Anyone who believes The Teacher Unions are interested in education that embodies a tough curriculum is a sucker. Anyone who believes The Teacher Unions are interested in anything beyond securing jobs, high salaries and big pensions for their members is a sucker.
Educating children, according to misguided liberals, is the responsibility of a village if one believes our Sec.of State who preached this 'algae' when she ran for the Democrat Party's Nomination.
Holding the village responsible allows the family, the student to offload personal responsibility.
This is the same 'algae' coming from that young 'fluke' Georgetown Law Student who complains about the cost of sex protection and wants/expects the government to pay for her free spirited promiscuous indulgence. She willingly indulges in free sex but when there is a cost she wants taxpayers to fork over.
Well, her attitude qualifies her to be a lawyer alright because she apparently spends more time learning about screwing than about our Constitution.
God help us if her thinking predominates because her views are no fluke! But then, in fact, it already has and that is why Obama could be re-elected. We'd rather continue to be screwed than solve our problems which entails bearing some pain, being responsible getting a solid education, learn to save more than we spend, rebuild the family unit and reduce/end our flirtation with open sex and drugs.
I am not attacking women. I am simply not willing to embrace a fluke!(See 1 and 1a below.)
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Atlantic Article author writes about his interview with Obama. He comes down on Obama's side but leaves unexplained several actions:
1) Obama persists in sanctions which have visited economic pain on Iran but has done little if anything to stop their nuclear advances.
2) Obama has done nothing for the Syrians nor did he lift a finger when Iranians rebelled a year ago.
3) Has any of Obama's bowing, scraping and apologizing had any effect in building a favorable
coalition for us among Middle Eastern nations or have they become too distrustful of any pledge from this president?
4) Elevating Israeli settlements, which allowed Abbbas to make it become a condition precedent, and not extracting anything from the Palestinians. Shades of Obama's recent Afghanistan apology while their people continue to murder our military and he remains mute.
5) Ask Mubarak what he thinks of Obama's commitments.
6) Now that we are nearing re-election time is Obama trying to live down his earlier backhanded treatment of Netanyahu?
I would rather stick with D'Souza's explanation of Obama than Goldberg's.
Churchill's bust versus Nobel Peace Prize? You decide. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1)-Can Teachers Unions Do Education Reform?
California charter-school leader Steve Barr thinks so. But skeptics say unions exist only to protect jobs.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Democratic activist Steve Barr thinks he's found a solution for improving schools without jettisoning collective bargaining: Reformed unionism. Is this an oxymoron or the real deal?
"You can't go into and change an 80-to-90 percent unionized industry without unionized labor," Mr. Barr explains. Toyota and Honda might beg to differ, but Mr. Barr is determined to prove that unions can be forces for good in education.
A former national finance chairman of the Democratic Party, Mr. Barr established the charter-school organization Green Dot in 1999 to help fix a system in which nearly half of the city's public-school students don't graduate. And he wanted to do so with unionized teachers.
Today, nine of 10 Green Dot grads are considered by the state to be prepared for California's public universities, compared to three in 10 at Los Angeles's public schools. What's more, three-quarters of Green Dot grads go onto a four-year college.
Green Dot's success is possible, Mr. Barr says, because its teachers aren't part of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)—L.A.'s dominant, 35,000-strong union—but rather the fledgling Asociacion de Maestros Unido (AMU). The AMU's collective-bargaining agreement is 33 pages, ghastly thin compared to UTLA's 330-page monster. The biggest difference is that Green Dot teachers don't have tenure. Oh, and their contract doesn't regulate everything from access to bulletin boards to student codes of conduct. The model, says Mr. Barr, helps answer a crucial question: "Are [bad teachers] the union's fault or the system's fault?"
But some might say unions and the "system" are one and the same. Proxies of teachers unions dominate school boards since unions are usually the only groups that organize in school-board elections. School administrators belong to a union within the AFL-CIO, just like the American Federation of Teachers. And the AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) help run the accrediting body that dictates policy at university schools of education. The school system, in other words, is vertically and horizontally integrated by the unions.
Mr. Barr acknowledges that the unions have created an "undemocratic feel," with "lots of meetings that aren't posted" and "a handful of people [in] control," most of whom have been "going at it for a long time." Yet he sees opportunities for reform not only in new unions, as at Green Dot, but within the existing behemoths.
First there are union elections, in which Mr. Barr hopes to see reform-oriented teachers win and drive changes from within. Last year, some disgruntled L.A. teachers formed the "NewTLA" caucus within the UTLA, but its mission remains awfully muddled. The caucus says it wants to promote "positive and proactive discourse among teachers" and to develop "education policy that empowers teachers, students, parents, and community." What that really means is anyone's guess.
For an example of progress, Mr. Barr cites last month's UTLA election, in which members passed a ballot initiative requiring union leaders to push for teacher input into the teacher-evaluation process (as opposed to administrators setting all the terms). A victory, but no watershed: Union leaders can still push, as is their wont, to water down standards and thereby protect bad teachers—bragging along the way that they're improving teacher accountability.
Union leaders love saying they've embraced reform even while doing everything in their power to thwart it. Take Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who worked with Mr. Barr to found a Green Dot school in New York City but opposed non-unionized charters at every turn. In 2010, Ms. Weingarten sought to oust reformist Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee for successfully weakening tenure protections, only to brag last year that "our union in the last two years had fundamentally reformed tenure so that it is really due process, so that it can't be used as a shield to incompetence."
"A lot of reformers who are Democrats or moderates," says Stanford political scientist Terry Moe, "want to believe that we can have unions and have reforms that are in the best interest of children. What they're ignoring is that unions are in the business of protecting jobs."
They also may be ignoring a main reason for Green Dot's success. "Green Dot schools are basically free to do as they please. Their union is nothing like local unions affiliated with NEA or AFT," says Mr. Moe. "These unions are not in a position to act in a way that established unions do."
And that's the scary part: "Give these unions another 10 or 15 years, and then what? Unions want to organize the charter sector, so they're willing to accept these contracts for now," says Mr. Moe. For now. A Steve Barr may want to "occupy" the unions, but it's just as likely that unions want to co-opt reformist rhetoric and "occupy" the charter sector.
Teachers unions didn't become such a formidable political force by being stupid. They're losing public opinion and market share to charters, but no real evidence suggests that they want to start privileging the interest of students over those of teachers.
Ms. Finley is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com
1a)Obama Backs Student in Furor With Limbaugh on Birth Control
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
The election-year fight over the administration’s birth control policy escalated Friday, with two unlikely figures — a Georgetown University law student and the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh — taking center stage in the politically charged conflict and pulling much of official Washington into the fray.
On Friday, one day after Senate Democrats beat back a Republican challenge to the new policy, President Obama called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student who had come under incendiary attack from Mr. Limbaugh, to thank her for publicly backing his regulations mandating contraception coverage.
The call by Mr. Obama to Ms. Fluke, an activist on the issue who had been barred by Republicans from testifying at a House hearing last month, provided new fuel to a dispute that has already spilled over into Congress and onto the campaign trail and was becoming a major source of contention between the two parties. Republicans have tried to use the issue to rally conservatives and Catholic voters who see the contraceptive mandate as an infringement on religious liberty.
But in Ms. Fluke and the scorn she has drawn from conservative commentators, Democrats may have found a symbol for what they have called a Republican “war on women” that could spell more difficulty for a Republican Party already showing signs of trouble with female voters.
The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said the president told Ms. Fluke that he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio. Mr. Obama believes, Mr. Carney said, that Mr. Limbaugh’s comments about Ms. Fluke were “unfortunate attacks,” and Mr. Carney called them “reprehensible.”
Ms. Fluke, 30, also drew support from the president of Georgetown University, who has differed with her in the past over the university’s refusal to provide insurance coverage for contraception.
The university president, John J. DeGioia, said in a statement: “One need not agree with her substantive position to support her right to respectful free expression. And yet, some of those who disagreed with her position — including Rush Limbaugh and commentators throughout the blogosphere and in various other media channels — responded with behavior that can only be described as misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
Mr. Obama phoned her just before she was to appear on MSNBC.
“He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” she told the program’s host, Andrea Mitchell. “And what was really personal for me was that he said to tell my parents that they should be proud. And that meant a lot, because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me.”
The tempest began after Ms. Fluke took public her campaign for contraceptive coverage at Georgetown, a Jesuit university in Washington, as Republicans and Catholic Church leaders were denouncing the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. Mr. Limbaugh subsequently called her a “slut” and a “prostitute,” drawing condemnation from Democrats.
On Friday, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, called the Limbaugh comments “inappropriate.” Rick Santorum, the former senator whose run for the Republican presidential nomination has thrust social conservatism into the spotlight, told CNN that Mr. Limbaugh was “being absurd.”
But, he added, “an entertainer can be absurd.”
In his radio show on Friday, Mr. Limbaugh said Ms. Fluke was being used as a political pawn by Democrats for fund-raising and other purposes.
“The Democrats are desperate,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “This is all they’ve got, is to go out and try to discredit their critics, to impugn and discredit the people who disagree with them.”
Democratic groups were trying to capitalize on the fight, circulating calls for support for Ms. Fluke tied to fund-raising appeals.
“Personal attacks on a student — and all women — simply can’t be ignored,” said one appeal from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Stand with us, and denounce Rush Limbaugh’s vile attacks.”
Ms. Fluke, a third-year law student, was no neophyte to the cause. She served as president and secretary of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice, as vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, and as an editor on The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. In those capacities, Ms. Fluke, a Cornell graduate, had other run-ins with the university over contraception access.
A week after she was shut out of the House hearing, House Democrats gave her a platform at an informal Democratic event where she testified that fellow students at her Jesuit university pay as much as $1,000 a year for contraceptives that are not covered by student health plans.
On his Wednesday show, Mr. Limbaugh said: “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.” Those remarks and others whipped up a frenzy of denunciations, but on Thursday, Mr. Limbaugh held his ground, declaring: “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
Mr. Boehner condemned those comments Friday, but also denounced Democratic fund-raising efforts stemming from the latest Limbaugh imbroglio.
“The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation,” said a Boehner spokesman, Michael Steel.
Some advertisers also expressed concern. On Friday, as complaints about Mr. Limbaugh’s comments mounted, a handful of companies said that they had halted their advertising on “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” at least temporarily. One of the companies, Quicken Loans, wrote on Twitter, “Due to continued inflammatory comments — along with valuable feedback from clients and team members — QL has suspended ads on Rush Limbaugh program.”
On Thursday, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said in a fund-raising appeal that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “women’s health rapid response fund” had raised $1.1 million and was nearing 500,000 signatures “on our petition against Republicans’ disgraceful assault on women’s rights.”
By Friday afternoon, the campaign committee had raised $1.6 million since Feb. 24, the day after Representative Darrell Issa’s hearings on the issue. Two petition drives had netted 600,000 signatures; 152,000 signed the Democratic petition on Thursday alone.
Republicans condemned such efforts, but the National Republican Congressional Committee launched its own fund-raising campaign against what it called “the Obama administration’s decision to trample on the religious liberty of Christian charities — forcing them to provide free birth control.”
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2)Obama's Many Messages on Iran: The Ticker
By Jeffrey Goldberg
It struck me early in my interview with President Barack Obama on the subject of Iran and Israel, that the president was addressing himself to a large number of far-flung and competing constituencies at once.
During much of our 45-minute conversation, which was held in the Oval Office Wednesday, Obama was directing a series of complicated messages to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will be visiting the White House Monday for what may turn out to be the single most consequential meeting of Obama’s presidency.
(Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, is the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror." He was formerly a Washington correspondent and a Middle East correspondent for the New Yorker.)
It is widely expected that Netanyahu will seek assurances from Obama that, one day in the not-so-distant future, the U.S. will strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, if sanctions fail to dissuade the regime in Tehran to give up its atomic ambitions. Obama, for his part, will be trying to convince Netanyahu not to attack Iran unilaterally, to give sanctions more time to work. One of the ways he will do this is to tell him that the U.S., in his words, “has Israel’s back.” Obama will also, he told me, argue that a premature attack could make the world more sympathetic to Iran. “At a time when there is not a lot of sympathy for Iran and its only real ally (Syria) is on the ropes, do we want a distraction in which suddenly Iran can portray itself as a victim?" he asked.
With Netanyahu he was performing a balancing act; with the Iranians, not quite so much. The president made it as clear as he ever has that a “military component” is one aspect of his famous formulation that “all options are on the table.” And he warned the Iranians (and comforted the Israelis) by noting: “As president of the United States, I don’t bluff.”
He had messages for other constituencies as well. One was his own administration, which has been speaking in multiple, and sometimes discordant, voices, on the question of America’s options vis-à-vis Iran, and on the possibility that Israel would strike Iran soon. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, last week suggested that Iran was run by “rational” men, which caused jitters among those who believe that Iran’s leaders have systematically made bad choices. Other U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, have talked at great length about the dangers and difficulties of a strike on Iran.
Such talk could cause the Iranians to believe that they are safe from U.S. military action. But I predict that such talk will stop now that Obama has said plainly, without equivocating or over-analyzing, that he is committed to keeping Iran from going nuclear.
Another constituency Obama was speaking to: leaders of the Republican Party, who he believes are trying to separate pro-Israel Americans (Jews, mainly, but not only) from the Democratic Party. “Why is it that, despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they've had over the last three years, that there are still questions" about his support for Israel? he asked. He then answered: “There is no good reason to doubt me on these issues.” He went on to say, “Some of it has to do with the fact that in this country and in our media, this gets wrapped up with politics. And I don't think that's any secret. And if you have a set of political actors who want to see if they can drive a wedge not between the United States and Israel, but between Barack Obama and a Jewish-American vote that has historically been very supportive of his candidacy, then it's good to try to fan doubts and raise questions.” Contained his answer was a subtle warning to anyone who claims to support Israel: Don’t turn such support into a partisan issue.
And of course, there is another constituency he was talking to: those American Jews themselves, whose sympathy and support he had in 2008 and hopes to have again as he stands for re-election. When he goes before the AIPAC convention Sunday morning, his message will be fairly unequivocal: Like most other presidents before him, he is on Israel’s side.
2a)
One day before the AIPAC conference kicks off in Washington, an anti-Obama pro-Israel group is widening its criticism of President Barack Obama's record on Israel -- while the White House defends its treatment of the relationship.
The trailer for a new 30-minute video, entitled "Daylight: The Story of Obama and Israel," cuts together clips of Obama quotes and outside commentary to put forth the narrative that Obama has made statements and taken actions as president that have put him out of step with the government of Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu and his supporters.
"We believe that that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines," Obama is shown saying, a reference to his May, 2011 speech, where he for the first time explicitly defined U.S. policyas supporting the 1967 borders with agreed swaps as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
"He didn't quite have a full grasp of what the full region looks like," conservative journalist Lee Smith is shown saying in the video. "This is not how you treat an ally."
The ad goes beyond the Israeli issue to suggest that the president is too solicitous of Muslim concerns. The end of the trailer shows Obama saying, "I want to make sure we end before the call to prayer," a clip from histown hall meeting with Turkish students in Istanbul in April 2009.
The video was produced by the group the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its pre-AIPAC publicity campaign, including posters and billboards all over Washington that question Obama's commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
"He says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Do you believe him?" the posters read. Then, next to a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, it says, "Do they?"
ECI is run by executive director Noah Pollak and Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain-Palin staffer now working at the consulting firm Orion Strategies and as chairman of the board of the Washington Free Beacon, an new conservative website.
"Obama says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable," Pollak told The Cable today. "We hope he means what he says, but the recent statements from his administration, his contentious relationship with the Israeli government, and his consistent efforts to weaken congressional sanctions don't inspire confidence."
The ECI board is comprised of Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer, who has endorsed Rick Santorum, and Rachel Abrams, the wife of former NSC official Elliott Abrams, and the author of the controversial Israel-focused blog "Bad Rachel." The group is also the only Israel-focused advocacy organization to have formed a SuperPAC in the run up to the 2012 election.
As part of its pre-AIPAC activity, ECI took out a full page ad in the New York Times yesterday calling out donors for supporting two liberal advocacy organizations in Washington, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, and accusing those donors of "funding bigotry and anti-Israel extremism."
Pollak also said that the video, billboards, and ads happen to refute a pre-AIPAC interview Obama gave toThe Atlantic, in which Obama expressed frustration with the attacks coming from conservative lawmakers and groups like ECI that claim he is not pro-Israel.
"Every single commitment I have made to the state of Israel and its security, I have kept," Obama said. "Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they've had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?"
"Obama said today he doesn't understand why there are questions about his record of support for Israel," Pollak said. "We think this movie will set the record straight, and remind pro-Israel Americans of the facts of this administration's failure to stand with Israel at some critical moment.
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