https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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One day after Obama is long gone common sense might return to the White House and D.C. Let's hope so.
But by then American voters might be too stupid to grasp its significance.
Last night a Fox Reporter asked people who liked Bernie Sanders to explain Socialism and why they liked Bernie. They could not and were confused about the distinction between Socialism and Capitalism and Bernie's ideas. God help us! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Are Caddell and Schoen expressing their wish as opposed to reality.
Is Schumer campaigning against The Iran Deal or simply voting against it knowing his vote will save him with Jewish voters but not stop Obama's run a way Iran Deal train? (See 2 below.)
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Obama claims his best decision, as president, was selecting Doofus. I thought it was concluding the greatest threat our military faces is climate change. (See 3 below.)
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Market levels are a function of many inter related factors. Among the most important, but by no means exclusive, are economic or statistics, psychology and physics.
When economic circumstances are favorable market levels generally can move higher because psychology is more favorable and impediments to a rise, though they may be present, are often ignored.
When market levels become extended, psychology can become more subject to challenge and the physical principal of what goes up must come down comes into play and price corrections are more likely to occur.
When the aggregate market level recently reached a multiple of earnings beyond 18 or so , historically speaking, the market was moving into what is known as overbought territory. When China's economy slackened resulting in their purchases of raw materials declining, one of the main economic engines began to sputter and psychology changed and a market correction became ripe.
I believe other factors also added to overall investor concerns. The prospect of The Iran Deal passing leading to a rogue nation possessing and capable of delivering nuclear weapons cannot be ignored. A possible Trump and/or Hillarious presidency leading to unknown actions and /or those that would continue America's divisiveness, transfer of wealth and unsustainable spending also cannot be ignored. Uncertainty relating to interest rate actions on the part of The Fed also come into play as does high nation debt levels and the inability to finance them, ie. Greece, Puerto Rico etc.
When statistics become more favorable and markets reach levels where negative economics and psychology no longer determine the direction a base will have been reached from which an upturn is likely. Looking at the DOW Averages and speaking technically the market could decline into the 14,000's. If that is the case then we still have more downside.
On the other hand, psychology could change even though economics does not and the punishment could abate at a higher level and lead to a more subdued recovery.
No one can predict with any certainty so the drama will simply have to play itself out.
As for myself, I believe the market has more downside and , at the very least, more testing and I remain an observer on the sidelines because I believe circumstances leading to deflation are in the air.
Time will tell.
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Dick
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1) Why We Have More Than 40 Million Functional Illiterates
Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education:
The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch's sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade.
Even at a glance, you may see several problems. Just because they were “designed to be learned and mastered” by the third grade doesn’t mean they will be. The majority of children cannot master these words by any grade, if by master you mean name them with automaticity at reading speed.
“Respected by both teachers and parents” is a slippery construction that conspicuously omits mention of “reading experts who conduct research.”
Furthermore, even if these words make up two thirds of a text, that means a child cannot read every third word. Nothing resembling reading can take place.
Note that phonics instruction would allow the student to read every word by the second grade. But the sight-word method promises that by third grade, the children will know a small subset of English words but still remain largely illiterate. What sort of promise is that?
Even all that is not the full indictment. Trying to memorize many graphic designs – and that’s what learning to read with sight-words entails – is virtually impossible. The brain becomes cluttered with hundreds of partly memorized designs, all of which look quite similar. There are children with photographic memories who can survive. But let’s focus on the average student. This child might not be able to memorize even 100 sight-words each year, or ever. But the real flaw is that few children achieve automaticity. Most are always wandering slowly in the forest, so to speak. If parents understood how hopeless and painful this process is, they would never allow their children near sight-words.
So we need a way for parents to grasp viscerally that sight-words are a mission impossible for almost all children. Consider:
Dolch words for first grade include think. Fluent readers of English see the phonics in this word; they see the logic of this word. As a result, such readers do not realize how utterly bizarre and difficult this word looks to first-graders told to memorize the design as a sight-word.
It’s important that everyone see this word as the first-grader sees it. In fact, there is a simple way to do this. Here are the same letters arranged in other ways: hinkt, inthk, nihkt, htnik, khtni, tkhin.
From the point of view of visual memorization, they are all equally difficult. For experimental purposes, pick one of them and memorize it (as a shape, not a series of letters).
One site actually prints the official dogma: “Many students do not need extra practice with the Dolch words, as they learn them by reading them repeatedly in context.”
This nonsense is repeated to parents, who then expect their kids to acquire these words the same way a dog picks up burrs in the woods. It’s not so easy. If schools were serious about memorizing word-shapes, children would draw them over and over. Flashcards would be used relentlessly. But keep in mind that our schools constantly campaign against rote memorization, which is said to be a great evil. Meanwhile, they’re asking children to commit rote memorization on hundreds (and in Whole Word’s heyday, thousands) of English words. So you know they are hypocrites. But let’s stick to the task at hand. Consider the words again. I bet you can’t pick out the one you memorized:
itkni, itikn, hkitn, kinht, nktni, ntikn.
That’s a bit of a trick, because these are six new configurations made from the same group of letters. The point is, English letters and words look a lot alike. There is not much to work with. And imagine the nightmare of longer words.
In the process of trying to memorize these look-alike designs, the brain is soon overwhelmed by complexity and clutter. Furthermore, our eyes scan a face or visual design from all directions. But English must be read left-to-right, letter by letter, then by syllables and words, but always left to right. The instant our eyes start darting around, which they always do with graphic designs, reading is finished. Sight-word readers report the most amazing cognitive problems. Words slide around on the page. Words reverse themselves. This doesn’t seem to make sense until you consider that the eyes are jumping around on the page in random jerks, thus inducing complementary side-effects.
For many children, the next step is to be told they have dyslexia, which simply means they don’t read well. They are told they have ADHD. They need an appointment with a shrink. They need to take Ritalin. Pretty soon these children are a mess inside and out, all because their school gave them an impossible task.
Even if you do memorize the 220 sight-words perfectly, you have been set up for a lifetime of cognitive schizophrenia. You will read some words phonetically and some as designs, back and forth in no predictable order. You won’t know which kind of word is coming next. There will be anxiety as your eyes go from left to right. What is this next thing coming at you? Is it in your sight-word inventory? No, apparently not, which means you have to read it phonetically. Your brain has to make a lot of extra decisions, which cripples reading speed. You become one of those millions of people who never reads for pleasure because it is, for you, hard work.
Experience suggests that girls are more patient with bad pedagogical methods. Many boys become angry and sullen. They pull back and refuse to participate. If you want to know why American college students are 57% female, think first of the phrase “sight-words.”
When Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, he thought he had made the case so compellingly that no one would dare promote sight-words in the future. He was wrong. Our Education Establishment spun off the International Reading Association in 1956. Their dozens of celebrated experts continued to promote sight-words up until the present day. First-graders still come home with lists of sight-words that they must commit to memory. So we have a surreal situation: sixty years later, many a Johnny still can’t read.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that Balanced Literacy and Whole Language are the contemporary repositories of all the bad reading theories from the last 85 years, perpetuated to the degree that each separate community will tolerate them. Now, Common Core seems comfortable with locking in all of this baggage. That should tell us from the start that Common Core is not serious about improving education. Common Core Math loves elaborate and elusive word problems – not a good idea anyway, but just imagine these semi-illiterate kids struggling with “Juanita, Charlotte, and Darcy walked to the mall to buy seven bags of stickers, but they had only $22.45 between them and…” Even the parents are getting ulcers from trying to help their kids.
QED: The one essential K-12 reform is to eliminate sight-words, and to teach children to read with systematic phonics. All phonics experts say the process takes about four months, but certainly by the second grade.
Bruce Deitrick Price’s ed site is Improve-Education.org. His new novel is The Man Who Falls In Love With His Wife, a romantic drama set in Manhattan. Info and e-book here.
1a)Saving America from a European Future
By Walter Mead
Ben Domenech, in a powerful Federalist column published Friday, identifies white identity politics as one of the driving forces behind the destructive appeal of Donald Trump’s populism. Trump’s success is a sign of a very great threat to the American right, Domenech says; it could transform the GOP from being a “fusionist ideological coalition with a shared belief in limited government” to a party that caters specifically and exclusively to the grievances and resentments of downtrodden whites. Such a path would be fatal to the cause of limited government, and would instead lead the GOP down the path taken by proto-fascist parties of the European right. One key passage:
“Identity politics for white people” is not the same thing as “racism”, nor are the people who advocate for it necessarily racist, though of course the categories overlap. In fact, white identity politics was at one point the underlying trend for the majoritarian American cultural mainstream. But since the late 1960s, it has been transitioning in fits and starts into something more insular and distinct. Now, half a century later, the Trump moment very much illuminates its function as one interest group among many, as opposed to the background context for everything the nation does. The white American with the high-school education who works at the duck-feed factory in northern Indiana has as much right to advance his interest as anyone else. But that interest is now being redefined in very narrow terms, in opposition to the interests of other ethnic groups, and in a marked departure from the expansive view of the freedoms of a common humanity advanced by the Founders and Abraham Lincoln.
Domenech is right that Trump and his immigration plan raise the specter of a GOP driven by white identity politics in a particularly vivid way. He is also right that the problem goes much deeper than Trump, who is, as he points out, merely benefiting from an anger and resentment that was already there. America is growing more and more diverse. Once the “cultural mainstream”, whites are becoming just one ethnic group among many. As that happens, the danger is that the GOP, which got 88 percent of its votes from whites in 2012, gives up on creating a coalition bound together by ideology and instead resorts to ginning up resentment among aggrieved members of its base.
If that transformation happens, Domenech argues, we would be faced with a European-style future, where the failure of the elites to respect the will of the large swathes of people creates an increasingly illiberal right-wing backlash, which in turn drives moderates to vote for the left, and so on in cycles.
2)
Schumer May Save the Democratic Party
The Iran deal has potential, both because of public opinion and the way the administration is positioning itself, to hurt Democrats in much the same way that the Iranian hostage crisis did in 1980 and 1981. Should New York Senator Chuck Schumer succeed in killing the deal, he will be saving the Democrats from what appears to be a grave political mistake.
President Obama has branded opponents of the deal as either ideological extremists or ignorant. In his speech at American University, he compared the agreement’s opponents with Iranian extremists chanting “death to America.” He pointed out that most of those opposed to the Iran deal supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, thus implying that they were warmongers—conveniently overlooking that his vice president and both of his secretaries of state voted for the war in Iraq.
Listening to the president you would never know that a plurality of Americans, including key parts of the Democratic party’s coalition, are opposed to the nuclear agreement. The Secure America Now (SAN) poll found 45 percent of Americans opposed the deal in July—up eight points from June—and that figure rises to 65 percent after respondents hear more details about the agreement. A more recent Fox poll shows that initial opposition has grown to 58 percent.
In both polls, barely 50 percent of Democrats support the agreement and well over one-third oppose. A critical group of Democratic voters—African Americans—is split on the issue, while Hispanics are overwhelmingly opposed. Making matters worse, a solid majority of women and younger voters oppose the agreement too.
Rubbing salt in these public opinion wounds, President Obama’s popularity is upside down with 52 percent of Americans rating him unfavorably. By contrast, the public views Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who opposes the nuclear deal, as favorable by a two-to-one margin.
Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other members of the administration have been berating the nuclear deal’s opponents. Kerry has been almost disdainful to members of Congress who have the temerity to suggest that the deal should be voted down and renegotiated. He claims that it’s too late to revise the agreement—the UN has already approved the deal, he says, the P5+1 partners won’t be willing to reopen negotiations and the Iranians have no interest in making revisions. Kerry seems to have become a defender of Iran’s rights rather than an advocate of the United States’ best interests.
Obama once said that a bad deal was worse than no deal. Now he and Secretary Kerry want us to believe that the choice is between a bad deal or war. At a news conference on July 15, the president made this false choice explicit: “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are—those are the options.”
According to an op-ed by former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, “the administration has used these same arguments before to try to stop Congress from imposing economic sanctions on Iran...but...when the sanctions were adopted, the doomsday forecasts were proven wrong.” Apocalyptic warnings are always the starting position of the Obama administration, and time after time they have been disproved.
For all his rhetoric, though, Obama has a problem: The SAN poll reveals that 62 percent believe that the deal doesn’t make America safer and more secure. Over 60 percent feel that the deal doesn’t prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon—the stated goal of the negotiations. And over 80 percent of respondents don’t believe that Iran should be given up to $100 billion in economic sanctions relief without Congressional approval, including 74 percent of Democrats.
Indeed, the administration’s problems are certain to become even more complicated by the revelation that the Iranians will be submitting their own data to the UN monitoring agency and doing their own inspections. This flies in the face of public opinion: the SAN poll finds that more than 60 percent believe the agreement should be voted down if the inspections are completed by an independent agency and the details of any and all side deals are made public to Congress.
Not only is there growing skepticism from the public, but Obama’s worst political nightmare has been realized: two prominent Democratic senators have decided to oppose the Iran agreement on principle—Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez.
It had been widely assumed that Obama would hold enough Democrats in Congress to ensure that, if Congress rejects the Iran deal, the president’s veto will prevail, and the deal will go forward. But that was before Senator Schumer announced his opposition to the current deal, urging that a better agreement be negotiated.
Schumer, who has until now been a faithful Obama supporter, has been the target of attacks that rival what the Obama administration hurls at Republicans. Administration supporters have warned that Schumer may be endangering his future leadership position, while rabid left-wing groups like Moveon.org allege that he is “voting for war.” Clearly, the administration and its allies believe that there is no such thing as legitimate opposition to the Iran agreement.
Schumer’s decision and his thoughtful and articulate statement explaining it reflect a man putting conscience before politics. Had Schumer—who is normally known as a hyper-partisan actor—been acting politically, he would have delayed his announcement as long as possible.
For all the abuse he’s taking, Schumer may actually be protecting the Democratic Party from the real political danger inherent in Obama’s actions. The contempt that the president and John Kerry showed by taking this agreement to the UN before submitting it to Congress and the American people was reckless. They are not only thumbing their noses at the American people and Congress, but they are showing contempt for the primacy of our system of checks and balances and they could be setting up the Democratic party for years of attacks of “you caused this!” every time Iran behaves in a threatening manner.
Should Obama veto a bill blocking the Iran deal and defy the will of Congress, he would once again find himself on the wrong side of public opinion: 61 percent of voters would want a veto overridden. If a veto is sustained solely by Democrats two-thirds of respondents, including a plurality of Democrats say they would blame the Democratic party if Iran got a nuclear weapon or used the money from sanction relief to support terrorist attacks on Israel.
By contrast, Schumer’s principled stand enjoys broad support: In another part of the SAN poll, Democratic voters were asked what their senators and representatives should do when faced with difficult choices—support the president or follow their conscience if they oppose him—35 percent said that they should “trust the President and his negotiators and support their party’s leader,” while 59 percent wanted their representatives and senators to set aside party loyalties and follow their conscience on the issue at hand.
As President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”
Congress is in recess, but the coming weeks will tell whether Democrats have the courage to stand up for what they believe and what the American people want, or whether they will be cowered by their president and risk damaging the party for years to come.
Patrick Caddell is a former pollster for President Jimmy Carter and a Fox News Contributor. He is also a principal on the SAN poll.
Douglas Schoen is a former pollster for President Bill Clinton and a Fox News Contributor.
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3) Earnest: Adding Biden "Smartest Decision Obama Has Ever Made In Politics," He Can "Mount A Successful Campaign"
At Monday's White House press briefing, the first since President Obama returned from his summer sojourn in Martha's Vineyard, ABC's Jonathan Karl asked White House press secretary Josh Earnest about the increasing rumors that Vice President Joe Biden is considering challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president.
Earnest brought up an old quote by President Obama, that adding the former Senator from Delaware to the 2008 ticket was "the smartest decision that he has ever made in politics."
"The president has indicated that his view that the decision that he made, I guess 7 years ago now, to add Joe Biden to the ticket as his running mate was the smartest decision that he has ever made in politics. And I think that should give you some sense into the president's view into Vice President's aptitude for the top job," Earnest said.
After Earnest was finished quoting the president's opinion of Joe Biden, Karl made a joke that implied Hillary Clinton wasn't that great of choice for Secretary of State. The press room erupted in laughter, including Earnest himself who didn't try to smooth over the situation.
"This is obviously, you know, a better decision than the secretary of state he choose," Karl quipped.
Earnest continued to lavish praise on the vice president, noting "there is no one in American politics today who has a better understanding of exactly what is required to mount a successful national presidential campaign" than Joe Biden.
"I'll just say that the vice president is somebody who has already run for president twice," Earnest said Monday. "He's been on a national ticket through two election cycles now, both in 2008 and the reelection of 2012. So, I think you could probably make the case that there is no one in American politics today who has a better understanding of exactly what is required to mount a successful national presidential campaign."
JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: So you have the development over the weekend that the vice president came back and met with Elizabeth Warren. How does the president deal with this if Biden actually decides to run? You have his current vice president versus the former Secretary of State.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE: Well, that's not an insignificant if in that question. And I think that's what everybody is pretty interested in finding out is what decision the vice president is going to make. The president has indicated that his view that the decision that he made, I guess 7 years ago now, to add Joe Biden to the ticket as his running mate was the smartest decision that he has ever made in politics. And I think that should give you some sense into the president's view into Vice President's aptitude for the top job.
KARL: So, I'd assume that means the president would support Vice President Biden if were to run? And this is obviously, you know, a better decision than the secretary of state he choose. So, uh -- well you said it was the best decision he ever made.
EARNEST: Yeah, it was...
EARNEST: The president has spoke at quite some length about the appreciation and respect and admiration he has for the service of Secretary Clinton, particularly in her four years as Secretary of State.
KARL: Just not his best decision.
EARNEST: Well, he, again, I think all of you and your coverage of some of the president's comments about Secretary Clinton have noted how warm those comments were.
I'll just say that the vice president is somebody who has already run for president twice. He's been on a national ticket through two election cycles now, both in 2008 and the reelection of 2012. So, I think you could probably make the case that there is no one in American politics today who has a better understanding of exactly what is required to mount a successful national presidential campaign. That means he's going to collect all the information that he needs to make a decision.
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