

Which one holds the more progressive views?

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government's criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you'll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul's good on the war stuff -- yawn -- but otherwise he's a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who'd kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He's more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He's a Democrat. And gosh, even if he's made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he's a murderer, in other words, but at least he's not a Republican!

...

Let's just assume the worst about Paul: that he's a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let's say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn't exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he's not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he's pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of “clean energy” – see his administration's policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that “nuclear renaissance” we've all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments -- and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion -- from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans' income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul's policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it's Paul who's the reactionary of the two?

The water carrying that liberals do for Barack Obama bothers me to no end - on the wars (now we're in three!), the bailouts, the Fed policy, HAMP, education, Gitmo, WikiLeaks, torture prosecutions of Bush officials and so many other counts, Barack Obama fucking sucks Dick Cheney's nitro pills.

Not saying you have to vote for Ron Paul or should even contemplate it if you're a liberal.

But you OUGHT to contemplate telling Barack Obama to go fuck himself.