Turns Out Brian Williams Misremembers A Lot Of Things

I'm sure you've heard by now how Brian Williams "misremembered" being in a helicopter that was forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003.

It turns out, there's a lot more he misremembers:

The NBC news anchor, who apologized Wednesday for telling a false story about taking fire in a helicopter while covering Iraq, is being called out for possibly lying about his experience covering Hurricane Katrina, according to a report.

Williams claimed to have gotten dysentery from drinking flood water and seeing dead bodies float past his hotel in the New Orleans French Quarter while covering Hurricane Katrina.

However the The New Orleans Advocate noted that the French Quarter was not flooded and quoted a local health expert who did not recall anyone getting such a stomach ailment.

Williams recalled his bout with the bug in interview with Tom Brokaw last year, when he said: “I accidentally ingested some of the floodwater. I became very sick with dysentery."

The Advocate said a public health official never heard of people getting things like dysentery after the storm.

“I don’t recall a single, solitary case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward,” Dr. Brobson Lutz told The Advocate.

“I don’t know anybody that’s tried that [drinking flood water] to see, but my dogs drank it, and they didn’t have any problems.”

Williams said also during an interview in 2006 that he saw dead bodies float past his window in the French Quarter.

“When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams said in 2006.

But the French Quarter, the original high ground of New Orleans, was not impacted by the floodwaters that overwhelmed the vast majority of the city, The Advocate said.

He also said in his Brokaw interview: “Our hotel was overrun with gangs, I was rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer. We are friends to this day.”

NBC News brass don't want to hold Williams accountable, but former Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw does:

“Brokaw wants Williams’ head on a platter,” an NBC source said. “He is making a lot of noise at NBC that a lesser journalist or producer would have been immediately fired or suspended for a false report.”

Brokaw's own credibility is in question here, since he apparently knew the Iraq helicopter tale was a fable:

Brokaw, 74, was still the “Nightly News” anchor when Williams came back from his Iraq expedition — and an insider said he knew the story Williams later spouted was bunk.

“Tom Brokaw and [former NBC News President] Steve Capus knew this was a false story for a long time and have been extremely uncomfortable with it,” the source said.

NBC News execs had counseled him to stop telling the tale.

NBC put a guy who made shit up about his Iraq war reporting experience into the Nightly News anchor chair - heckuva job NBC!

While the elites at NBC are trying to save Williams' lying ass, some of the plebes feel differently:

NBC brass hasn’t been talking to lower-level employees about the situation, leaving people in a panic, the insider said.

“NBC bosses don’t understand how serious this is. Nobody in a leadership position is talking to the troops. Nobody has addressed it,” the source said.

One longtime NBC employee who has worked with Williams on several occasions had a few dirty words to describe the celebrated anchor, calling him a “real pompous piece of s–t.”

“He’s an a–hole,” he fumed. “He’s not a journalist. He’s a reader.

“Oh, the fireworks that are going off inside,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. He’s the face on NBC. He’s a liar.

“Everyone knew it.”

Can't wait for the next NBC Education Nation where the pompous Williams asks directs questions to Michelle Rhee about the importance of holding teachers accountable for their performance and behavior.

Same goes for Brokaw, who has been known to pontificate about teachers unions allowing poor performing teachers to remain in their profession.

Brokaw knew Williams was full of shit, NBC News brass knew he was full of shit, Williams himself knew he was full of shit - and yet, there was Brian Williams, hosting the NBC Nightly News last night.

Ah, yes - accountability is only for the little people.

Supporting De Blasio On The Charter School Issue

Michael Fiorillo on the war Eva Moskowitz, Andrew Cuomo and the media launched against Bill de Blasio over the charter school issue:

Public school teachers, parents and students are in a tough position here. While De Blasio has not been as strong as people hoped - no surprise to many readers of this blog, I imagine - he nevertheless is making some efforts to right the grotesque inequities caused by charter schools, and can safely assumed to be under tremendous pressure by the local Overclass to allow privatization to continue.

Unless we get out into the streets to show that there is a large constituency willing to fight for the public schools, De Blasio will either give in completely or be destroyed. In either case, that could lead to the endgame coming upon us very soon.

Whatever his temporizing and shortcomings, we probably have no choice but to (critically) support him, get active and loud, and show that there is widespread opposition to the takeover of the schools.

I agree completely - sure it would have been nice to see de Blasio cancel all eight of Eva's charters and give the space to traditional public schools, but you can see from the uproar over de Blasio's cancellation of three schools why that wasn't going to happen.

As Michael notes, the corporate forces have mustered a heavy assault against the moderately progressive policies de Blasio has taken on charters and if those of us who support traditional public schools don't get vocal about supporting him on this, we're going to see, as Michael puts it, "De Blasio will either give in completely or be destroyed."

Let me go on record saying, I support de Blasio on this issue, the so-called "war on charters" is a phonied up meme that came out of Eva Moskowitz's public relations office (as I wrote last night), and we need to hit the media over and over for acting as stenographers rather than journalists in covering this story.

Start with WNBC 4 - give them a call and let them know how you are permanently shutting the channel off over their stenography on the Eva issue.

Patrick Walsh also blogged about the chop job they do on his interview with them over the charter co-location issue.

Here's the number:

866-639-7244

It is time to start talking boycott of the media outlets that carry water for the pro-privatization movement.

NBC and Comcast have carried water for the corporate education reform movement for years now, most notably with their Education Nation pro-privatization propaganda fest (literally subsidized by the for profit University of Phoenix)  and it is high time they pay an economic and political price for this.

Turn off NBC, cancel any business you do with Comcast and let them know this again and again and again.

I just called NBC to let them know.

You should do it too.

Blog it, tweet it, get the story out there - public school teachers have had ENOUGH of the pro-privatization propaganda spewing from NBC and are taking the action to shut the network OFF.

If Eva Moskowitz can get loud and shrill, so we can - WE SUPPORT BILL DE BLASIO ON THE CHARTER SCHOOL ISSUE.

Education Nation Should Invite Carrianne Howard To Talk About How Wonderful Lloyd Blankfein's Art Institutes Are

Raging Horse does an excellent job of pointing out who NBC should have invited for their corporate education reform-slanted Education Nation propaganda-fest this year.

Alas, NBC isn't much interested in having anybody on that stage who won't carry water for the corporate education reform agenda, so they only invited deformers like Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, et al. to this year's Education Nation.

Even Diane Ravitch was only invited to sit in the audience, an outrageous insult to not only Ravitch but to every teacher in this country who has been slammed and smeared by corporate reforms like Klein, Rhee, et al.

But of all the corporate education reform-friendly guests NBC did invite, I find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein the most outrageous.

You see, Goldman Sachs, in addition to being the most evil corporate entity on the planet, owns 41% of the parent company of the notorious for-profit swindle college, the Art Institutes.

Bloomberg News published a devastating expose of the Art Institutes and Goldman Sachs back in 2010 that found degrees from the Art Institutes essentially worthless, debt levels incurred by students at the schools extremely high.

They use the story of Carrianne Howard, a young woman who graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and now makes her living as a stripper, to show just what a scam the school is (that's Howard pictured above, with her Art Institute diploma):

Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.

These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”

...

Carrianne Howard, the Florida student, didn’t borrow for her education. Instead her parents paid roughly $70,000 in tuition bills. Her mother, an airline data analyst, and her father, a computer engineer, sold their California home and moved to Virginia after her father lost his job and her mother retired. They used money from the sale to pay for tuition, and her parents are now struggling financially, Howard and her mother say.

Howard grew up in Valencia, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and became drawn to video gaming during high school. One afternoon in 2004, an Art Institute ad popped up on her PC.

“I was as excited as can be,” she says. “I thought it was a dream come true.”

She and her mother toured the Fort Lauderdale campus, a bright, modern three-story building flanked by reflecting pools and palm trees. Her tour guide “just made it sound really exciting and a lot of fun, like I was going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Howard says.

EDMC schools train representatives to make “no promise, implication, or guarantee” about employment, Muller says.

A couple of years into her studies, Howard says she grew disenchanted. Some classes consisted largely of playing video games, she says. She wanted to drop out but her mother insisted she finish because the family had spent so much already. She graduated in December 2007; in March 2009 she lost her first job, at GameRecruiter, a Fort Lauderdale-based gaming industry employment agency where she was making $12 an hour. Marc Mencher, GameRecruiter’s president and CEO, says she was let go only because he closed down her entire department, and calls her “an exceptional performer.”

She may be struggling to find work in part because of inadequate preparation from the Art Institute’s gaming department, Mencher says.

“It’s a weak program because it’s understaffed,” says Mencher, who serves on the Art Institute’s national advisory board for gaming programs. “I personally feel the students aren’t getting their money’s worth.”

After Bloomberg Businessweek asked EDMC for comment, Mencher sent a follow-up e-mail, saying that although the Art Institute is “not perfect and they have issues like any organization,” it is “an excellent program built on input from respected industry professionals along with local employers.” It has an “outstanding placement” record for graduates, he said.
Lido Cabaret

Howard applied for dozens of jobs, not only in gaming but also in grocery stores and nursing homes, mostly for minimum wage, she says. In October 2009, Howard turned to adult entertainment by doing paid Web chats. In March she started dancing at Lido Cabaret, earning $400 to $1,000 a week, she says.

She now hopes to save enough to go back to college and get a business degree. As she considers returning to school, Howard also helps run an anti-Art Institute website, where she has collected more than 70 names in a petition to send to the U.S. Education Dept.

The private, nonprofit Florida Institute of Technology, where Howard would like to enroll, won’t accept any of her credits from EDMC, according to spokeswoman Karen Rhine, because the Art Institute doesn’t have the kind of accreditation the traditional college requires. In its school catalog and other documents, the Art Institute “does not imply or guarantee” that credits will transfer to other universities, says EDMC’s Muller.

At 1 a.m. on a recent weeknight, Howard finished a shift at Lido. “This is what I do,” she says. “When I’m in here, I try not to think about the Art Institute.”

NBC ought to add Carrianne Howard or any of the other students who graduated from Art Institutes with a worthless degree and tens of thousands in debt to talk up the school.

But instead they invite banker criminal Blankfein instead.

In the past, they have had the CEO and head criminal of the University of Phoenix at Education Nation.

This year, the executive VP from Apollo Group, the owner of the University of Phoenix, will be there.

So every year, NBC doesn't miss a trick to not only invite every corporate deformer they can think of to sell the corporate deform agenda, but there's always a for-profit college criminal shill on the panel as well.

But no Diane Ravitch, no Anthony Cody, no Karen Lewis, no Susan Ohanian, no Lois Weiner, no actual working teachers who don't carry the ed deform message

And no students from one of these for-profit scam schools like Art Institutes or University of Phoenix to tell the audience how much debt they carry as they work at Starbucks or Applebees or, like Carrianne Howard, a strip club.

NBC's Education Nation ought to come with a scammer alert on the bottom of the screen.

The entire "symposium" is nothing but propaganda for the corporate education deform movement and for the criminal for-profit school industry.

Education Nation Sponsors - A Rogue's Gallery Of Criminality And Corruption

NBC is a media conglomerate that used to be owned by the evil General Electric (a company that manages to straddle evil in quite a few ways, from making and profiting off armaments that kill people to making badly designed nuclear power plants to polluting the environment with impunity to exploiting its own labor all across the world to preying on low income minorities with $700 million in subprime loans, $218 million of which ended up in foreclosure.)

Now NBC is owned by Comcast, a company that is universally hated by consumers across the country and regularly ranks in the top five of the the list of "Most Despised" companies in America.  If you want to see just how bad a company Comcast is, check out the customer forums on Comcast's own site!  I have been a customer of all three major cable companies and I can say without a doubt that Comcast was by far, the worst of the three.  The bill consistently shifted around, they were always trying to stick me with charges for products or services that I never asked for, and the customer service was abysmal.  Then, when I ended my service and returned my cable box and paid my last bill, they claimed they never got the money and sent the last month's charges into collection.  Yeah, I have fonder memories of that time when my apartment building burned than I have as a Comcast customer.

So, let's cut to today.  NBC is running the third edition of its education reform show called Education Nation.  As has been usual with the other two editions of this nonsense, NBC has invited a corporate education reform friendly line-up of guests - people like Joel Klein, Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee.  When they have invited parents or teachers to be part of the line-up, these have been parents and teachers who espouse corporate education reform values like firing hundreds of thousands of teachers, tying teacher evaluations to test scores, charter school expansion, online schools and the like.  This year, NBC is promoting the education reform movement movie "Won't Back Down," just as a couple of years ago they promoted another education reform movement movie, "Waiting for Superman."  And just as in the past, NBC's Education Nation tolerates no dissent from the corporate education reform narrative - Diane Ravitch and other noted opponents to the education reform agenda have not been invited to the show, though darling of the corporate reform movement Randi Weingarten is there to give her perspective on things.

Which perhaps makes sense, since the AFT is inexplicably one of the sponsors of this crap, as is the NEA.  Yes, you heard right, teachers - you're hard-earned dues money is going to help sponsor an NBC show that promotes the myth of the "bad teacher" and the sanctity of the standardized test score.  I suppose this is the unions' way of "staying relevant" in a time of anti-teacher, anti-union bashing, but frankly, both the AFT and the NEA would do better to put on their own "Debunking NBC's Education Nation Nonsense" show and invite real students, real parents, real teachers and real education leaders to tell their stories.  But that would take some actual ingenuity or desire at the unions to take on the education reform movement, and as we have seen over and over, that does not exist at either the AFT or the NEA.  They would rather have " a seat at the table" or some such nonsense rather than promote the values and principles their members hold dear - like smaller class size, a rich, diverse curriculum, and other progressive education values.

So I get why they wouldn't want to put on their own Education Nation to debunk NBC's corporate version.  But why the hell are they also sponsoring it?  Have you seen the list of corporate sponsors?  The line-up reads like a rogue's gallery of corporate criminality, nepotism and cronyism:

University of Phoenix
Gates Foundation (i.e. Microsoft/Monsanto)
Bezos Foundation (i.e., Amazon)
ExxonMobile
Citibank
Statefarm
Kelloggs Foundation

We could take a brief look at each of these criminal organizations and the harm they do to America and the world and then ask what would anybody who cares about kids, education or schools be doing watching an education show on a network once owned by one of the most evil companies in the world, now owned by one of the most despised, that is sponsored by these corporate criminals.  But you can do your own Google search and come up with the pollution caused by ExxonMobile, the horrible working conditions at Amazon warehouses, the horror Bill Gates is doing to Africa and Asia via GMO, and the predatory business practices of TARP-recipient Citibank.  Instead I am going to focus on the University of Phoenix, since this company purports to be an institution of higher learning, has been a corporate sponsor of Education Nation for all three years and has managed to get its president onto the Education Nation stage to pontificate about education issues.

Here is how NBC bills the University of Phoenix:

University of Phoenix is constantly innovating to help students balance education and life in a rapidly changing world. Through flexible schedules, challenging courses and interactive learning, students achieve personal and career aspirations without putting their lives on hold. As of May 31, 2011, 398,000 students were enrolled at University of Phoenix, the largest private university in North America.

All of that is just advertising jive.  The University of Phoenix is actually a for-profit "college" with the highest number of student loan defaults of any school in the country.  One out of every four students who attends this "college" defaults on his or her loan.  The graduation rate is also one of the lowest in the country (currently 9%, 5% for online students), and even when you do graduate with a University of Phoenix degree, you find out very quickly it's not worth the paper its printed on.

So why is University of Phoenix on the list of Education Nation sponsors?  Why was the president of this for-profit diploma mill on stage at Education Nation talking about education standards last year when his own company has none other than, "Can you hold a pen and sign for the loan, please?"

NBC News president Steve Capus has defended the presence of University of Phoenix as a sponsor, saying that the company is not shaping editorial content for Education Nation and has been the subject of some "tough news stories" on NBC News.

But as FAIR has pointed out, NBC has actually done more to promote University of Phoenix than scrutinize them. Ann Curry actually patted a University of Phoenix VP on the head on The Today Show at "Learning Plaza" last year and praised him for helping kids.  So much for the "tough NBC news stories" on University of Phoenix.  And in fact, NBC has partnered with the University of Phoenix to "donate" technology to classrooms that will show NBC "educational programs" while promoting the University of Phoenix and made the University of Phoenix it's lead sponsor in the "On-The-Road" segment of last year's Education Nation. Far from being a simple sponsor with no say over editorial content, it is clear from the prominent place the University of Phoenix has on the sponsor's list, the donor's list, and in the content of Eduction Nation that NBC and its parent company Comcast are quite comfortable selling a diploma mill with abysmal graduation rates and the highest defaults of any college in the land to its viewers.

What are we to make of a so-called education reform forum that promotes and partners with a "college" that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers over the last decade in the form of defaulted loans, has saddled hundreds of thousands of students with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and continued to expand its business even as its graduation rates and loan default rates show that it should be shut down?

If NBC News was an actual "news" organization as opposed to some public relations wing of its parent corporation, the people at the network wouldn't be partnering with some shyster college like University of Phoenix and putting the president of said college on stage to talk about higher education standards.

No, if NBC News were an actual "news" organization, they would be exposing the University of Phoenix for the crap college it is, warning every American to stay as far away from it as possible, and asking law officials why the University of Phoenix president wasn't behind bars with Bernie Madoff.

But of course NBC News is not an actual "news" organization any more than Brian Williams or Matt Lauer are real newsmen (as opposed to corporate shills) and so we get the Education Nation crapola, hosted by the unctuous Williams, complete with corporate criminal sponsors and studio audience.

The good news out of all of this is, fewer people are watching TV these days, and of those, fewer still are watching NBC News shows, so who knows how many people are actually going to see this garbage.  Many Americans have woken up to the fact that what they see spewed on TV news programs these days is propaganda and lies.  They actually hold teachers and schools in much higher esteem than, say, news media personalities from NBC.

Still, it's really a big pain as an educators to have to push back against the lies and propaganda on something like NBC's Education Nation and it's certainly true that many of those lies and some of that propaganda has become conventional wisdom for Americans.

How could it be otherwise when all they ever hear about schools from hacks like Brian Williams is "Our schools are in crisis!"

NBC Uses Laugh-Added Measurements To Lay Off "Tonight Show" Employees

NBC has announced layoffs for two dozen "Tonight Show" employees and has reportedly slashed the salary of host Jay Leno by millions of dollars to avoid steeper staff cuts at the show.

The network, which is set to begin airing Education Nation in late September, a "seminar" of education reform that promotes, among other things, value-added measurements of teacher effectiveness based upon test scores for conducting education cutbacks and layoffs, has decided to use laugh-added measurements of the "Tonight Show" staff to see which members will be laid off first.

"Tonight Show" staff members deemed to be adding fewer laughs to the show this year as compared to last year will be let go first.

Previously employee seniority was used to conduct layoffs and cuts at the network, but a spokesman for Comcast Corp, the parent of NBC/Universal, said the cable company had added this "sophisticated tool" built by a cadre of geniuses at Microsoft, the Gates Foundation, and Monsanto to measure how many laughs each employee is adding to the broadcast and can now say with almost exact certitude which employees are the most valuable laugh-wise and which are the least valuable.

The laugh-added measurements have a median margin of error of 52%, a maximum margin of error so high even Carnac couldn't get them right, but Comcast Corp. believes this is the way to conduct employee cuts for the future and says other NBC shows should expect to see layoffs conducted this way too.

Despite high ratings for the just-aired Olympics, the network is hemorrhaging advertising dollars and expects to make cuts at every program on NBC.

The only NBC show Comcast is sparing from layoffs is the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

One anonymous source at Comcast told the Associated Press, "We've used the laugh-added measurement tool on all our shows, including the Nightly News, and frankly, that show is the funniest thing on the network."

Tonight Show employees will be informed of their layoffs tomorrow when they return to work. NBC has decided to bring in former Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to conduct the layoffs and will tape each for airing during Education Nation next month.

Said the anonymous Comcast source, "Comcast thinks this is a teachable moment that can be used to show how laugh-added and value-added are excellent tools for seeing which employees are valuable and which aren't. And bringing in Michelle Rhee to do the layoffs - well, that was a no-brainer. She really gets off on this kind of thing...especially if somebody cries!"

What "General Electric Doesn't Pay Taxes"? Story

If you're getting all your news from an NBC outlet, you'd never know about the story that the Times broke about General Electric paying NO federal taxes at all.

The Kaplan Post in Washington, itself embroiled in scandal over it's for-profit education division, delights in tweaking NBC over this story:

It’s the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow, if it doesn’t raise their blood pressure first. General Electric Co., reported the New York Times last week, earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States — and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes.

The front-page story drew widespread commentary in newspapers and on many Web sites. ABC News and Fox News, among others, were all over it.

But the story was conspicuously absent from the reportage of one news organization: NBC.

During its Friday broadcast, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” had no time to mention that America’s largest corporation had essentially avoided paying federal taxes in 2010. Or its Saturday, Sunday or Monday broadcasts, either.

Did NBC’s silence have anything to do with the fact that one of its parent companies is General Electric?

NBC News representatives say that it didn’t. “This was a straightforward editorial decision, the kind we make daily around here,” said Lauren Kapp, spokeswoman for NBC News. Kapp declined to discuss how NBC decides what’s news or, in this case, what isn’t.

But to others, NBC’s silence looks like something between a lapse and a coverup. The satirical “Daily Show” on Monday noted that “Nightly News” had time on Friday to squeeze in a story about the Oxford English Dictionary adding such terms as “OMG” and “muffin top,” but didn’t bother with the GE story.

Ignoring stories about its parent company’s activities is “part of a troubling pattern” for NBC News, said Peter Hart, a director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watchdog group that often documents instances of corporate interference in news. He cited a series of GE-related stories that NBC’s news division has underplayed over the years, from safety issues in GE-designed nuclear power plants to the dumping of hazardous chemicals into New York’s Hudson River by GE-owned plants.

What’s more, Hart notes, NBC News has covered corporate tax-avoidance stories before — that is, when they didn’t involve GE. All three networks’ news divisions, according to Hart, have become reliable sources of publicity for their parents’ other corporate interests, doing news stories about upcoming sporting events or new TV shows carried on their own networks.

“It’s very curious,” Hart said. “Imagine if a different company were involved. If you changed the name to Citibank or Goldman Sachs, would NBC be interested in the story then? I suspect they would be.”

I stopped watching NBC News years ago, but I think they used to run some jive-ass gotcha thing called the "Fleecing of America" where they'd catch some corporate or government crook stealing big-ass money.

This GE/tax dodge story sounds perfect for that segment, doesn't it?

Put up a picture of Jeff Immelt's face with the words "Tax Cheat" slashed across it like a bad sunburn.

The fleecing of America indeed.

My Question For Obama At NBC's Education Nation

Matt Lauer will be interviewing Barack Obama as part of the Education Nation Summit sponsored by Microsoft, the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Walmart, General Electric, McGraw-Hill and a few other giant corporations that stand to make billions off education reform.

You can send in questions to ask Hopey/Changey via NBC.

I sent in the following:

You recently signed a $23 billion dollar teacher jobs/Medicaid aid bill. You insisted that $11.9 billion dollars be cut from food stamps in order to pay for the bill. When Rep. David Obey suggested some cuts to the data system provisions in Race to the Top, you threatened to veto the bill.

So the food stamp cuts went through. Beginning in 2014, a family of three will lose $521 in food stamps a year.

My question, Mr. President, is why do you think creating new standardized tests for every subject at every grade level and building data systems to track the scores from those tests and use them to close schools and fire teachers is more important than feeding hungry children?

There is not one untruth in that question I wrote above.

Not one.

And yet, Obama will pontificate on NBC, along with many of the other "experts," about how teachers are hurting children by refusing to give on tenure, seniority, merit pay, charter schools, etc.

Meanwhile Hopey/Changey took $521 out of the mouths of a family of three so he could keep his precious data systems.

And somehow, the press has never called him on this.

Not once.

What hypocrites.

What jive.

All of it.

Superman.

Education Nation.

Zuckerberg.

Oprah.

The ed reformers are not interested in real solutions to address the real problems we teachers deal with every day in the school systems across this nation.

Instead they pontificate about bad teachers and spend millions on p.r. to bust the unions.

Make no mistake - that is ALL this jive is about.

Break the last powerful union in the country.

Rahm Emanuel said about the autoworkers "Fuck the UAW!!!"

You can be sure they feel the same way about the AFT and the NEA as well.

Worst vote I ever cast was for Hopey/Changey.

Frankly, I list that as one of the biggest mistakes in my entire life.

I had a bad feeling about him from the beginning.

I even blogged about that over at NYC Educator's site.

But in the end, the specter of President Palin had me pull the lever for Hopey/Changey, even though I suspected his education programs would be bad.

But never in my wildest nightmares did I think they would be this bad.

After the election, when Repubs retake the House and Senate, very little business will get done in Washington.

There will be lots of gridlock and the GOP is vowing to stop any new spending bill.

There will be little-to-no working together between the parties.

But one piece of common ground they will work will be teacher bashing.

Obama is vowing to end teacher tenure.

John Kline the soon to be House Education Committee chair says that IS some change he can believe in.

You can be sure they will attempt some carrot/stick jive to end tenure.

Want Title 1 money?

Get the unions to agree to abolish tenure.

And if the unions do not agree, the p.r. machine will move into motion and get the word out that teachers hate poor children and want to take their school money from them.

Never mind that Obama has already taken their food stamp money to save his precious data tracking machinery.

NBC Hates Teachers

Here's the list of participants for their "Education Summit":

Participants in the Education Nation Summit will include:

•Michael Bloomberg: Mayor, City of New York
•Geoffrey Canada: CEO & President of Harlem Children's Zone Project
•Arne Duncan: US Secretary of Education
•Byron Garrett: CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA)
•Allan Golston, President, US Program, The Gates Foundation
•Reed Hastings: Founder & CEO of Netflix
•Walter Isaacson: President & CEO of the Aspen Institute
•Joel Klein: Chancellor of New York City Schools
•Wendy Kopp: CEO and Founder of Teach for America
•John Legend: Musician; Founder of the Show Me Campaign
•Gregory McGinity: Managing Director of Policy, The Broad Education Foundation
•Bill Pepicello, Ph.D.: President of University of Phoenix
•Sally Ride: First Female Astronaut; Vice-chair of Change the Equation
•Michelle Rhee: Chancellor, District of Columbia Public School System of Washington, D.C.
•Margaret Spellings: Former US Secretary of Education
•Antonio Villaraigosa: Mayor, City of Los Angeles, California
•Randi Weingarten: President of American Federation of Teachers (AFT-CLO)

Not ONE teacher there.

Not one.

Weingarten doesn't count.

Nor does Wendy Kopp.

And Christ, what is the University of Phoenix guy doing there?

He belongs in jail for fraud, not pontificating about education.

Have you taken a look at the number of consumer fraud complaints AGAINST the University of Phoenix?

There are 14 pages of complaints about this "university" at Consumeraffairs.com alone.

Seriously, this guy belongs in a Turkish prison.

That HE has been invited to the "summit" while a working teacher has not says all you need to know about NBC News, G.E. and the other corporate sponsors of this "summit."

But there are plenty of other problems with the summit as well.

Why is John Legend there?

Will he be singing?

Or just parroting Gates Foundation propaganda like he usually does?

Because the summit doesn't need John Legend to parrot Gates Foundation propaganda when they have the president of the Gates Foundation on the panel.

Like most education "reform" discussions, the NBC Education Summit is a sham.

They already KNOW the answers to the questions they're going to ask.

They just want to continue to sell the country on them.

Give NBC a call and let them hear some of your thoughts.

Phone: (212) 664-4444

Ask for the NBC News comment line. Then ask for the MSNBC comment line.

And be brief. You only get about 45 seconds.