the part of the Civil Rights Act which outlaws private establishments
from denying services on the basis of race, sexual identity, etc; like
Blacks at lunch counters, staying at hotels, et alia! He dissembled
when questioned by Rachel Maddow, who brilliantly found ways to
come back to the question as he rambled on, avoiding a direct answer.
She finally asked whether she, a gay woman, could be refused. Nada.
Amazingly, he seemed oblivious to the spectacle he was making. He
likely has other such 'principled' isssues and will perform as a Tea
Party rabble-rouser on the campaign trail or, G-d forbid, in the Senate.
Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18herbert.html?th&emc=th
A Very Bright Idea
By Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: May 17, 2010
We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and
the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete
two years of college by the time they finish high school?
That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with
Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School
Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives
highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma
and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually
devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the
course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete
their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th
and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city's
Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least
in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids
drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr.
Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely
disappointing.
Many bright and talented youngsters are lost along the way. "We seldom
capture the imagination and energy of young people until somewhere well
along in the college years," said Dr. Botstein.
A visit to the school is a glimpse into the realm of the possible. I stopped
by on a gloomy, rainy morning, and the building's exterior seemed fully in
synch with the weather. But inside you're quickly caught up in what seems
almost the ideal academic atmosphere. In class after class, I was struck by
how engaged the students were, and how much they reflected the face of the
city.
These were kids who had come to the school (mostly by subway) from every
borough and from just about every background imaginable.
The first class I visited was a college-level biology course. The students
were deep into the process of dissecting fetal pigs. One of the students,
who hopes someday to be a doctor, explained to me how essential it was for
the students "to understand the organ systems in mammals."
In another class, a fiendishly difficult math problem was being worked out.
When the class ended without the problem being brought to a satisfactory
conclusion, the students groaned as if a movie had been interrupted at the
climactic moment. The instructor assured them that "we'll pick it up right
here" the next time the class met.
The Bard High School Early College model has been around long enough and has
given a first-rate education to enough students to warrant significant
expansion and close study to determine just how far this promising
innovation might be able to fly. (A second school, Bard High School Early
College Queens, opened in 2008.)
Dr. Botstein would like to see 150 such schools created across the country,
which would reach roughly 100,000 students.
President Obama mentioned the Bard school last summer in a speech in which
he suggested that more attention should be paid to such "innovative
approaches" to education. An application for a grant that would help cover a
national expansion of the program has been filed with the United States
Department of Education.
When you look at the variety of public schools that have worked well in the
U.S. - in cities big and small, and in suburban and rural areas - you wonder
why anyone thought it was a good idea to throw a stultifying blanket of
standardization over the education of millions of kids of different
aptitudes, interests and levels of maturity.
The idea should always have been to develop a flexible system of public
education that would allow all - or nearly all - children to thrive. One of
the things Bard has shown is that kids from wildly different backgrounds -
including large numbers of immigrant children - can thrive in an educational
environment that is much more intellectually demanding than your typical
high school.
In this tough economic period, a program in which students come out of high
school with up to 60 college credits already in their grasp can only be
welcome. But the students I talked with were not fixated on the costs they
would avoid in their college years. They were focused on the challenging
work of the present moment.
As I watched a small group of history students enthusiastically
participating in a discussion of events in the post-World War II period, I
thought of a comment that a student in the biology lab, Claire Fishman, had
made to me earlier: "When I get to college, I'm going to be really well
prepared."
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/whos_afraid_of_rand_paul_20100518/
Who's Afraid of Rand Paul?
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: May 18, 2010
Tuesday's election results were pretty good for progressives. The retirement
of that windbag chameleon Sen. Arlen Specter is long overdue, and pro-labor
forces were able to push Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a runoff in Arkansas.
Even the big tea party win in Kentucky has its bright side.
Count me as one lefty liberal who is not the least bit unhappy with the
victory by Rand Paul in Kentucky's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.
Not because it might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in
the general, but rather because he seems to be a principled libertarian in
the mold of his father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and we need more of that
impulse in the Congress. What's wrong with cutting back big government that
mostly exists to serve the interests of big corporations? Surely it would be
better if that challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the
Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we're talking about.
Rand Paul, like his dad, is worthy of praise for standing in opposition to
the Wall Street bailout, which will come to be marked as the greatest
swindle in U.S. history and which was, as he noted on his website, an
unconstitutional redistribution of income in favor of the undeserving rich:
"Federal bailouts reward inefficient and corrupt management, rob taxpayers,
hurt smaller and more responsible private firms, exacerbate our budget
problems, explode national debt, and destroy our U.S. dollar. Even more
importantly, any bailout of private industry is in direct violation of the
Constitution. It is a transfer of wealth from those who have earned to those
who have squandered."
Of course the joker in the deck is the word principled before libertarian,
and, as many online commentators have noted, Rand Paul is a bit more
inclined to waffle on an interventionist foreign policy than is his father.
While he would have insisted on a declaration of war before the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, he argues that Afghanistan, where the 9/11
attack was planned, was a legitimate target but that Iraq was not. In either
case, as he insists correctly, a congressional declaration of war was
constitutionally required:
"If I had been in the U.S. Senate I would have stopped them and said no
more, we will have a vote. We will declare war with Afghanistan. We will
declare war with Iraq. I would have voted for a declaration of war with
Afghanistan but I would have voted against a declaration of war with Iraq.
But I would have made them vote. And that's the problem, they no longer pay
attention to the rules."
In any case, his Republican establishment opponent, Trey Grayson, attacked
Paul for his opposition to an interventionist foreign policy as well as for
favoring the legalization of marijuana, and on both counts it is a good sign
that Kentucky voters rejected those lines of attack.
True, to wax warmly about a potential Republican libertarian senator is an
act of desperation for a liberal who still hopes that the federal government
might be moved by the embattled band of progressive Democrats in Congress to
put the power of the federal government at the service of the needy. But
when has that happened recently? With a commanding Democratic majority in
Congress and a former community organizer as president, the focus of
economic policy in this time of enormous economic pain has been on saving
the bankers who created this mess.
With the Democrats trusting our well-being to the likes of Lawrence Summers
and Timothy Geithner, who under President Bill Clinton did so much to enable
Wall Street greed, would it not be good to have at least one Republican
senator questioning the Washington spending spree? Yes, Rand Paul is bad on
a lot of social issues I care about, and no, I don't embrace his faith in
the social compassion of unfettered free markets. But the alternative we
have experienced is not one of a progressive government properly restraining
free-market greed but rather, as was amply demonstrated in the pretend
regulation of the oil industry, of government as a partner in corporate
crime. It is the power of the corporate lobbyists that is at issue, and it
is refreshing that candidate Paul has labeled Washington lobbyists a
"distinctly criminal class" and favors a ban on lobbying and campaign
contributions by those who hold more than a million dollars in federal
contracts.
Heresy, I know, but it is only thanks to Ron Paul, the father and hopefully
the mentor of the potential Kentucky senator, that we got a congressional
mandate to audit the Fed's role in the banking bailout. How bad could it be
to have another irascible Paul in the Congress?
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