Undernews for May 30, 2011

Undernews for May 30, 2011

We interrupt this deficit cutting for a few facts

Those “non-combat” troops we’re leaving in Iraq will cost about $50 billion, which – writes Joshua Holland of Alternet – could also pay for

24.3 million children receiving low-income health care for one year, OR

726,044 elementary school teachers for one year, OR

829,946 firefighters for one year, OR

6.2 million Head Start slots for children for one year, OR

10.7 million households with renewable electricity -- solar photovoltaic for one year, OR

28.6 million households with renewable electricity-wind power for one year, OR

6.1 million military veterans receiving VA medical care for one year, OR

9.8 million people receiving low-income health care for one year, OR

718,208 police or sheriff's patrol officers for one year, OR

6.0 million scholarships for university students for one year, OR

8.5 million students receiving Pell grants of $5,550

Great thoughts of Marty Paretz

Hear what comforting words the New Republic's Martin Paretz had to say back in 1982. He advised Israel to deliver Palestine a "lasting military defeat" that would "clarify to the Palestinians in the West Bank that their struggle for an independent state has suffered a setback of many years." Then "the Palestinians will be turned into just another crushed nation, like the Kurds or the Afghans," and the Palestinian problem - which "is beginning to be boring" - will be resolved."

Myths about America’s schools

Paul Farhi, Washington Post - Today’s school reform movement conflates the motivations and agendas of politicians seeking reelection, religious figures looking to spread the faith and bureaucrats trying to save a dime. Despite an often earnest desire to help our nation’s children, reformers have spread some fundamental misunderstandings about public education.

1. Our schools are failing.

. . The percentage of Americans earning a high school diploma has been rising for 30 years. According to the Department of Education, the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds who were not enrolled in school and hadn’t earned a diploma or its equivalent fell to 8 percent in 2008. Average SAT and ACT scores are also up, even with many more ¬ and more diverse ¬ test-takers.

2. Unions defend bad teachers.

Unions have proved amenable to removing the bad apples in their ranks ¬ with due process. Montgomery County, for instance, implemented its Peer Assistance and Review program with union cooperation a decade ago. . . Between 2006 and 2010, 245 teachers resigned or were dismissed. Many districts have similar programs, but, as a Harvard study pointed out, they are expensive. . . Some school systems show better results than others, yet most have teachers’ unions. If unions are universally problematic, why are some students succeeding while others languish?

3. Billionaires know best.

Bill Gates, real estate developer Eli Broad and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg have made massive financial contributions to public schools to promote pay-for-performance programs, which reward teachers with bonuses when their students do better on standardized tests. . . In a three-year, $10 million study released last fall, Vanderbilt University researchers found no significant difference in performance between students who were taught by middle school teachers eligible for cash bonuses and those who weren’t.

4. Charter schools are the answer.

Charter school students are among the most motivated, as are their parents, who sought an alternative education for their children and mastered the intricacies of admission.

Obama grants licenses for Pharmas to grow pot, while threatening criminal action against state approved programs

David Downs, East Bay Express - Despite the US government's staunch opposition to medical cannabis farms in Oakland and elsewhere, the feds have begun licensing a whole lot of large legal pot grows throughout the country. But this weed is not for cannabis dispensaries and their patients; it's for Big Pharma.

The Drug Enforcement Administration told Legalization Nation in an e-mail last week that 55 unnamed companies now hold licenses to grow cannabis in the United States, a fact that contradicts the widespread belief that there is only one legal pot farm in America, operated under the DEA for research purposes. It appears as if the upswing in federally approved pot farming is about feeding the need of pharmaceutical companies who want to produce a generic version of THC pill Marinol and at least one other cannabis-based pill for a wide variety of new uses.

In other words, if big corporations grow dope with the government and put it in a pill, it's medicine. But if you grow it at home or at a city-permitted pot farm and then put it in a vaporizer, it's a felony.

"They've got to realize, as a political issue, this is going to raise a red flag," said Kris Hermes, spokesperson for medical marijuana lobby Americans for Safe Access. "Here we have companies cultivating marijuana on a mass scale to produce generic Marinol. It's going to force the government to answer more questions than it wants to."

It's a weird piece of news that comes at a strange and contradictory time for the drug war. As US attorneys send threatening letters to states and cities, including Oakland, warning them against "commercial cultivation" of marijuana, the DEA is quietly handing out licenses for commercial cultivation.

Word

Gingrich buys his engagement rings in bulk. - Stephen Colbert on why Newt Gingrich has a $500,000 account at Tifanny's

Germany to close all nuclear plants by 2022

BBC - Germany's coalition government has announced a reversal of policy that will see all the country's nuclear power plants phased out by 2022.

The decision makes Germany the biggest industrial power to announce plans to give up nuclear energy.

There have been mass anti-nuclear protests across Germany in the wake of March's Fukushima crisis, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.

Al Jazeera finds foreign troops on the ground in Libya

VIDEO

PBS hacked over Wikileaks story

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing - The PBS.org website, and data associated with the PBS television network, its programs, and its affiliate stations, appear to have been hacked by an entity calling itself LulzSec (or "The Lulz Boat"). The hack was made public around 1130pm ET, Sunday, May 29, and included cracking the PBS server, posting a bogus news story and some defacements, and publishing what appear to be thousands of passwords.

According to an article in the Australian edition of IT security publication SC Magazine, LulzSec has gone after other media entities in recent weeks: Fox News Network and the TV show X-Factor are reported as prior targets. As the name implies, LulzSec would appear to be in it for the proverbial lulz, rather than, say, financial gain.

A statement from LulzSec:

"Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further... perusing. As you should know by now, not even that fancy-ass fortress from the third shitty Pirates of the Caribbean movie (first one was better!) can withhold our barrage of chaos and lulz. Anyway, unnecessary sequels aside... wait, actually: second and third Matrix movies sucked too! Anyway, say hello to the insides of the PBS servers, folks. They best watch where they're sailing next time."

Word

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. - H.L. Mencken

Pocket paradigms

Here is the part of the Holocaust that is most frequently denied. Not that millions were slaughtered but that those who did the deed might under certain conditions be either you or I. And we would do it, as Adolph Eichmann suggested, simply by finding the right words for it, what he called 'office talk.'It is this unrecognized, undiscussed denial, especially at moments of solemn observance, that most frightens me. And our recovery does not lie in still more talk, ceremonies, and professions of horror. It lies instead in the study, honor, and practice of the good and the decent.

If you watch good people closely, their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of decency.

We need perhaps a museum of the good, curricula in decency studies, and practice in their skills and rhythms. We need peace experts instead of military experts talking about Iraq on Fox TV. We need mediators instead of just lawyers on Court TV. We need movies, and heroes, and moving stories that win Academy Awards and models for our children that lead them to the contentment of cooperation and fairness rather than to brutal examples drawn from the play-by-play of violence and wrong that appears with every other click of the zapper.

The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Al Graib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it- Sam Smith

Florida governor bans liberals from public event

Think Progress - Anxious over their increasing unpopularity, Republicans lawmakers across the country are banning media from chronicling the blowback at public events. Florida’s now deeply disliked Gov. Rick Scott (R) adopted a similar tactic yesterday at a “campaign-style” budget signing ceremony at a town square in The Villages retirement community in Central Florida. Before putting his pen to the $69.7 billion state budget, Scott took an ax to $615 million of what he called “shortsighted, frivolous, wasteful spending.” Scott conveniently failed, however, to mention exactly what some of those “frivolous” programs were, including ones that provide help for the most vulnerable in society: .. .homeless veterans, meals for poor seniors, a council for deafness, a children’s hospital, cancer research, public radio, whooping-cough vaccines for poor mothers, or aid for the paralyzed.

Declaring the town square event to be “private,” Scott’s staffers had Sumter County sheriff’s deputies remove Democrats and those with “liberal-looking pins and buttons” from the event:

Members of The Villages Democratic Club were barred from the budget signing by Scott staffers who said the outdoor event in The Villages town square was “private.” Other staffers and Republican operatives scoured the crowd and had Sumter County sheriff’s deputies remove those with anti-Scott signs or liberal-looking pins and buttons. They escorted more than a dozen people off the property.

Most accurate pie chart ever

News Hour pimps for Patriot Act

Glenn Greenwald, Salon - PBS' News Hour conducted a discussion of the Obama-supported, reform-free Patriot Act extension with conservative David Brooks and "liberal" Mark Shields, and it magnificently highlights conventional establishment thought on such matters. First we have this from Brooks:

If you cover politics on the campaign trail, the Patriot Act is extremely unpopular, and can -- people running for office rail against it.

Once they get in office, especially those in charge of the national -- nation's security, they tend to support it. So, I assume, once they get in office and they understand what it's doing behind the scenes, they tend to think it's probably a good idea.

And this is what's happened to President Obama. It's what's happened to most people who are privy to how it actually works.

.... Then Shields offered this "counterpoint":

I think the indispensable part that intelligence played in the capture and [sic] -- of Osama bin Laden probably strengthened the case for the Patriot Act's -- Patriot Act's reinstatement. And I would say intelligence remains the cornerstone of the exit strategy from Afghanistan and to Iraq to a considerable degree. And I think that neutralized some of the opposition.

Now that we killed bin Laden, we need civil-liberties-eroding measures like the Patriot Act more than ever. The notion that the death of bin Laden would trigger a winding down in the War on Terror -- as though bin Laden was the cause of those policies rather than pretext for them -- will prove to be one of the more absurd notions advanced on such matters.

Red states the most socialistic

GOP presidential candidate calls for end of pot war

Liberty Underground - Gary Johnson, GOP presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor, was on Sean Hannity's show last night, discussing his views on Marijuana legalization.

"Half of what we spend on law enforcement, courts, and prisons is drug related. It costs $70 billion per year. We're arresting 1.8 million people a year in this country. And, we now have 2.3 million people behind bars. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world" said Johnson.

Johnson added that the drug usage should be treated first as a health issue and not a criminal one. "Look, we're not condoning drug use here. But as a family, wouldn't we rather be dealing with any problems associated with drug use as a family rather than having it subject to the criminal justice system?" remarked Johnson.

Gary Johnson is perhaps the only GOP candidate besides Ron Paul who wants to put an end to the War on Drugs.

Park police abuse dancers at Jefferson Memorial

"Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise, a specific against social awkwardness" - Thomas Jefferson

Park Police at Jefferson Memorial

NBC Washington -
A handful of dancers got cuffed on Saturday for doing what they say the Founding Fathers would have wanted them to do - expressive dancing in National Parks.

A court recently ruled that expressive dancing was in a category with picketing, speech making, and marching - a banned activity at national memorials.

A small group came out on Saturday to protest the ruling, by dancing together inside the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial.

But after a few minutes, their moves got busted by Park Police.

Five were arrested, while listening to earphones and moving rhythmically in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson.

"The founders understood that the only thing that was going to make the American experiment succeed was the people standing up for these rights," Jared Denman, a demonstrator, told NBC Washington.

The memorial was shut down while demonstrators got arrested.

Some visiting from out of town were less than impressed with the protesters' interpretive moves. "I think its ridiculous," said Edward Kelly of Richmond. "We just traveled up the steps and we've been waiting for 15 minutes."

Video of the Park Police wrestling some of the dancers to the ground has appeared on YouTube.

KOKESH ISN'T GIVING UP

Indicators: Fox News is bad for your brain

Tim Rickinson, Rolling Stone - According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network.

Indicators: the costs of commuting

Slate - This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.

A survey conducted last year for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, for instance, found that 40 percent of employees who spend more than 90 minutes getting home from work "experienced worry for much of the previous day." That number falls to 28 percent for those with "negligible" commutes of 10 minutes or less. Workers with very long commutes feel less rested and experience less "enjoyment," as well.

Long commutes also make us feel lonely. Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist and author of Bowling Alone, names long commuting times as one of the most robust predictors of social isolation. He posits that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer "social connections." Those social connections tend to make us feel happy and fulfilled.

Obama jacks up suits against student defaults

USA Today - The government increasingly is threatening to sue people who've defaulted on their student loans to get the money back. The number of loan defaults that the Education Department has referred to Justice Department lawyers for possible legal action has risen dramatically since before the recession and nearly doubled from 2009 to last year: There were 918 referrals in 2006; that number rose to 2,596 in 2009, and then to 5,393 last year, Education Department figures show.

Some saw Manning mentally unfit when sent to Iraq

Guardian UK - The American soldier at the center of the WikiLeaks revelations was so mentally fragile before his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, threw chairs around, shouted at his commanding officers and was regularly brought in for psychiatric evaluations, according to an investigative film produced by the Guardian.

Bradley Manning, who was detained a year ago on Sunday in connection with the biggest security leak in US military history, was a "mess of a child" who should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq, according to an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007.

The officer's words reinforce a leaked confidential military report that reveals that other senior officers thought he was unfit to go to Iraq. "He was harassed so much that he once pissed in his sweatpants," the officer said.

"I escorted Manning a couple of times to his 'psych' evaluations after his outbursts. They never should have trapped him in and recycled him in [to Iraq]. Never. Not that mess of a child I saw with my own two eyes. No one has mentioned the army's failure here – and the discharge unit who agreed to send him out there," said the officer, who asked not to be identified because of the hostility towards Manning in the military.

Despite several violent outbursts and a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, a condition that meant he was showing difficulty adjusting to military life, Manning was eventually sent to Iraq, where it is alleged he illegally downloaded thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and passed them on to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

Hillary Clinton's role in the case that ended the ban on direct corporate campaign contributions

Buried in the coverage of last week’s federal court case which struck down a ban on corporate campaign contributions is the role Hillary Clinton played in the story. While the NY Times news story didn’t mention her, a subsequent editorial did:

“Judge Cacheris’s ruling struck down part of an indictment accusing two businessmen of illegally reimbursing employees for their donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for president and the Senate. They are charged with paying more than $180,000 to 43 fake donors in an effort to evade donation limits. Most of the indictment still stands, with a trial scheduled in July.”

Politico expanded on the story:

“The ruling came in a criminal case brought by the U.S. government against two men – William Danielczyk, Jr. and Eugene Biagi – alleging they skirted campaign contribution limits by reimbursing their employees for $186,600 in contributions to Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for Senate in 2006 and president in 2008. The two men were charged with two counts of reimbursing contributions, as well as conspiracy, obstruction of justice and using corporate funds to reimburse contributions. Cacheris dismissed one of the seven counts, and also ruled the ban on corporate giving unconstitutional.”

The handling of campaign contributions has been a consistent part of the Clinton saga and one that has been consistently played down by the conventional media.

Word

Hank Chapot , Oakland CA - So, I'm waiting on my corner to cross and this guy shouts out, "Hey did you hear about the ten thousand prisoners released on Thursday, I'm one of 'em!" He's so happy, he hugs me and shakes my hand all the time going on about the beauty of freedom. I point to my bike and say, "Get one of these, the ultimate freedom machine." It was worth all my pocket change.

If Obama's being hurt by racism it's not much

A number of loyal Obama supporters have been raising racism as an explanation for why Obama isn't doing better. In fact he's doing pretty well considering that he's running three unnecessary wars and not doing much for those hit by the Great Recession.

Gallup has him at 50% approval rating. That's just one point under Bill Clinton at a similar stage of his administration. It is also six points ahead of Ronald Reagan in May 1983, 15 points ahead of Jimmy Carter in May 1979, and even with Richard Nixon in May of 1971. These, by the way, were all white guys.

Word

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on. - Kurt Vonnegut

Pocket paradigms

The policy of the Israeli government is clearly distinguishable from the theology of Judaism to all but a small yet powerful and noisy crowd including neo-conservatives, cable TV anchors and semantic bomb throwers. Israeli policy reflects Judaism about as well as the American right reflects Christianity. If what goes on in the synagogue doesn't stay in the synagogue than it can not be expected to be treated as though it were still there. In other words, if you're going to ask American taxpayers to subsidize Israel and back its policies, the matter should be handled no differently than building a B2 bomber or putting a federal agency's office in some congress member's district. If you want to play by religion's rules, act like a religion. Otherwise, the rules of politics govern. And anyone who calls that anti-Semitic is either a cry baby or a scoundrel. - Sam Smith

Fox News can be pretty good once it gets away from politics

A complete guide to American exceptionalism

Furthermore. . .

Police pay up in settlement for illegal raids during 2008 Republican convention

For the first time since 1900, no sitting U.S. senator on either side of the aisle is running or considering a run for president, at least yet.

Rightwing Dutch government cracks down on pot pubs

Employee ownership and co-ops: key to a new economy

ENDS

© Scoop Media