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$3.99
By Stanley Kutler
$13.57
$23
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s message was plain: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, oversight or public intervention.
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Flickr / Foraggio Fotographic
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By Joe Conason — We suddenly seem willing to consider sensible ideas that were always deemed unthinkable. Soon we may be mature enough to observe how other developed countries address problems that have baffled us for generations.
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White House
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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged the dire state of the economy, but struck a hopeful tone as he expanded on his vision for recovery. Investments in energy, education and health care will be key, he said, as will an expanded bailout of the financial sector. (Summary, video and full text after the jump)
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By Ellen Goodman — If freedom is just another word for no high-flying jobs left for new college graduates to lose, it opens room for risk-taking. And—dare I say it?—idealism.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The Senate passed its own version of the stimulus package Tuesday, slashing funding in areas that would most effectively stimulate the economy, such as aid to low-income Americans and states, while expanding tax cuts. The House and Senate bills must now be reconciled with one another.
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By Eugene Robinson — Rarely has a new presidency been greeted with such a consensus of good will—and rarely has a new president so needed it.
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By Marie Cocco — George W. Bush promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House, but he leaves with less honor and with lower public approval than any other president since Richard Nixon.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Bush administration’s specific failures—in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties—are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics.
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Flickr / jphilipg
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There will be negotiation, revision and capitulation, but the basic guts of the Democrats’ $825 billion stimulus package are out in the open. There’s billions for infrastructure, billions for schools and billions for you and me. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) responded by saying “Oh. My. God,” which we’ll take to mean, “Praise Jesus! The Democrats have done it again.”
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In his weekly address posted on Change.gov Friday, Barack Obama explains why he’s starting his job before assuming office: It’s the economy, stupid.
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By Ellen Goodman — “Virginity pledges” are one of the ways that government officials measure whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.
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By David Sirota — For most of us, Benjamin Franklin’s words in 1789 still apply: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” However, millionaires, by definition, are not most of us.
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thewe.cc
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Nothing says full of yourself like ordering a Venezuelan mayor to halt construction of a near-complete shopping mall after passing by it in a car. Obviously, President Hugo Chavez has a bit of a ego, though his suggestion to use the facility as a university or hospital, not as a monument to consumption and capitalism, does seem a bit more just.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Because Arne Duncan gets along with teachers unions but is also seen as a reformer, his selection was interpreted as a politically shrewd, split-the-difference choice by Obama. But that is not the whole story.
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By Marie Cocco — As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing.
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AP photo / Douglas Healey
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By Chris Hedges — The multiple failures that beset the country can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead on creating hordes of competent systems managers.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — No, the federal government isn’t going to discover new billions under some rock in a national park. But with the economic downturn, the new president’s imperative will be to spend as fast as he can, to the tune of perhaps $500 billion, to keep the economy from going belly up.
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highereducation.org
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Because of its inexpensive community colleges, California was the only state to earn a passing grade in the affordability category of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education’s annual report. Just as the demand for quality education is expected to spike, too many students are priced out of college, the center found.
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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By Regina Marler — A new volume of the late poet’s correspondence sheds fresh light on the anguish and art of Sylvia Plath.
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By Joe Conason — Obama can be expected to behave as Bush ought to have acted in a time of national crisis. That means drawing on goodwill wherever he can find it, drawing on talent regardless of party and drawing on the powerful desire of most Americans to live again in one nation.
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Neoconservative white-guy Bill Bennett uttered a frightening example of what many fear will be a knock-back for minority rights in the U.S. Asked about how an Obama victory would affect perceptions of race, Bennett suggested that because one black man has been elected president, claims about institutionalized racism are no longer viable.
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Flickr / zoonabar
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Californians voted 52 percent to 48 percent to approve a despicable ballot measure banning gay marriage. The two sides spent more than $74 million, and in the end proponents of Prop. 8 won out by convincing voters that the measure would somehow protect children.
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AP photo / Seth Perlman
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Truthdig asked Demitrious C. Sinor, an inspirational educator, to sound off on the state of our schools. He warns that unless the No Child Left Behind regime ends soon, America’s classrooms could unravel. It’s a reality that neither presidential candidate seems to fully understand, but one he sees every day, from where he sits.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Catholics, who are quintessential swing voters and gave narrow but crucial support to President Bush in 2004, are drifting toward Barack Obama. And this time, some church leaders are suggesting that single-issue voting—such as on abortion—is by no means a Catholic commandment.
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youtube.com
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In this time of confusion and strife, it’s a good thing there’s FactCheck.org to shine a light through the political fog that surrounds us all. Or something like that. Anyway, the FactCheck folks took a close look at the McCain campaign’s shadowy little commercial number, “Ayers,” and found it to be problematic on several counts.
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flickr.com/mcoughlin
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By Bill Boyarsky — One of the worst casualties of the Iraq war and the Wall Street failures is the U.S. public school system, which is central to the nation’s economic, intellectual and social health. With financial resources being consumed, education cuts are on the way. Thank you, John McCain and President George W. Bush.
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AP photo / Ivan Sekretarev
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After months of mounting pressure and speculation, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced Monday that he is stepping down, but not before defending his legacy, challenging his detractors and admitting that he “may have committed follies.”
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Mr. Fish
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The renowned author sits down with Truthdig literary editor Steve Wasserman to tell stories about his books, the many loves of his life—including dinosaurs and Halloween—and his own starring role in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame.
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Flickr / soldiersmediacenter
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The No Child Left Behind Act forces high schools to allow military recruiters access to students. Counter-recruitment groups that pitch alternatives to military service are working around the country to try to limit the impact of the Pentagon’s $3.5-billion effort. One organization in the Los Angeles area is pushing, with some success, for equal access.
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bpbraves.net
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UCLA professor Wellford Wilms, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the crisis of public education in America, offers a must-read counterpoint to Bush’s blather about “No Child Left Behind.”
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AP photo / H. Rumpf Jr.
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By Paul Cummins — Much is made of the dropout rate in America’s schools, and usually it’s the students who are the focus of the discussion. But what happens when teachers themselves opt out of their roles in the classroom? [In this short analysis, Truthdig educational expert Paul Cummins looks at teachers’ heartbreak, frustration and depression.]
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By Amy Goodman — It has been 40 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel.
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By Eugene Robinson — How weird is this presidential election? So weird that I’m about to give a nod of appreciation (of sorts) to Geraldo Rivera, of all people—and also to, gulp, Fox News.
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epp-ed.eu
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A California senator is working to push a bill through the state’s legislative channels that would make global warming a required study topic in California public schools, but detractors maintain that the science behind Sen. Joe Simitian’s proposed academic addition is unclear.
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By Eugene Robinson — Is the thought of him as president just vaguely scary? Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect, still pretty remote, that he could actually win?
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Freespeech.org has this entertaining take on the privatization of the Internet, a medium that was once public, open and collaborative, but has since been taken over by corporate juggernauts. It’s not something we all think about, but it wasn’t so long ago that the Internet was organized around information and education, as opposed to shopping.
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AP photo / Kyodo News
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Japan’s education ministry has generated protest in Okinawa by erasing one of the country’s worst moments from history textbooks. Okinawans who lost loved ones when the Japanese army ordered them to commit suicide during World War II are bitterly battling the historical omission.
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By Marie Cocco — Countless studies show that abstinence-only sex education just doesn’t work, so why is it getting more money than ever from the federal government?
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healthofchildren.com
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While the nation’s tweens and teens are taught the laughable “abstinence only” government-sponsored curriculum about sex, one middle school in Maine is taking a more realistic approach to the matter, offering a range of birth control options in an effort to curb a troubling trend toward teen pregnancy among its students. Yes, you read that right: This is a middle school we’re talking about here.
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nydailynews.com
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A study of 7-to-11-year-old Brits found that the climate crisis and terrorism have added to the usual pressures of school and friendships to drive kids batty. Luckily, schools that engaged world-weary children with lessons and activities related to global catastrophe managed to alleviate some of the tension.
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totallychoice.com
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File under “Your Tax Dollars at Work”: Congress has once again approved a three-month extension of a $50-million nationwide abstinence-education program, a move detractors say ignores indications that the approach (shock!) may not be working for America’s teens.
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AP photo / Charles Rex Arbogast
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Truthdig regulars Sheerly Avni, James Harris and Josh Scheer put their heads together to try to figure out why the big problems that plague our communities never get solved.
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AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
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Truthdig regulars Sheerly Avni, James Harris and Josh Scheer put their heads together to try to figure out why the big problems that plague our communities never get solved.
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AP Photo / Charlie Niebergall
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By Bill Boyarsky — If a Democrat wins the next presidential election, she or he will have to tackle battles abroad—and, no less significantly, at home. Boyarsky predicts that, after ending the Iraq war, a Democratic president would “immediately be confronted with domestic issues that have no Democratic consensus, issues in which debate is charged with deep feelings about national, ethnic and racial identity.”
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By Sharon Scranage — Students aren’t the only ones who worry about grades—teachers also have to meet performance standards and follow curricula dictated by their districts. However, as educator Sharon Scranage points out, teachers working with socioeconomically disadvantaged children have to deal with even greater challenges without the aid of a specific “core” curriculum to address their students’ special needs.
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sitesatlas.com
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A top Israeli education official has authorized a textbook for exclusive use in Arab Israeli schools that tells a different side of the story of Israel’s creation in 1948. For starters, the text acknowledges that Palestinians dubbed the historical event “al nakba” (the catastrophe).
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wulfweard.blog.co.uk
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While many schools continue to move toward abstinence-only (aka “keep your fingers crossed”) sex education, some communities are fighting for more candid and honest curricula. A Maryland school district, for example, just won the right to teach middle and high schoolers about homosexuality and the proper use of condoms.
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AP Photo/Francis Specker
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By Sharon Scranage — It’s not just kids who get left behind in an educational system that fetishizes data and quantitative measures instead of qualitative progress. Teachers, particularly in lower-income schools, end up punished and humiliated because they are judged to be “underachievers,” according to educator Sharon Scranage.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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