How Far Should A President Bow?

Will Obama's diplomatic and domestic initiatives cause the nation future grief? Con Coughlin is concerned and fearful Obama's governance could lead to serious problems.

Is the president's primary obligation to keep our nation safe or loved and can you do one while still accomplishing the other? Apparently Obama believes you can. Certainly our image has been tarnished. The question is: 'how far should a president bow?'

Conservatives believe public policy should preserve and improve American Society. George Wshington was no Isolationist. He preferred diplomacy to war but he also understood the latter was sometimes unavoidable. It has been proven that maintaining national strength and being prepared for war is one of the most effective ways to maintain peace. Again referring to Washington, he said: "...If we desire to avoid insult we must be able to repel it;...if we desire to secure peace...it must be known that we are at all times ready for war."

Statists are more inclined to commit the U.S. to a course of conduct that cannot be easily reversed by changing administrations according to Mark Levin. They seek treaties to improve American Society through muti-lateral power sharing - global citizenship in preference to national sovereignity. This seems to be the dreamy world Obama believes can achieved if we mend our ways and seek accomodation with those who do not share these views or have our values.

A contrite president apologizing for past mistakes theoretically should serve our interests but it can also be interpreted as a sign of weakness. America has been humbled by its financial disarray. How far should a president play the game of eating 'crow?'

Even if Obama extracts a commitment from a 'rogue' nation's leadership would it provide any sense of security of continuance? How many broken promises are acceptable? What is the price Obama should pay? Can any democratic leader endanger another nation's security in acheiving minimum concessions he deems acceptable for his own nation's interests?

You decide.(See 1 below.)

George Will, unmasks Russia and writes it may have first class missiles but it remains a third rate nation because its demographic trends tell the real story. (See 2 below.)


Walter Isaacson is concerned about our nation's failed education and offers some thoughts on how to raise standards. (See 3 below.)

Do man's responsibilities extend beyond self? Is man obligated to procreate- some reigions says yes? If so, then does man's responsibility extend even further beyond self as he brings other life into the world? Where does one's parental responsibility end so as not to stifle initiative, self-learning and eventually independence? Is this role better accomplished or served in a two parent (male and female) familyenvironment or structure - if so why, if not why? Is education necessary to sustain life? Does a Republic form of government demand greater responsibility, knowledge and the ability to make sophisticated choices - my rights end where your's begin? Can the same be said for groups?

What role does Capitalism play? Is Capitalism preferable? What role should government play? How far should government extend its powers in order to protect its citizens thereby curbing the very freedom it seeks to protect? During catastrophic events should government's role and response become greater and if so, should it retreat once the disaster has passed or even can it?

In a free society, where man has certain inalienable rights, what recourse does man have when government exceeds its own authority? Has defending one's rights become too costly and thus, though the Constitutional concept remains, in reality it is a fading dream? To what extent should government assist the individual? Will an increasingly dependent society be able to sustain itself?

If man has the right to protest how far can he go and still remain civil and within the legal limits of free speech? What are the rights and privileges of counter-protesters and can civility be maintained and under what lawful circumstances? If freedom of speech no longer obtains on many college campuses where is our society heading?

Does the press and media have any responsibility in educating and presenting facts? Should opinion be relegated to the editorial page or identified as such by the media?
What is the role of the politician in guarding our rights? Are politicians so conflicted by partisanship and campaign costs they are incapable of objectivity and serving the nation's interests beyond their own?

When pirates are apprehended in wanton acts should they be released? If we have no laws to retain them should we pass ones that permit us to do so? How did we allow Barabary Piracy to return?

If a nation threatens others and is known to be producing the means to implement these threats is pre-emption a legitimate course of action? GW pronounced this to be our new doctrine post 9/11 but then failed short of taking action vis a vis Iran, N Korea etc. Professor Thomas West, of the University of Dallas, agrees that a defensive foreign policy does not exclude the necessaity of pre-emptive action and James Wilson, a Founder, also rejected the argument that America must wait until attacked.

What are the limits of interrogation? Does a nation have the right to protect itself by unqiue means that border on conduct deemed beyond humane? Some have said to defeat your adversary you must become like your adversary - is that avoidable? Against a committed foe who imposes no self-restraints what is he appropriate position nations that adhere to a rule of law should adopt?

That said I refer you back to the comments posed in the first three paraghraphs above and ask to what length should our nation go in dealing with other nations whose governments are in direct conflict with our system of values and belies. Does our nation have a responsibility to intrude in the belief doing so makes the world a better and safer place? Must we wait for a World War?

Does any of this matter and, even if it does, is it so beyond man's ability that hope of improvement is a senseless goal? A very bright friend of mine and a fellow memo reader believes our size and diversity no longer makes it possible for America to live within the parameters of The Constiututional precepts of our Founders and that, over time, our Republic will fade as others before it.

Specific to our nation do you believe we are currently on the right path to sustain what our Founders intended? If not, what role do you see for yourself in altering our course? I have my own thoughts about the many questions I have posed, and the list could be endless, but above all I believe it is incumbent upon every person to get a solid education and to be a responsible citizen - to conduct themselves in a manner that enhances the society in which they live. This encompasses the treatment of one's fellow man with respect and according him the same rights and privileges one holds dear for oneself - it's the do unto others shtick, if you will. Also, learning must never cease.

There has never been a period in world history without challenges. Are the ones we face today more momentous and does history provide a guide? Can man learn anything from history or is he destined to repeat its mistakes because human nature and emotion dictates his repetitive behaviour not learning and restraint?

For a wonderful film sent by a dear friend and fellow memo reader see:(http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=1695 )



Dick

1) Barack Obama must beware of playing party politics with security
By Con Coughlin


There is little new in the revelations that the CIA had used White House-sanctioned methods of torture.

All it is going to take is a massive terror attack to teach President Obama that there is a world of difference between the politics of the campaign trail and those of high office.

You have only to look at his stunning success in last year's election race to see that Mr Obama is the consummate campaign performer. Early in the contest I watched the then Democratic candidate in action in Kansas, where he had managed to persuade thousands of Americans who would not normally involve themselves in politics – cowhands, students and disillusioned pensioners – to turn up on a bitterly cold night to hear him speak. Throughout his hour-long speech he wowed the crowd with his commitment to make the world a better place, while giving precious little indication as to how precisely he intended to achieve this messianic goal.


Meanwhile, Mr Obama has travelled far afield to imbue both allies and enemies with a new sense of well-being, the feeling that the world is a better and safer place now that the abhorrent Bush administration is no longer in office. Whether it is his appeal to Iran's fundamentalist mullahs to unclench their fists, his reluctance to confront North Korea's nuclear activities or his "new beginning" with Cuba, the President wants to be everybody's friend, as he was on last year's campaign trail.

But a change of leadership at the White House does not mean the world has suddenly become a safer place. Al-Qaeda is still devising plots, the Taliban continues to murder coalition forces and rogue states such as North Korea, Syria and Iran persist with efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction while supporting Islamist terror groups.

So Mr Obama must take care when he attempts to score cheap political points on national security issues, as he did last week with his unnecessary decision to release previously classified details of the legal opinions authorising the use of the extreme interrogation techniques – torture, to you and me – that were drawn up by the Bush administration. Apart from highlighting the sophistry Bush's lawyers used to justify the inexcusable, there is little new in the revelations that the CIA had used White House-sanctioned methods of torture – such as water-boarding, in which a detainee suffers simulated drowning.

The Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib scandals provide graphic examples of how the Bush administration lost the plot over its handling of terror suspects. But the fast tempo of the global campaign against Islamist-inspired terrorism means that all this is ancient history. Abu Ghraib is now run by Iraqis, who don't share the West's qualms about mistreatment of prisoners; and Guantanamo will be closed by the end of the year. Torture and extraordinary rendition are practices that ceased long before the Bush administration left office.

So why did Mr Obama reopen old wounds by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions? The answer lies more with the President's desire to heap humiliation on his predecessor than his stated aim of transparency on this dark episode. Playing party politics with sensitive security issues might work well on the campaign trail, where candidates can do so without consequences. But in office it is another matter, and runs the risk of compromising the effectiveness of intelligence and security agencies.

Jimmy Carter's drive to cleanse the CIA after the scandals of the Nixon years left the organisation neutered to the extent that the White House found itself unsighted on two of the most cataclysmic events of the late 1970s – the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Mr Obama runs a similar risk if he continues to undermine the morale of America's lead intelligence-gathering agency. As Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, pointed out after last week's release of legal documents, "its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001."

Say what you like about the Bush administration, the former president left office proud in the knowledge that he had achieved his most important goal in the aftermath of September 11 – to prevent America from suffering a repeat attack. If Mr Obama wants to emulate that success, he must provide effective leadership to the legions of dedicated professionals in whose hands the defence of America and its allies rests.

Mr Obama's critics are already drawing unfavourable comparisons between his presidency and Jimmy Carter's. All it would take for Mr Obama's presidency to suffer similar ignominy would be for a recently released Guantanamo detainee to launch a devastating terrorist attack against the US.

2)
The Incredible Shrinking Russia
George Will

WASHINGTON -- America's "progressive" president has some peculiarly retro policies. Domestically, his reactionary liberalism is exemplified by his policy of No Auto Company Left Behind, with its intimated hope that depopulated Detroit, where cattle could graze, can somehow return to something like the 1950s. Abroad, he seems to yearn for the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was rampant and coping with it supposedly depended on arms control.

Actually, what was needed was not the chimera of arms control but Ronald Reagan's renewal of the arms race that helped break the Soviet regime. The stately minuet of arms negotiations helped sustain U.S. public support for the parallel weapons spending.

Significant arms agreements are generally impossible until they are unimportant. Significant agreements are those that substantially alter an adversarial dynamic between rival powers. But arms agreements never do. During the Cold War, for example, arms negotiations were another arena of great power competition rather than an amelioration of that competition.

The Soviet Union was a third-world nation with first-world missiles. It had, as Russia still has, an essentially hunter-gatherer economy, based on extraction industries -- oil, gas, minerals, furs. Other than vodka, for what manufactured good would you look to Russia? Caviar? It is extracted from the fish that manufacture it.

Today, in a world bristling with new threats, the president suggests addressing an old one -- Russia's nuclear arsenal. It remains potentially dangerous, particularly if a portion of it falls into nonstate hands. But what is the future of the backward and backsliding kleptocratic thugocracy that is Vladimir Putin's Russia?

Putin -- ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office -- must be amazed and amused that America's president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.

Nicholas Eberstadt's essay "Drunken Nation" in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing "a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation." Previous episodes of depopulation -- 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 -- were the results of civil war, Stalin's war on the "kulaks" and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today's depopulation is occurring in normal -- for Russia -- social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as "street children." Furthermore, "mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits" -- including poisonously impure home brews -- "is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on." Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev.

Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in The Wilson Quarterly ("The World's New Numbers"), notes that Russia's declining fertility is magnified by "a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term -- hypermortality." Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and alcoholism, and the deteriorating health care system, a U.N. report says "mortality in Russia is three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women" than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report, Walker says, "predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually." Be that as it may, "Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war."

According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia's population, which was around 143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as 115 million in 2030.

Marx envisioned the "withering away" of the state under mature communism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the world may be witnessing the withering away of Russia, where Marxism was supposed to be the future that works. Russia, he writes, "has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history."

"History," he concludes, "offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline." Demography is not by itself destiny, but it is more real than an arms control "process" that merely expresses the liberal hope of taming the world by wrapping it snugly in parchment

3) How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools
By Walter Isaacson

National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states' traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local standards downward in order to pretend to satisfy federal demands by showing that their students are proficient.

It's time to take another look. Without national standards for what our students should learn, it will be hard for the U.S. to succeed in the 21st century economy. Today's wacky patchwork makes it difficult to assess which methods work best or how to hold teachers and schools accountable. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the politics surrounding national standards has become a little less contentious. A growing coalition of reformers — from civil rights activist Al Sharpton to Georgia Republican governor Sonny Perdue — believe that some form of common standards is necessary to achieve a wide array of other education reforms, including merit pay for good teachers and the expansion of the role of public charter schools. (See pictures of inside a public boarding school.)

The idea of "common schools" that adopt the same curriculum and standards isn't new. It first arose in the 1840s, largely owing to the influence of the reformer Horace Mann. But the U.S. Constitution leaves public education to the states, and the states devolve much of the authority to local school districts, of which there are now more than 13,000 in the U.S. The Federal Government provides less than 9% of the funding for K-12 schools. That is why it has proved impossible thus far to create common curriculum standards nationwide. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush summoned the nation's governors to Charlottesville, Va., to attempt a standards-based approach to school reform. The result was only a vague endorsement of "voluntary national standards," which never gained much traction. In 1994, President Bill Clinton got federal money for standards-based reform, but the effort remained in the hands of the states, leading to a wildly varying hodgepodge of expectations for — as well as ideological battles over — math and English curriculums.

The No Child Left Behind Act pushed by President George W. Bush unintentionally exacerbated the problem. It required each state to ensure that its students achieve "universal proficiency" in reading and math — but allowed each to define what that meant. The result was that many states made their job easier by setting their bar lower. This race to the bottom resulted in a Lake Wobegon world where every state declared that its kids were better than average. Take the amazing case of Mississippi. According to the standards it set for itself, 89% of its fourth-graders were proficient or better in reading, making them the best in the nation. Yet according to the random sampling done every few years by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, a mere 18% of the state's fourth-graders were proficient, making them the worst in the nation. Even in Lake Wobegon that doesn't happen. Only in America. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, led by reformer Chester Finn Jr., has been analyzing state standards for more than a decade and concludes, "Two-thirds of U.S. children attend schools in states with mediocre standards or worse."

See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.

See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.

Everyone agrees that the existing standards aren't working; what has been lacking so far, on both sides of the ideological divide, is the political will to do anything about them. Bush and his reform-oriented Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings, recognized the problem, but as a former governor, Bush was keenly attuned to the political problem of pushing for national standards. I remember listening to him at a White House lunch he hosted for a small group attending an Aspen Institute education forum. He challenged former Democratic governor Roy Romer of Colorado, who made a case for common standards. Bush agreed with the goal, but he said it was too politically explosive to make it worth pushing at the federal level.

And yet there has never been a better opportunity to do that. As a candidate, Barack Obama was ambiguous about his commitment to the education-reform agenda of standards, testing, accountability and greater choice. But such doubts were quelled by his pick for Education Secretary: Arne Duncan, who was a cool and driven reformer as CEO of the Chicago public-school system and is also a basketball player from the South Side who knows how to move the ball. Duncan's position on common standards is clear: "If we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America," he says. "I know that talking about standards can make people nervous, but the notion that we have 50 different goalposts is absolutely ridiculous." (Read "No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?")

Duncan has a new arrow in his quiver. Buried in the President's stimulus package is a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" education fund that the Secretary can use to give incentives to states that make "dramatic progress" in meeting goals that include improving standards. States that fail to give assurances that they will improve standards are at risk of losing education funding from other parts of the stimulus bill.

How to Build Better Standards
The drive toward common national standards should begin, I think, with math and reading. Algebra should be the same for a kid in Albany, N.Y., as it is for one in Albuquerque, N.M., or for that matter in Beijing or Bangalore. (We can save for later the debate over whether that should be true for more subjective subjects like history.) These standards should define precisely what students are expected to know by the time they complete each grade and should be accompanied by tests to assess their level of proficiency. The process should be quasi-voluntary: states should not be forced to adopt the common standards, but they should be encouraged to do so through federal funding and public pressure. In states that shy away from holding their schools accountable to these standards, parents and business leaders should hold the elected leaders accountable.

These 21st century American Standards should be comparable to, and benchmarked against, the standards of other countries so that we can determine how globally competitive our nation's economy will be in the future. Forty years ago, the U.S. had the best graduation rates in the world. Now it ranks 18th. In math scores on international tests, the U.S. ranks 25th; in reading, 15th. As Obama said in his speech to Congress a few weeks ago, "This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that outteach us today will outcompete us tomorrow." We can already see the signs. Major drug companies such as Merck and Eli Lilly used to outsource much of their manufacturing to India and China; now they also outsource much of their research and engineering.

See pictures of eighth-graders being recruited for college basketball.

See how children in your state test.

The best standards are those that are clear and very specific. For fourth-grade reading, an example would be demonstrating the ability to distinguish between cause and effect and between fact and opinion in a selected text. For fourth-grade math, examples would include demonstrating the ability to calculate perimeters and volumes, multiply whole numbers, represent data on a graph, estimate computations and relate fractions to decimals. Specific common standards would allow textbook and curriculum developers to spend their research dollars achieving clear goals rather than producing various versions for different states. Just because the standards are national does not mean, thank goodness, that they need to be written by the Federal Government. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more frightening sight than that of all 535 members of Congress grappling with a congregation of bureaucrats and voting on whether high school graduates should or should not be required, for example, to be able to plot real and complex numbers as points on a plane. Even at the state level, there were times when standards became tangled in political debates, including a protracted "fuzzy math" dispute over whether students should be taught to estimate answers and understand concepts rather than memorize multiplication tables and master long division. When politicians and ideological posturers got out of the way, reasonable educators and experts resolved the dispute by deciding, sensibly, that those skills worked best in tandem.

Fortunately, there is already a process under way that could, if properly nurtured, take charge of writing common national standards. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have been working with a nonprofit called Achieve Inc. In 2001, Achieve helped launch the American Diploma Project, which establishes curriculum standards that align with what a graduate will need to succeed in college, the military or a career. Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of CCSSO, hopes to kick this effort up a notch at a special meeting in Chicago on April 17 by announcing an agreement among 25 states to support an aggressive schedule to devise internationally benchmarked math and English standards for all grade levels. "I see standards as the essential foundation for all education reforms," he says.

These standards could build on the existing NAEP tests, which currently are administered every few years to a representative sample of students around the country in grades 4, 8 and 12. This type of approach was endorsed by the Commission on No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan group led by former governors Tommy Thompson and Roy Barnes that was run by the Aspen Institute, where I work.

The Road to Reform
Clear standards, testing and assessments would permit more experimentation by schools and individual teachers. After Hurricane Katrina, a surge of young and creative educators went to New Orleans, led by Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, the New Schools Venture Fund and successful charter operators like KIPP Academies. Now more than 60% of the students are in charters, and test scores are improving. For such a system of experimentation to work, there need to be clear standards and assessments so that parents and administrators can know which schools are successful. Indeed, the entire national debate about whether charter schools are good or bad could be defused (as Duncan did in Chicago) if both sides accept the obvious: good charter schools are good, bad charter schools are bad, and a system of common standards and assessment is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

See how Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of Education, is tackling classroom challenges.

See pictures of teens and how they would vote.

A national system of standards and testing would also permit the gathering of consistent data, down to the classroom level, so that we could finally get more rigorous evidence to answer some basic questions: Do smaller classrooms make a big difference, and in which situations? How beneficial is it to have a longer school day or year? It would also help resolve disputes about different teaching methods, like whether phonics or a whole-language approach to reading works best. In addition, we could more easily spot ineffective teachers, and they could be weeded out or offered training resources that have proved useful.

Wouldn't this arouse opposition from teachers or their unions? No, at least not from the teachers' groups that support serious reform. The American Federation of Teachers says clear standards would help ensure that teachers are effectively trained, objectively judged and provided with proven teaching tools and curriculums. "Common, coherent, grade-by-grade standards promote effective professional development," the union wrote in a 2008 report that criticized weak state standards. "A shared understanding of what students should know and be able to do enables the best kind of professional development: collegial efforts to share best practices." Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, argues that a national-standards approach would help students while still allowing teachers to be creative. "Abundant evidence suggests that common, rigorous standards lead to more students reaching higher levels of achievement," she wrote in a recent Washington Post Op-Ed piece. "Just as different pianists can look at the same music and bring to it unique interpretations and flourishes, various teachers working from a common standard should be able to do the same."

Secretary Duncan has indicated that he will use the carrots and sticks in the stimulus bill to support voluntary efforts to write national standards and to prod states to adopt them. This process should involve advisory boards that represent employers, college admissions officers, military recruiters, teachers, education scholars and parents. It should also be ongoing, because the standards will have to evolve as the needs of the workplace and global economy do.

For example, I learned a lot of calculus, which hasn't proved that useful in my career. But I do remember being confronted at a Time Inc. meeting on digital strategy with the simple question of how many direct two-way links there were in a fully connected network of 50 nodes. It was a long time before any of us could figure out even how to begin figuring it out. Tomorrow's careers are likely to require more knowledge of networks, probabilities, statistics and risk analysis. That's why it would be useful to have the standards-setting body be advised by recruitment officers from the infotech, biotech, medical and, yes, financial sectors.

The U.S. will, believe it or not, eventually get out of the current financial crisis. Then it will face an even bigger challenge: creating a real economy that will be as internationally competitive in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century. All of the recent bank bailouts and mortgage plans will, even if they succeed, build an economic foundation of bricks without straw — ready to crumble — if we don't create a productive economy again. That means creating a workforce that is educated well enough to produce more value per capita than other countries. This will be especially true in the 21st century economy, which promises to be based foremost on knowledge. And that is why the U.S. needs, particularly at this juncture, 21st century American standards for its schools.

Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and the author of, most recently, Einstein: His Life and Universe