Friday, September 14, 2012
Is Bloom's Portrait of Iowa and Iowans out of Bounds?
The infamous article in Atlantic Monthly's online edition from the journalism professor at Iowa, Stephen Bloom, continues to elicit critical reactions from those who know the state best. How fair was the Professor's Portrayal?
Sunday, September 9, 2012
We Built It!
Whatever happened to the sense of gratitude -- let alone recognition of the role of government, teachers, breaks, ohters -- that most Americans seem to feel about their luck in being alive in this country, at this time? Watching the GOP convention speeches, framed around the the President's remark recently that no one, no matter how successful, does it solely on his own, it's easy for someone like me who was the beneficiary of a Congress who passed the National Defense Education Act to help finance the college costs of those like me from families who didn't have the means to afford tution and fees costs for all their kids. The speakers -- Santorum, Nikki Haley, even Ann Romney, and Chris Christie -- hammer on the same point: we hearty individualists and we alone are able to say "we did it." Good for them! I can only say: it really is doubtful.
DT
DT
The politics of student loans
A sobering series on college costs, the most recent post of which looks at the federal government's outstourcing to collection agencies to run down the delinquent in repaying their student loans.
The link below is to the New York Times most recent article on the costs of college, both monetary and political. All are sobering accounts of how students and their families have paid dearly for their detachment from politics and policymaking. The problem, though, is that the anti-government and anti-political detachment fostered by this detachment only makes it worse.
DT
The link below is to the New York Times most recent article on the costs of college, both monetary and political. All are sobering accounts of how students and their families have paid dearly for their detachment from politics and policymaking. The problem, though, is that the anti-government and anti-political detachment fostered by this detachment only makes it worse.
 |
|
Sunday, August 26, 2012
The Road to Recovery?
As pointed out in an August 25 New York Times column by Charles Blow, a White House report issued a week earlier noted that:
“Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the economy lost over 300,000 local education jobs. The loss of education jobs stands in stark contrast to every other recovery in recent years, under Republican and Democratic administrations.”
For a time, the loss of teaching jobs was held in abeyance by the so-called stimulus, enacted by a strictly Democratic vote in 2009. As federal funds ran out and the Republicans who controlled the House in the wake of the 2010 elections put efforts to curb the debt atop of their own recovery agenda, the recovery has slowed and job increases have been paltry and confined to the private sector.
Meanwhile, China and India continue to pour resources into education, far outpacing in the US in producing college graduates with training in Science, Technology, and Math (STEM) degrees. Charles Blow's column proceeds to point out the consequences of these divergent paths for the next generation of Americans. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that these consequences are hardly hearty or worthy of national pride.
In 1957, I was a fourth grade student when the USSR launched Sputnik, the ICBM capable of carrying nuclear warheads from one side of the world to the other (in addition to winning the race for space). The US response included passage of the National Defense Education Act, a program that was in place nine years later when I borrowed money from the early student loan program to pay for what my (athletic) scholarship didn't cover at Whittier College. The interest on NDEA loans was 3%; the terms of repayment were such that if I chose to enter the education field, 10% of what I owed would be canceled from the total I borrowed up to five years or half of the value of the loan.
This is worth mentioning because hundreds of thousands of Baby Boomers like me benefited from this federal program. That this program was part of national security seems, in retrospect, to make good sense (though at the time it struck me as odd to couple defense-spending with subsidies to college students). The contrast today could not be more stark. As college has become far more necessary for economic survival for today's high school graduates, and the costs of attendance have escalated at a rate the rivals only the growth in health-care spending relative to the cost of living, the attitude of lawmakers toward education at all levels has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Under the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011, passed in an eleventh-hour compromise after House Republicans threatened to allow the debt limit to expire for the first time in history, federal educational spending, already diminished on a per capita basis relative to my generation, becomes expendable -- literally. Since the Super Committee created by the debt deal failed, as expected, to agree to an additional trillion dollars in savings over a ten-year period, the default option in that event that was part of the BCA goes into effect on January 1, 2013. "Sequestration" -- automatic across the board cuts in spending programs in defense and domestic discretionary programs -- takes effect unless action is taken beforehand to "kick the can down the road" until the 213th Congress is in power.
Partisanship aside, this is no way for the world's oldest constitutional republic to run things. And so it will remain until sufficient numbers of the masses most directly affected by these priorities make it plain to office-holders that this is unacceptable. Or, at the very least, that this is an issue demanding debate in the presidential election. The ball, as the saying goes, is in our court.
DT
Monday, April 23, 2012
The Oldest Story in American Politics
This editorial is from the local Tucscon, AZ paper about the two young men battling to take Gabby Giffords' district in the House. It's a hoot, a tad partisan perhaps (but not in an unfair way), and it's a wonderful caricature on the state of American Politics at this point of the 21st Century:
High school graduate Jesse Kelly defeated a Harvard educated Air Force pilot, a nice American named Dave Sitton and Frank “Spank me, I’m bad” Antenori. Now that the fat lady has sung and the primary is over it’s time for Act II of “The Barber of Civility”: A contest between the guy who looks like the Jurassic Park professor without the pith helmet and a carpet bagging gun-toting Bible thumping gosh and shucks Gomer Pyle who can channel Sean Hannity.
Jesse will do great among the unwashed, the rural, the illiterate, the scared goobers willing to cheerfully vote against their own interests, whipping up the groundlings and the believers with rhetorical red meat so rotten with the stench of untruths that honorable flies will choose to lay their eggs elsewhere. And he’ll smile like a man surprised he said something resembling a coherent thought. And the crowds who hate elitists and grammar and syntax and critical thinking will slap their knees and hoot. Scan the online comment section for repugnant speech and unfiltered anonymous hatred of all who differ with the strict conservative view and and you have found your archetypal "here come the black helicopters from Kenya" Kelly supporters.
And he will be petted and stroked and groomed and cooed to by right-wing think tanks and he’ll be showered, nay, flooded with bags of cash from big oil and all the right PACs looking for a manly mannequin with a pull string. And he’s a pretty one. He’s tall and he’s handsome and he’s tall and he’s handsome. Elderly church ladies who can't tell you who the Vice-President is gaze adoringly up at Kelly, yearning to vote for him and to adopt him and to feed him apple pie. Goodbye Mo Udall, hello empty plastic Ken doll.
And he will be angry at those who question his ascendency and his indignant finger will raise up to poke the sky and he’ll thunder incoherent talk radio babble about freedom and liberty and liberty from freedom and FOX news and the right-wing machine will give him their cameras and their spotlights every chance they can.
He won’t represent you. He will represent the Tea Party fanatics, talk radio freaks, the hand-wringing evangelicals, the gun fondlers and the paranoid. The rest of you are just not Americans, you Marxists and Communists and baby killers and you can go to Hell for all he cares. He’ll terrify crowds with his tales of the liberal straw man, the wretched progressive sasquatch, the abominable secularists and he’ll shake the scarecrow and he’ll offer himself up as the great peasant’s torch just waiting to be pressed into battle against the fictitious kindling. Swaddled in the flag and clutching his sacred Constitution he’ll weep for America and prophesy a plague of socialism sweeping across the land that will rival the fire-in-the-sky visions of St. John. Evolution is a head-shaker and abortion is for harlots and those who are not with him are devils. The Word is Limbaugh and he is the word made flesh. Hearken to Jesse all ye Limbaugh Christians, the end times are upon us and the Messiah has a high school diploma. Reject him not, oh ye dittoheads. The Republicans have their man, their folksy Baron of bromides, their King of jingos, raised in the womb of the right-wing echo chamber. And their darling will have an army of fanatical feverish shock jocks who’ll trumpet at the Walls of Jericho for He who is Him everyday until Medicare, Social Security, Big Government, Taxes, the department of Education, our rotting public education system, and those diabolical regulators and the United Nations all come tumbling down.
At the final debate with Giffords in 2010 he was figuratively hoisted on the shoulders of believers with pitchforks and torches who cheered their Messiah with yahoos and slogans in lieu of palm fronds. How can one be civil when you’re debating an opponent who lies and smirks and makes George Bush sound look Stephen Hawking? His adherents cannot be moved by facts, they have found faith.
Sinclair Lewis had his Main Street Babbitt, we have Kelly. This Barber v. Kelly election will truly be an American spectacle rivaling the Scopes Monkey trial because its outcome will define us for years. Are we an easily frightened America aching for the shallow comfort of the primitive and the superstitious or are we the fearless America that questions, that embraces the future, that is modern and smart? Mark Twain and H.L.Mencken savaged their respective times as the gilded ages of carnival hawkers and tent evangelists and smiling shoeshine salesmen and gullible rubes willing to say yes to any smiling carpet-bagger. They are gazing up from Hell longing to see this show unfold. This summer the oldest American story shall repeat itself.
PS:DT--My guess is that the exact characters might change, but the essential elements of the story will be repeated dozens if not scores of times in this election. The New Gilded Age indeed!
High school graduate Jesse Kelly defeated a Harvard educated Air Force pilot, a nice American named Dave Sitton and Frank “Spank me, I’m bad” Antenori. Now that the fat lady has sung and the primary is over it’s time for Act II of “The Barber of Civility”: A contest between the guy who looks like the Jurassic Park professor without the pith helmet and a carpet bagging gun-toting Bible thumping gosh and shucks Gomer Pyle who can channel Sean Hannity.
Jesse will do great among the unwashed, the rural, the illiterate, the scared goobers willing to cheerfully vote against their own interests, whipping up the groundlings and the believers with rhetorical red meat so rotten with the stench of untruths that honorable flies will choose to lay their eggs elsewhere. And he’ll smile like a man surprised he said something resembling a coherent thought. And the crowds who hate elitists and grammar and syntax and critical thinking will slap their knees and hoot. Scan the online comment section for repugnant speech and unfiltered anonymous hatred of all who differ with the strict conservative view and and you have found your archetypal "here come the black helicopters from Kenya" Kelly supporters.
And he will be petted and stroked and groomed and cooed to by right-wing think tanks and he’ll be showered, nay, flooded with bags of cash from big oil and all the right PACs looking for a manly mannequin with a pull string. And he’s a pretty one. He’s tall and he’s handsome and he’s tall and he’s handsome. Elderly church ladies who can't tell you who the Vice-President is gaze adoringly up at Kelly, yearning to vote for him and to adopt him and to feed him apple pie. Goodbye Mo Udall, hello empty plastic Ken doll.
And he will be angry at those who question his ascendency and his indignant finger will raise up to poke the sky and he’ll thunder incoherent talk radio babble about freedom and liberty and liberty from freedom and FOX news and the right-wing machine will give him their cameras and their spotlights every chance they can.
He won’t represent you. He will represent the Tea Party fanatics, talk radio freaks, the hand-wringing evangelicals, the gun fondlers and the paranoid. The rest of you are just not Americans, you Marxists and Communists and baby killers and you can go to Hell for all he cares. He’ll terrify crowds with his tales of the liberal straw man, the wretched progressive sasquatch, the abominable secularists and he’ll shake the scarecrow and he’ll offer himself up as the great peasant’s torch just waiting to be pressed into battle against the fictitious kindling. Swaddled in the flag and clutching his sacred Constitution he’ll weep for America and prophesy a plague of socialism sweeping across the land that will rival the fire-in-the-sky visions of St. John. Evolution is a head-shaker and abortion is for harlots and those who are not with him are devils. The Word is Limbaugh and he is the word made flesh. Hearken to Jesse all ye Limbaugh Christians, the end times are upon us and the Messiah has a high school diploma. Reject him not, oh ye dittoheads. The Republicans have their man, their folksy Baron of bromides, their King of jingos, raised in the womb of the right-wing echo chamber. And their darling will have an army of fanatical feverish shock jocks who’ll trumpet at the Walls of Jericho for He who is Him everyday until Medicare, Social Security, Big Government, Taxes, the department of Education, our rotting public education system, and those diabolical regulators and the United Nations all come tumbling down.
At the final debate with Giffords in 2010 he was figuratively hoisted on the shoulders of believers with pitchforks and torches who cheered their Messiah with yahoos and slogans in lieu of palm fronds. How can one be civil when you’re debating an opponent who lies and smirks and makes George Bush sound look Stephen Hawking? His adherents cannot be moved by facts, they have found faith.
Sinclair Lewis had his Main Street Babbitt, we have Kelly. This Barber v. Kelly election will truly be an American spectacle rivaling the Scopes Monkey trial because its outcome will define us for years. Are we an easily frightened America aching for the shallow comfort of the primitive and the superstitious or are we the fearless America that questions, that embraces the future, that is modern and smart? Mark Twain and H.L.Mencken savaged their respective times as the gilded ages of carnival hawkers and tent evangelists and smiling shoeshine salesmen and gullible rubes willing to say yes to any smiling carpet-bagger. They are gazing up from Hell longing to see this show unfold. This summer the oldest American story shall repeat itself.
PS:DT--My guess is that the exact characters might change, but the essential elements of the story will be repeated dozens if not scores of times in this election. The New Gilded Age indeed!
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Kevin Bacon Theory of Politics
The game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", which I thought was Six Degrees of Separation, is the game where you try to trace your path to Kevin Bacon in the fewest possible steps. In Six Degrees of Separation, the theory is that every one is connected within six degrees of separation. This article states that the election has reached a point where they are starting to play this game more often. Whether it be Mitt Romney and his "ties" to Ted Nugent who recently said that if President Obama wins the election this year that he will be dead or in jail by this time next year. Or the most recent controversy of Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen, who has almost zero ties to the President, when she stated that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life. This happens during every election, but the truth is if someone tried hard enough they could probably find a connection between the President or Mitt Romney to anyone. So we better all watch what we say because who knows...it might be overheard by someone who thinks I am connected to the President. And if I am connected to the President and I said it, it might as well have come straight from his mouth. Give me a break.
http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/17/11250791-analysis-kevin-bacon-theory-of-politics-overtakes-2012-campaign?lite
Racism in Iowa
http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/16/ruling-expected-soon-in-iowa-employment-discrimination-lawsuit/?hpt=us_t2
I was reading an article today on CNN about racism and dicrimination in Iowa. A lawsuit has been filed for over 6,000 African- American applicates who felt that racism had a role to play in them being looked over for a job. The beginning of the article tells a stroy about a clear racist bias that lead to a women not being considered for a job. The lawsuit was filed against Iowa. The following is a block of a paragraph that I have trouble with.
"The plaintiffs' attorneys say the discrimination is not necessarily a result of racism. They say the discriminatory hiring was often the result of implicit bias – an unconscious preference of the mostly white hiring officials for white applicants over black applicants."
This was the plaintiffs' attorney and it makes it sound as if they don't want this to been seen as racism because that will have a negative affect on Iowa. Everyone would like to believe that racism was a thing of the past that has already been delt with but I don't think that is near to true. I was watching a national baseball game the other day and it was Jackie Robinson day, a day were every player wears Jackie's number 42 and everyone is suppose to honor how Jackie was able to perserver through racism and break the color barrier in baseball. Some would say Jackie Robinson was one of the most important figures in African- American history and they wouldn't be lieing. What shocked me most was an announcers comments on the day. He spoke about how, even today, we are still fighting for people's basic rights to be equal. And he made a broad and suprising statement that he cautioned American's to start treating one-another with equality because we like to move on too soon on issues of inequality.
We have been talking about whether people would like to take the easy and wrong path compared to the hard and right path and this is how I feel people view equality and racism. They feel like the issue is over and we have moved on but this is just the easy and wrong path. The issue of equality will always be there and we can't ignore it.
Do you feel racism is still an issue today? I have trouble believing it isn't with the actions and comments I've heard people have about Obama.
I was reading an article today on CNN about racism and dicrimination in Iowa. A lawsuit has been filed for over 6,000 African- American applicates who felt that racism had a role to play in them being looked over for a job. The beginning of the article tells a stroy about a clear racist bias that lead to a women not being considered for a job. The lawsuit was filed against Iowa. The following is a block of a paragraph that I have trouble with.
"The plaintiffs' attorneys say the discrimination is not necessarily a result of racism. They say the discriminatory hiring was often the result of implicit bias – an unconscious preference of the mostly white hiring officials for white applicants over black applicants."
This was the plaintiffs' attorney and it makes it sound as if they don't want this to been seen as racism because that will have a negative affect on Iowa. Everyone would like to believe that racism was a thing of the past that has already been delt with but I don't think that is near to true. I was watching a national baseball game the other day and it was Jackie Robinson day, a day were every player wears Jackie's number 42 and everyone is suppose to honor how Jackie was able to perserver through racism and break the color barrier in baseball. Some would say Jackie Robinson was one of the most important figures in African- American history and they wouldn't be lieing. What shocked me most was an announcers comments on the day. He spoke about how, even today, we are still fighting for people's basic rights to be equal. And he made a broad and suprising statement that he cautioned American's to start treating one-another with equality because we like to move on too soon on issues of inequality.
We have been talking about whether people would like to take the easy and wrong path compared to the hard and right path and this is how I feel people view equality and racism. They feel like the issue is over and we have moved on but this is just the easy and wrong path. The issue of equality will always be there and we can't ignore it.
Do you feel racism is still an issue today? I have trouble believing it isn't with the actions and comments I've heard people have about Obama.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)