Matching Tracksuits

politics

Calling All Pakistanis – NYT

Wednesday 3 December 2008

From the New York Times:

On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?

NYT

My Hometown

Thursday 13 November 2008

Headlining The Nation:

It was hot as Hades on June 5 in the little mountain town of Bristol, Virginia. But that didn’t stop hundreds of southwest Virginians–in the most staunchly Republican part of a state that hadn’t voted Democratic for president since 1964–from streaming into the local high school gym to whoop it up for a liberal, mixed-race fellow from Chicago with a mighty suspicious moniker. Fresh off his lopsided, nomination-clinching primary victory in North Carolina, Barack Obama had chosen–to the mystification of political experts–to launch his general election campaign not in the “battlegrounds” of Pennsylvania or Ohio but in a remote Southern backwater containing 17,000 souls who’d given George W. Bush 64 percent of their vote in 2004.
A New, Blue Dixie.

Sincerely, Mr. Waxman

Friday 7 November 2008

A letter, dated October 28:

Dear Mr. Blankfein[, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Goldman Sachs]:

Earlier this month, the Treasury Department announced plans to invest $125 billion of taxpayer funds in nine major banks, including yours, as an emergency measure to rebuild depleted capital. According to recent public filings, these nine banks have spent or reserved $108 billion for employee compensation and bonuses in the first nine months of 2008, nearly the same amount as last year.

Some experts have suggested that a significant percentage of this compensation could come in year-end bonuses and that the size of the bonuses will be significantly enhanced as a result of the infusion of taxpayer funds. According to one analyst, “Had it not been for the government’s help in refinancing their debt they may not have had the cash to pay bonuses.”

Press accounts report that the size of the bonuses could exceed $6 billion at some firms receiving federal assistance.

While I understand the need to pay the salaries of employees, I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry’s worst years on record. As one newspaper recently reported, “critics of investment banks have questioned why firms continue to siphon off billions of dollars of bank earnings into bonus pools rather than using the funds to shore up the capital position of the crisis-stricken institutions.”

To assist the Committee’s investigation into this issue, I request that you provide the following information and documents for your company as well as any affiliates or subsidiaries:

  1. For each year from 2006 to 2008, the total compensation and average compensation per employee, paid or projected to be paid to all personnel, broken down by salaries, bonuses (cash and equity), and benefits; and a description of the reasons for the year-to-year changes in these amounts.
  2. For each year from 2006 to 2008, the number of employees who were paid, or are projected to be paid, more than $500,000 in total compensation; the total compensation paid or projected to be paid to these employees, broken down by salaries, bonuses (cash and equity), and benefits; and a description of the reasons for the year-to-year changes in these amounts.
  3. For each year from 2006 to 2008, the total compensation paid or projected to be paid to the ten highest paid employees, broken down by salaries, bonuses (cash and equity), and benefits; and a description of the reasons for the year-to-year changes in these amounts.
  4. Documents sufficient to show all policies governing the granting of the bonuses to the groups of employees referenced in items (l) to (3).

Please produce the requested information to the Committee no later than November 10, 2008. To the extent that 2008 year-end bonuses have not been finalized by that time, you should notify the Committee as soon as those bonuses are determined and supplement your response with updated information and responsive documents.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee in the House of Representatives and has broad oversight jurisdiction as set forth in House Rule X. An attachment to this letter provides additional information about how to respond to the Committee’s request.

If you have any questions about this request, please ask your representatives to contact Theodore Chuang or Alison Cassady of the Committee staff at (202) 225-5420. Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,
Henry A. Waxman
Chairman

I’m not sure which is more disturbing: the fact that the letter has to be written to begin with, or the fact that Time and Bloomberg scooped Congress. Shouldn’t the banks’ books have been open from the beginning of the bailout, so that Congress doesn’t find out from Time magazine that these banks are robbing taxpayers?

Oh, right — that would be real oversight. How foolish of me.

(Source: House Oversight Committee Web Site)

They’ve Lost It

Friday 10 October 2008

If they ever had it. Common sense, that is. Republicans see “politically motivated attempts to damage the [Republican party]” everywhere. Even when it’s a Republican-selected prosecutor:

After his investigation, Steven Branchflower, a former prosecutor hired by a Republican-controlled legislative committee, concluded that Monegan’s rebuff of the entreaties played a role in his firing but was not the only reason.

Palin’s supporters argued that the report, released less than four weeks from Election Day, was a politically motivated attempt to damage the Republican presidential ticket. The report initially had been due at the end of the month, but the Democrat managing the investigation said its release was moved to Oct. 10 so it would not come on the eve of the election. (washingtonpost.com).

Shades of Kathleen Parker.

I’m so freaking sick of that — anything critical of the Republicans is just “politically motivated.” Yet this kind of crap is fine:

With Mr Obama leading in the polls and only 24 days to go before the US presidential election, the series of outbursts have sparked the interest of the Secret Service, which guards the candidates and other dignitaries.

They launched a brief investigation after a man was heard — but not recorded — by several journalists shouting “kill him”, when Mrs Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, was speaking of Mr Obama’s links to Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist who is now a professor in Chicago. The two men sat together on educational committees but have rarely been in contact for six years.

Before a rally in Pennsylvania this week, local Republican leader Bill Platt warmed up the crowd by several times referring to “Barack Hussein Obama,” focusing on the Illinois senator’s middle name, trying to highlight his differences with other Americans.

When John McCain asked “Who is the real Barack Obama?”, a supporter shouted back: “He is a bomb.”

Chants of “Nobama, Nobama” mingled with cries of “terrorist,” as one banner in the crowd declared: “Go ahead, let the dogs out.” (telegraph.co.uk)

Astounding: was it a political rally or a potential lynch mob?

They might as well have said, “Turn the dogs loose on that darky socialist pink commie bastard, boys!”

A comment on the Post piece pretty much sums up how I feel about McCain now: “Well that’s the end of her political career. Now McSame has no where to go. Just think this was a man I use [sic] to respect. Now with all of his hate motivated rallies leaves him with shame. HOW SAD.”

And just below it:

Remember to Win Back America:

Last census
Whites=80.2% of population
Blacks=12.8% of population

Proof positive that this is bringing out the worst honesty in people. And here are two videos to prove it:

The McCain-Palin Mob in Strongsville, Ohio, Part I

The McCain-Palin Mob in Strongsville, Ohio, Part II

It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

Tuesday 30 September 2008

That’s what the rest of the world is saying, anyway. The Spiegel staff writers, and hence a certain segment of Germany, certainly thinks that America’s world dominance has come to an end:

[Bush] talked [at the UN] about terrorism and terrorist regimes, and about governments that allegedly support terror. He failed to notice that the delegates sitting in front of and below him were shaking their heads, smiling and whispering, or if he did notice, he was no longer capable of reacting. […]

“Absurd, absurd, absurd,” said one German diplomat. A French woman called him “yesterday’s man” over coffee on the East River. There is another way to put it, too: Bush was a laughing stock in the gray corridors of the UN.

The American president has always had enemies in these hallways and offices at the UN building on First Avenue in Manhattan. The Iranians and Syrians despise the eternal American-Israeli coalition, while many others are tired of Bush’s Americans telling the world about the blessings of deregulated markets and establishing rules “that only apply to others,” says the diplomat from Berlin.

But the ridicule was a new thing. It marked the end of respect.

The article continues,

Is it only President George W. Bush, the lame duck president, whom the rest of the world is no longer taking seriously, or are the remaining 191 UN member states already setting their sights on the United States, the giant brought to its knees? UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon referred to a “new reality” and “new centers of power and leadership in Asia, Latin America and across the newly developed world.” Are they surprised, in these new centers, at the fall of America, of the system of the Western-style market economy?

The fall of America? We were always taught, as citizens of any great empire in history, that our global empire would last forever. The American middle class rules the world, right? Not anymore — the middle class is disappearing, and the UN Secretary General is already talking about “new centers of power.”

I don’t know if any news agencies are reporting about this kind of pessimism in Europe. Obama, though, at least recognizies America’s fall from grace. Does he see how bad it really is?

The banking crisis in the United States has shaken many things in recent days, not just the chancellor’s affection for America and the respect the rest of the world once had for the US as an economic and political superpower. Since the US investment bank Lehman Brothers plummeted into bankruptcy two weeks ago, the financial crisis has developed a destructive force of almost unimaginable strength. The proud US investment banks with globally recognized names like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have all gone bankrupt, been bought up or restructured. The American real estate market has essentially been nationalized. And the country’s biggest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, has failed and been sold at a loss.

In light of the almost daily reports of losses in the financial sector, it seemed almost secondary to note that the disaster had also turned into one of the biggest criminal investigations in American history. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is already investigating 26 large financial corporations as well as 1,400 smaller companies and private citizens for possible fraud.

Economists now characterize what began two years ago with falling prices in the American real estate market as the biggest economic disaster since the world economic crisis of the 1930s. No one knows whether and how the meltdown of global financial markets, which would have grave consequences for the world economy, can still be prevented.

And now, of all times, the world is faced with a preeminent power that no longer seems capable of leading and a US president who is not even able to unite his divided country in an hour of need.

For weeks, Bush ignored the crisis, insisting on the strength of the market and telling Americans: “Everything will be fine.”

Indeed — we might finally be reaching the point at which Americans are no longer pacified by such platitudes. We are in a new America.

This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.

A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.

It’s a very long series of articles, but take the time to read it: The End of Arrogance.

Hagee and the Messiah

Monday 31 March 2008

This race has been odd for the religious right. First, there was the issue of whether or not to support a Mormon — a non-Christian in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Now comes the troubling Hagee endorsement of McCain.

Yet it’s not only those on the left side of the spectrum that are troubled by this — or at least, it shouldn’t be. Those same Evangelical Christians who hesitated to support McCain should also be leery of Hagee and his less-than-orthodox theology, as seen below:

[Video removed from YouTube.]

Out Before the Count

Tuesday 29 January 2008

If Giuliani is a prize fighter and the primary season is a title bout, Giuliani just bonked his head on the way out to the ring, knocking himself unconscious to the cheers of virtually no one.

Teaching to Standards

Tuesday 17 July 2007

One of the problems of teaching to No Child Left Behind standards is the risk of teachers becoming nothing more than their students’ test scores.

Via Eduwonk.com I found one such teacher’s story:

I teach in an inner city school where inequity is apparent. The neighborhood has a high poverty level. Violence and poor housing conditions tuck my students in at night!

Underemployment, unemployment, lack of health insurance is the norm. It has only been of late that a “real” grocery store was available for residents to purchase fresh foods.

We are locked into teaching reading practices that are driven by federal government’s bad research. I witness a lack of all that made school a joy for my students. Literally the things that helped to build community and self-respect and self-esteem for children have disappeared. In their place is rigid schedules and long periods of disjointed phonics, and disjointed language practices.

One of the reasons many teachers are not fans of NCLB is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That “one-size” is often, as this teacher comments, “disjointed.”

This teacher writes of her students’ lack of satisfactory achievement according to the NCLB-mandated state testing.

My Unsatisfactory “grade” was followed by the comment:”This teacher�s students made minimal growth in her classroom this year.”

Most of my children are reading on or above grade level. The amount of “progress/growth” made this year by most of my children was no where near minimal.

I asked my principal if she believed that statement that appeared on my evaluation. She said “Yes, I do, based on your DIBELS scores!”

Her statement hurt me because I know the amount of work I did this year with my precious students. The amount of growth the children had in all areas was in no way “minimal.” I mentioned that the reading levels of some of my first-graders were equal to the end of second grade. She said the district didn�t recognize non-standardized test scores. (susanohanian.org)

Having worked with at-risk kids, I can understand (to a degree) what this teacher is going through.

Such “teaching” turns both students and teachers into little more than cogs in some great bureaucratic machinery. No one is working toward “learning” in any real sense here, and as far as teaching critical thinking, it’s probably non-existent.

Very often, kids coming from such backgrounds need so much more than simple reading and writing instruction. They step into school with huge disadvantages to begin with, and to some degree, reading and writing alone will not help them. They need work with social skills and an understanding of the social framework that exists outside the inner city.

This is not to say that I am advocating a sixties-style “go where the students take us” type of teaching, and I am not suggesting that all standards are a bad thing. However, NCLB’s cookie-cutter approach seems to do little for many students and teachers.

Ron Paul

Friday 29 June 2007

Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.

He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.

If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)

I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.

And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.

What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.

Ty Pan Du Sie Tu Vous

Tuesday 12 June 2007

When learning Polish, for some reason I had the hardest time initially using the formal voice of address. English-only speakers might not know what I’m talking about, even though the formal/intimate distinction existed in English for hundreds of years.

In French, it’s a question of “Vous” and “tu.” “Vous” would be “you all” — second person plural — and is used in all formal occasions; “tu” is informal, and used with intimate friends or family. In German, it’s “sie” and “du”.

This is why Martin Burber’s wonderful book Ich und Du is translated I and Thou and not I and You.

In English, it used to be “you” and “thou,” with “thou” being the more intimate. Because most of us are exposed to “thou” exclusively through liturgical language, we get the sense that it’s incredibly formal. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Po Polsku

In Polish, there are two options. The first is the common use of “Pan” or “Pani” — literally, “lord/master” or “lady/mistress.”

The older, now-obsolete form is to use “Wy” — “you all.” It’s still used in the mountainous southern region, and K in fact speaks to her grandmothers this way. “Co robicie ostatnio?” “What have you been doing lately?”

Out of this came an amusing verb: dwoic. While this is related to the word “dwa” (two), it’s not, strictly speaking, “double” (which is “podwoic”). Instead, a better explanation would be “to use the second person plural.” In that case, one might ask another, “why are you [dwoic] me?” meaning, “Why are you using the formal voice with me?”

The second method, and the one used now, is to use “Pan” and “Pani.” To be polite, a shop attendant, for example, doesn’t ask, “Do you need help?” Literally, he asks, “Does the lady need help?”

The problem for me was not so much remembering the odd construction but learning when to make the switch from “Pan” or “Pani” to “you.” I called people “you” when I should have used “Pan/Pani” more times than I care to recall. And there really are no guidelines — it depends, somewhat, on the person.

Linguistics of Diplomacy

I got to thinking about all of this due to an article by Charles Bremner. It begins,

Here is one of those stories that are difficult to convey to people who speak only English. President Sarkozy’s government has annoyed the “progressive” sections of the teaching establishment with an order that school pupils must address their teachers with the formal vous rather than the familiar second person singular tu. Teachers are advised to use the respectful vous to Lyc�e teenagers in their classes.

While I could never imagine students in Poland referring to teachers in the second person, I could also never imagine teachers using the formal third person with teachers.

The piece goes on to discuss how world leaders refer to each other — tu/du or vous/sie?

Angela Merkel dropped German formality enough to call him “Lieber (Dear) Nicolas” but stuck to the formal “sie” not the familiar “du”. Sarkozy’s matey reply jarred on old-fashioned ears. “Ch�re Angela… J’ai confiance en toi.” (In older English I trust thee not you). Lib�ration joked that Franco-German harmony was still lacking. “They are going to have to start by agreeing whether they use tu or vous,” it said. (Charles Bremner piece)

While the article doesn’t mention George Bush, it seems safe to assume that, like Gordon Brown, his dependence on interpretors will solve the tu/Vous problem. But considering the little back rub he once gave Merkel, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that Bush would opt for “tu” over “Vous.”

Bush in that Country East of Germany

Saturday 9 June 2007

Bush went to visit Poland during the G8 summit. Yesterday in the car, I heard two different NPR news briefs about it — not whole reports, but simply a mention in the headlines.

Neither time did the reporter refer to the Polish president by name.

The first time was something about Bush going to Poland to visit “that country’s president.”

The second time, it was a mention of Bush meeting his “Polish counterpart.”

I’ve wondered why they didn’t use the Polish president’s name. Is the Bush’s Polish counterpart’s name so difficult to pronounce? Did the reporter not know the name of the president of Poland?

For the uninformed, it’s Lech Kaczenski. (That “n” should have an accent on it.) That would be pronounced “Ka-chenee-ski.”

Can they not pronounce it? Can they not remember it? At least they didn’t have to say “president of Poland” in Polish — that is a mouthful: “Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej”

Romney

Friday 11 May 2007

Sharpton’s words about Romney bring to the debate so much that it’s difficult to know where to start.

CBS News has a great editorial about this.

Sharpton is entirely justified to question Romney on his views on the racist aspects of Mormonism. Blacks were excluded from assuming positions of power until the late 1970s. We all know, of course, that Romney will condemn that aspect of his religion — it would be political suicide to do otherwise. In that sense, we’ll never know if we got a straight answer from him. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

What’s most disturbing about Romney is his religion — a cult, by the standards of many orthodox Christians. It has all the earmarks:

  • exclusivity
  • specially “revealed” information
  • a founder who was somehow closer to God than anyone else

Oh, wait — I just described every major monotheistic religion, didn’t I?

Romney’s Mormonism will be problematic with many of his target constituency of conservative Christians. Evangelicals tend, I believe, to regard Mormons as misguided at best, Satanically deceived at best. Many of these same individuals (who would fall into the umbrella term “fundamentalists”) call Catholics non-Christians, and Catholicism is much closer, theologically, to evangelicalism than Mormonism is.

The question is whether Romney’s views on abortion and his generally conservative views — he is a Republican candidate, after all — will weigh more favorably with traditional Christian voters than his unorthodoxy.

“Background Check? We don’t need no stinkin’ background check”

Friday 20 April 2007

Cho Seung-hui went through the mandatory background check before buying the guns he used in his rampage. No criminal record, no problem.

Yet…

  • He’d been admitted to a mental health care unit within the last eighteen months.
  • Teachers and students alike commented on his disturbing behavior.
  • Complaints had been made about his behavior.
  • A professor had raised concerns about the content of his writing.

But what kind of a background check could have discovered all this?

If if someone has recently received significant mental health care in the same state he’s trying to buy a gun, it’s conceivable that that information could be available. But since there’s no national database of such information, all one would have to do is cross the state line.

Do we want a national database to record that kind of information? I don’t think I do.

Do we want to have background checks that include interviews with former educators? Is that even feasible?

Just what kind of background check can stop someone like this from getting a gun? The only solutions I can think of involve national databases and inquiries into very personal information.

Open a Can of Wup Ass

Saturday 20 January 2007

Reading through old journal entries the other night, I found a poem I’d received in a forwarded email in April of 2002:

American Pride

Osama Bin Laden, your time is short;
We’d rather you die, than come to court.
Why are you hiding if it was in God’s name?
Your just a punk with a turban; a pathetic shame.

I have a question, about your theory and laws;
“How come you never die for the cause?”
Is it because you’re a coward who counts on others?
Well here in America, we stand by our brothers.

As is usual, you failed in your mission;
If you expected pure chaos, you can keep on wishing
Americans are now focused and stronger than ever;
Your death has become our next endeavor.

What you tried to kill, doesn’t live in our walls;
It’s not in buildings or shopping malls.
If all of our structures came crashing down;
It would still be there, safe and sound.

Because pride and courage can’t be destroyed;
Even if the towers leave a deep void.
We’ll band together and fill the holes
We’ll bury our dead and bless their souls.

But then our energy will focus on you;
And you’ll feel the wrath of the Red, White and Blue.
So slither and hide like a snake in the grass;
Because America’s coming to kick your ass!!

Looking back on it, almost five years later, the poem and the sentiment it expresses are even more tragically pathetic. Many of the people who sent this around the country were most likely the ones who voted for Bush back in 2000 and were glad that he — “A real man, by God!” — was in office on 9/11. They probably had no doubt that America would go after bin Laden with a fury that the world had never seen.

Most of us had no doubt about that.

Bush’s speech on September 13, 2001, confirmed this: “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.”

They were probably surprised when, eighteen months later, Bush said that while bin Laden must be “on the run, if he’s alive at all,” he conceded that he doesn’t “spend too much time on him.” (Source)

Now, in 2007, with Bush promising a “surge” that virtually no one wants, with bin Laden still at large, with Iraq virtually at war with itself, with the Taliban re-grouping, it all just seems like the taunts of a thirteen-year-old.

It smacks of insecurity — and by that I mean a lack of both self-confidence and a lack of a feeling of safety.

State Sentence

Saturday 30 December 2006

We’ve all seen the picture of the hooded executioners putting the noose around Saddam’s neck. The International Herald Tribune and the New York Times ran it on their main pages, as did al Jazeera‘s English website. The Washington Post didn’t.

What struck me about the photo was the lack of officialness about everything.

  • The executioners are wearing street clothes.
  • The room looks relatively small, and suspiciously like a randomly chosen room in a building’s basement.
  • The executioners are wearing tattered ski masks.
  • Not only are the executioners not wearing uniforms; not a single uniform is visible anywhere.

Of course, it’s difficult to tell much of anything about the room itself with such a closely cropped photo.

Still, what immediately came to mind when I first saw this was the obvious similarity to all the beheading videos released from Iraq. It hardly looks like an official state action.