Progressives
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2011There are a lot of progressives whom Stalinists would have called useful idiots. I present to you Greg Sargent:
Could Obama have adopted a far more aggressive posture while negotiations were going on? Absolutely. But the simple fact of entering into talks inevitably reinforced the sense that Obama and Dems were not prepared to allow default -- no matter what -- reinforcing a set of dynamics that were stacked against them. Was that avoidable?
...It may simply be that the dynamics of the situation were insumountable: Obama and Dems were not prepared to let the country default no matter what.…
mikethemadbiologist | July 22, 2011As with history in general, I suppose the victors write--or rewrite--economic history too. One of the arguments for balancing budgets that's floating around is that Clinton got us a surplus, times were good, and therefore, we should do it again. Of course, things were better for some people, including those at the bottom (which is a worthwhile gain), but most of the spoils went to those at the top. As the joke went, "Clinton has created millions of jobs, and I'm working three of them." Snark aside, the reason why Clinton was able to lower the debt was no mystery: private sector debt…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2011Because these are the idiots you've allied yourselves with:
...many of these voucher advocates claim they simply want to expand school choice and improve the quality of education for all.
Yet one group that has been influential in the school voucher push -- the Independence Hall Tea Party, which has run a major PAC that operates in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania -- is finally admitting that its true goal is to abolish public education.
Here's what the head batshitloonitarian thinks:
"We think public schools should go away,'' says Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2011I'll get to creationism in a bit, but first...
Last week, Yves Smith started a wee lil' ruckus among progressives with a post titled "Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name." In that post, she argued:
Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported…
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2011If you haven't heard (wouldn't blame you if you hadn't), in the Alabama State House, a legislator switched parties--from the Republican Party to the Democrats, which, given the trend, especially in the South, over the last few decades is surprising. What's even more surprising is why he switched--teacher bashing:
Chalk up another Democratic win this week: Alabama State Rep. Daniel Boman, who entered the legislature as a Republican in November, is switching parties to become a Democrat after he says the GOP went too far in attacking teachers in the state...
Now there's Boman, who's walking…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2011It only took Ezra Klein about much longer than me to figure this out:
...the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early '90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. "We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance," he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when…
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2011By way of Bob Somerby, we come across this Brookings Institution report by Tom Loveless, "How Well Are American Students Learning?" There's a lot in the report, especially since it's really three studies rolled into one, but part of section I, which debunks the notion that Finland has the best educational system in the world highlights the intersection of educational goals, curriculum, and testing. Loveless writes (p. 10):
But by 1999, Finland slipped to only a little above average in TIMSS (z-score of 0.06), ranking fifth of the original twelve countries and fourteenth of all countries…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2011Mind you, I'm not talking about 'framing', but simply the justification for the policy (I'll the propaganda for another time). I'm encouraged that Matthew Yglesias, who writes for the Center for American Progress, a progressive outfit, has stumbled into modern monetary theory (italics mine):
Does anyone seriously deny that there's something these people could be doing that would be more useful than being unemployed? Now ask yourself this. Suppose you had more money. Would you buy more goods and services? I would. And if more people were buying more goods and services, then wouldn't firms…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2011Over at Open Left, jeffbinnc pithily summarizes all of the metrics of which educational 'reformers' are fond:
Then, to illustrate just how the focus on more and better tests is going to be raised to the levels of panacea, the CAP rolled out a new report last week that based just about everything on the notion that test scores are the be-all and the end-all of education attainment in our country.
As I noted in a Quick Hit here on Open Left, CAP's analysis of school performance "relied on the results of 2008 state reading and math assessments in fourth grade, eighth grade, and high school"…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2011At this point in Obama's term, I'm simply hoping that the things I care about, like Social Security and education, aren't mentioned by Obama in his State of the Union address. I've given up on thinking he'll actually institute good policy (lost hope, if you will), and am just attempting a holding action. This is the administration that told Democrats they had to choose between school funding and feeding hungry children, and also has imposed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failed ideas on the entire country, so I'm not optimistic.
Matthew Yglesias draws our attention to a Center for…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2010I write about education and educational data a lot, and I'm always struck by the insistence that the U.S. K-12 educational system is DOOMED! This is a staggering display of willful ignorance that rivals creationism (and, arguably, is more pernicious). Without going through the entire backstory (that's what links are for), some U.S. states--relatively large ones--excel, to the point where they do better than every European country and most Asian countries. These states also do better than expected, given their childhood poverty rates; some cities also do a better than expected job of…
mikethemadbiologist | July 18, 2010I'm surprised that this revelation by Democratic Congressman David Obey hasn't received more attention. Basically, the House Democrats went to the wall for education and managed to get $10 billion to prevent teacher layoffs and an additional $5 billion for Pell Grants. To do so, they had to cut Obama's educational 'reform' program, Race to the Top, by about fifteen percent. This is the same so-called reform bill that screwed over Massachusetts' schools and that also weakened science education.
What was the Obama administration's response? According to Obey (italics mine):
The secretary…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2010By way Atrios, I stumble across a list of ways to combat unemployment put together by progressive wonks--and it explains why the so-called left is so politically impotent (I've removed the elaborative paragraphs):
1) Offer bonuses for long-term unemployed persons who find work.
2) Offer bolstered work-search help for the long-term unemployed.
3) Expand retraining programs and increase outreach.
4) Expand relocation allowances.
5) Encourage self-employment.
6) Expand work-sharing programs, and include incentives for employers to hire the long-term unemployed.
7) Provide generous tax incentives…
mikethemadbiologist | June 17, 2010President Obama has been arguing that if he had tried to regulate the oil industry before the BP disaster, it would have gone nowhere and Republicans would have pissed and moaned about oppressive regulations:
In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: "I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2010Oy. Anyone who thinks Jews are smarter than other people, well, that's because we gave all of the stupid to Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve). Last week, in The New York Times, Murray had an op-ed about charter schools wherein he scribbled about the failure to find differences in performance between charter and public schools:
So let's not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2010Last week, we looked at how the Obama Administration's "Race to the Top" education 'reform' legislation screwed over Massachusetts because MA had the silly idea that changing the curriculum (dumbing it down, actually) of one of the most successful educational systems in the world should be presented to the citizens of the Commonwealth. Silly Mad Biologist: we want to teach kids about democracy and citizenship, not have them grow up and do them. Jeepers. Some people.
Anyway, "Race to the Top" also screws over science education, especially innovative programs to expose young children to…
mikethemadbiologist | May 1, 2010(from here)
Obama's kinder, gentler "Drill, baby, drill" is looking very short-sighted. We can only hope he has learned that when you use your party loyalists as foils and adopt a center-right compromise, so that you can claim to have boldly discarded the "the tired debates between right and left", that there is a potential pitfall: your party loyalists might actually be correct on the merits. Consider oil drilling (italics mine):
UPDATE via the Wonk Room: Repeating a GOP/Oil industry sounding talking point, earlier this month the President said:
It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2010By way of Yong Zhao, we find this Economic Policy Institute report, "Let's Do the Numbers", about the false precision in the award process of the Obama Administration's signature school reform initiative. Anyone involved in a grant award process knows that the design of the scoring metrics can have a huge effect on the outcome. Consider Massachusetts which lost millions of dollars because we wanted to examine why we should lower our curricular standards (italics mine):
...we examined the case of Massachusetts, which scored surprisingly low (13th of the 16 finalists) for a state with a…
mikethemadbiologist | April 19, 2010Since I've raised this issue before, and it doesn't seem to have taken, the gloves are coming off.
Once again, we see the sorry spectacle of blaming scientists for policy failures--all scientists, not a subset (consider this foreshadowing). As always the 'scientists' are described as bookish nerds who bore policy makers and reporters with p-values.
This is as stupid as blaming a working ob/gyn for the lobbying failures of NARAL.
Let's take global warming and the recent Swifthack affair. Where the hell were the professional organizations that kill many, many trees in order to ask me to…
mikethemadbiologist | April 18, 2010Whatever else one might say about Republican (for now) Florida Governor Charlie Crist, he was absolutely right to veto a bill that would link teacher pay to student performance (italics mine):
Mr. Crist said Thursday that his decision was not political. He cited "the incredible outpouring of opposition by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school boards and legislators."
The bill was supported by the Florida Department of Education and statewide business groups, which expressed disappointment in the governor's decision, saying that teachers should be held more accountable.
But the…