Would you even know a good teacher, if she pushed your kid to great achievement?

Yes, that’s Rod Serling‘s shadow, and that’s the “Twilight Zone” music you hear.

Consider the curious case of Carolyn Abbott in New York City (links added):

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall—the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile—placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. To receive a high school diploma in the state of New York, students must demonstrate mastery of the New York State learning standards in mathematics by receiving a score of 65 or higher on the Regents exam. In 2010-11, nearly 300,000 students across the state of New York took the Integrated Algebra Regents exam; most of the 73 percent who passed the exam with a score of 65 or higher were tenth-graders.

Because student performance on the state ELA and math tests is used to calculate scores on the Teacher Data Reports, the tests are high-stakes for teachers; and because New York City uses a similar statistical strategy to rank schools, they are high-stakes for schools as well. But the tests are not high-stakes for the eighth-graders at Anderson.

By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.”

The state tests, she believes, are poorly equipped to assess real mathematical knowledge, especially for high-performing students. “They’re so basic; they ask you to explain things that are obvious if you’re three years ahead,” she says. The Anderson students “understand it at a different level. They want to explain with equations, not words.” But the scoring of the free-response items on the tests emphasizes a formulaic response, with the scoring instructions often looking for a single keyword in a response to garner credit.

“They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” And the multiple-choice questions?  “Multiple-choice questions don’t test thinking,” she declares. Knowing how to answer them is “just an art.”

Ms. Abbott?  Oh, yes.  She is ranked the worst math teacher in New York City.

Read more of this fascinating, troubling case* at Aaron Palas’s blog at the Hechinger Report.

_____________

* Working hard to avoid using the term “colossal cluster f***.”

Related articles

• The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC? (dianeravitch.net)
• Cram. Memorize. Regurgitate. Forget. (everydaysociologyblog.com)
• In New York Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Aren’t Always Good Enough (nytimes.com)

No attempted political smear like an old attempted political smear

This New York Times photo feature is making the e-mail and Facebook rounds of Republicans and anti-Obamaniacs:

Should have noted, it’s making the rounds yet again.

In the note I got most recently, the sender posted this — probably a copy and paste message:

This picture will stun you

If each person sends this to a minimum of 20 people on their address list, in three days,
all people in The United States of America would have the message.
I believe this is one proposal that really should be passed around.
________________________________________________________________

THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD AND CURL YOUR HAIR

Description: cid:image001.jpg@01CCB96D.4D1AFD50

The name of the book Obama is reading is called: The Post-American World, and it was written by a fellow Muslim.

“Post” America means the World After America ! , Please forward this picture to everyone you know, conservative or liberal. , Democrat or Republican, Folks we need to be aware of what our president is thinking–or planning
We must expose Obama’s radical ideas and his intent to bring down our beloved America!

Oy.  Where to begin with the factual corrections?

First, Zakaria is not exactly a Muslim extremist.  He was born in India, a secular nation which practices religious diversity by law, his mother a former editor of The Sunday Times of India, his father a member of the popular Indian National Congress, the party of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh, to mention four famous Prime Ministers of India.

Editor, Newsweek International was a featured speaker at Charles Schwab Institutional Impact 2007 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)”]

Fareed Zakaria, [then

Second, Zakaria is a highly-respected journalist with great experience in international affairs.  He’s a former columnist for of Newsweek, and was editor of Newsweek International (is that American enough?).  Currently he has a column in Time, and a regular slot on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS, after a program on PBS and assignments for ABC.  You probably know the man by sight, and he doesn’t scare you in your living room.

Third, it’s not about “after” America — it’s about life in the world after several other nations figure out the U.S. secrets to success (freedom and trade), and apply them to become, like the U.S., a world power.  Not the world “after America,” but the world after the domination of America and Pax Americana.  The note in the New York Times said:

Writing in the Book Review a few weeks ago, Joseph Joffe said about Zakaria’s book:

Zakaria’s is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the ”rise of the rest.” After all, how can this giant follow Rome and Britain onto the dust heap of empire if it can prosecute two wars at once without much notice at home? The granddaughters of those millions of Rosie the Riveters who kept the World War II economy going are off to the mall today; if they don’t shop till they drop, it’s because of recession, not rationing.

“Not another exercise in declinism.” Want to bet the people passing the photo around didn’t bother to read Zakaria’s book?  Heck, they didn’t even bother to check it out on Amazon, or Wikipedia.  Anyone who thinks this photo sinister clearly could use a good read of the book — if they can read.

Fourth, Zakaria’s book has an entire chapter on keeping the U.S. from falling into decline — it’s not a book to”bring down our beloved America,” but is instead a book aimed at doing the exact opposite.  Zakaria outlines how the U.S. can maintain influence and power in a world where superpower influence is problematic rather than an enormous advantage at all times, and a world where trade is better than war.

Fifth, The Post-American World got a lot of praise from conservative, Republican- and Libertarian-leaning people when it was published.  The pedestrian Wikipedia explained:

The Post-American World, at 292 pages long, was described as “a book-length essay”^[5] and a “thin book that reads like one long, thoughtful essay”.^[6] Written with an optimistic tone, it features little new research or reporting, but rather contains insights and identification of trends.^[5] The reviewer for The Wall Street Journal described the tone as “infectious (though not naive) sunniness…but without Panglossian simplicity”.^[1] The American Spectator reviewer noted that the prose had a journalistic style^[7] while the reviewer for The Guardian noticed the writing sometimes displayed “news magazine mannerisms”.^[8]

Zakaria’s view on globalisation was said to be similar to journalist and author Thomas Friedman.^[9][10] Friedman reviewed The Post-American World and called it “compelling”.^[11] The review in American Conservative compared this book with Rudyard Kipling‘s poems “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden“, both written at the height of British power and warning against imperial hubris.^[12] The American Spectator review listed it as adding to similar themed books, comparing it to Oswald Spengler‘s The Decline of the West (1918), Arnold Toynbee‘s A Study of History, Paul Kennedy‘s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), and Robert Kagan‘s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008).^[7] Kagan labeled The Post-American World as “declinist”;^[13] however, Martin Woollacott of The Guardian labeled Zakaria an exceptionalist.^[8] The Commentary review added the works of Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama to the list of comparisons and suggested there is now a sub-genre of books that consider the decline or demise of American hegemony.^[14]

Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, Commentary — any self-respecting, halfway well-read neo-conservative would have all of those sources on her desk today.

Having read Zakaria’s book should be an indication of American patriotism.  Dwight Garner’s comment at Art Beat, a blog of the New York Times, said the photo was a “stylish book-ad,” and he meant it as a compliment.  He closed off his note:

Anyone know what book John McCain is — or should be — carrying around?

Grand question.  I’ll wager McCain knows the book, if he hasn’t read it.

But what about Mitt Romney?  I’ll wager he didn’t bother to read it.  Rick Santorum?  Surely not.  Newt Gingrich probably read it quickly, over-analyzed it, found some minor issue of historical interpretation to disagree with, and pronounced it not worthy of actual citation.

The people who try to raise fears with the photo?  They probably don’t read newspapers, don’t have library cards, and they hope to hell you’re too busy updating your Facebook profile to know anything at all about reality and world history.  Would they send the photo around if they had Clue #1?

Sixth, the book came out in 2008.    Even the paperbacks are in new editions with revisions, it’s been out so long.

How desperate are the Obama-obsessed folk?  They’re so desperate they are recycling hoaxes from 2008.  Worse, they find people willing to be hoaxed all over again, forgetting they got hoaxed back then.

Voter identification?  How about a voter sanity check?  Given a choice, a sane person might say “let illegal aliens vote, instead” — they know more about America and what makes it great than the perps of this hoax.

Is it significant that Zakaria has not been shy about criticizing serious policy errors promulgated by Republican candidates for president?  Nah.

More:

• Truth or Fiction debunked the hoax — in 2008
• Snopes.com called the claims with the photo false – in 2008

Even Mmre, with help from Zemanta

• Zakaria: How America can thrive in a post-American world (globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com)
• Zakaria: It’s a new world, Mitt – CNN (globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com)
• Fareed Zakaria to Grover Norquist: ‘Aren’t You to Blame’ for Rising Debt? (newsbusters.org)
• Robert Kagan: Whey The World Needs America (thewesternexperience.com)
• Zakaria: The Republican Party’s demographics problem (globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com)
• From Fareed Zakaria to Mitt Romney: “Today, we are in a different era” (dinmerican.wordpress.com)

Debunking claims of climate hoaxes, or evidence of the End of Civilization as We Know It

Found this on the Grist site today:

Grist infographic: Idea of climate change hoax makes no sense

The problem?  Far too many people not only don’t weigh ideas to see if they make sense, but instead they actively seek out ideas, no matter how crazy, just because they like the concept.

In short, the fact that such a chart is necessary at all suggests that it may not be useful.  Anyone who had the common sense to figure out that the globe is warming, and the scientists who say so are mostly honest as the day is long (and warm), won’t accept the judgment of Grist, either.

I mean, Peter Gleick exposed the immoral and perhaps illegal acts of the so-called Heartland Institute, virtually walking through the front door of the group’s offices and asking, “Will you show me all your dirty work?”  John Mashey’s painstaking work confirms Gleick’s blowing the whistle on Heartland, and Heartland’s fellow travelers.

What has Heartlandgate brought?  Heartland is spending thousands of dollars on a public relations campaign to impugn Gleick, and widely-read sites like the anti-science Watts Up get suckered in (well, Heartland was paying for Anthony Watts’ pet project . . . what should we expect?).  Even Andrew Revkin at his New York Times Blog can’t find his way to label actions as they should be labeled.

Will it make a difference to state the facts, the common sense version of reality?  My actual hope is that I am in error, and that such a graphic, if pasted around the internet, will make a difference.

Is my hope wholly misplaced?

Update:  At the Washington Post blogs, Stephen Stromberg wrote that Gleick erred by failing to follow the rule that climate scientists must be more than twice as morally straight as the “skeptics.”  I’m not convinced Gleick erred; he’s done yeoman service to exposing the truth.  I’m struggling to find any illegal act he committed.  Heartland claims there may be some fraud, but not all the elements of any crime of fraud are present.  If, as Heartland argues, the documents are fakes, there was no value lost.  If, as most of us suspect, the documents are not fakes, I still see no harm to Heartland in their having their feet held the fire on being honest with the IRS and the public.  Heartland claims an absolute right to fib to the public, and somehow Mr. Gleick interfered?  Where’s the harm to the public good?  Certainly not in exposing Heartland’s dark secrets.  No harm, no crime, in this case.

No cookies for this misogynist/misanthrope

Conservatives get crazier every day:  In Indiana, a state representative urges colleagues to vote against a resolution honoring Girl Scouts of America, for imaginary reasons.

A state legislator has sent a letter to fellow Republican members of the Indiana House saying he will not support a resolution celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts because he believes it is a “radicalized organization” that supports abortion and promotes homosexuality.

In a letter obtained by The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne on Monday, Rep. Bob Morris of Fort Wayne said he did some research on the Internet and found allegations that the Girl Scouts are a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood, allow transgender females to join and encourage sex.

“After talking to some well-informed constituents, I did a small amount of web-based research, and what I found is disturbing,” Morris wrote in his letter, which also accused the group of promoting “homosexual lifestyles.”

Morris sent the letter to House Republicans on Saturday.

Ashley Sharp, spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Northern Indiana-Michiana, said Monday a statement on the group’s website states that it leaves sex and reproduction questions to parents. The group accepts transgender youth on a case-by-case basis.

Morris is the only House member to refuse to sign a resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts that lawmakers approved last week. He told the Journal Gazette that others would join him in opposing the resolution but later recanted that statement in an interview with The Associated Press.

That old “some research on the Internet” as a source.

It’s scary people can be so delusional without resorting to psychotropic drugs. Is this guy smoking the same stuff Rick Santorum and Rick Perry smoke?

More, and Related Articles:

• Text of the letter from the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette; from the letter it appears Morris has a radical agenda of his own, pushing his daughters into an anti-Girl Scout group; oh, and then there is the slam on Michelle Obama’s involvement in Girl Scouts
• Girl Scouts of Northern Indiana-Michiana (buy some cookies?)
• Rep. Morris explains his anti-union politics, interviewed by his colleague, Sen. Banks
• Sheila Kennedy worries about the sanity of people who make charges like these, “Those Commie Girl Scouts . . .”; “Withdrawal from reality–an insistent belief in things that are demonstrably untrue (think ‘death panels’ and United Nations black helicopters and ‘Agenda 21′) is a sign of paranoia. I don’t know what psychiatrists call an irrational antipathy to people who are in some way different–gay people, immigrants, etc.–but as my mother would have put it, ‘a wellness it isn’t.’”

Daily Flogging of Teachers Dept., Alabama Division: ‘Bible says no teacher raises’

Borrowed completely from ThinkProgress — I’m too flabbergasted to add more at the moment:

Alabama State Senator Thinks Increasing Teacher Pay Goes Against A ‘Biblical Principle’

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Feb 1, 2012 at 2:15 pm

Tool for flogging teachers?

According to Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill (R), the Bible says that increasing teacher salaries would only lead to less-qualified teachers. McGill said at a prayer breakfast that doubling teachers’ salaries — starting pay for Alabama teachers begins at $36,144 — would not help education. In fact, he said that keeping teacher pay low is a “Biblical principle“:

“If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.

“To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?

“And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

“If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.”

McGill found justification in the Bible for not increasing teacher pay, but he evidently found nothing in scripture preventing him from approving a 67 percent pay increase for legislators in 2007, which increased annual salaries for the part-time legislators from $30,710 to $49,500. He said that the higher pay helped to stop corruption.

A 2011 report showed that while Alabama teachers have the highest starting salaries in the nation, the state lags far behind the national average for teacher pay. Currently, a part-time legislator in Alabama is making more than a full-time teacher with a Master’s degree and 15 years of experience.

If we don’t increase teacher pay, we get less than the best for our children.  Which should we sacrifice, our children, or this brain-dead legislator’s complete misinterpretation of the Bible?

Somebody help me out here:  Where in scriptures is there any suggestion that teachers shouldn’t get fair pay for fair work?

These guys are making a mighty effort to prove that prayer breakfasts are dangerous, anti-social gatherings that should be avoided by patriotic Americans and legislators.

Related articles suggested by Zemanta:

• The Alabama Legislator Who Thinks God Wants Teachers to Be Paid Poorly (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• What Teachers Put Up With [EvolutionBlog] (scienceblogs.com)
• Politician: Don’t Pay Teachers More (abcnews.go.com)
• The Bible Says Teachers Don’t Deserve Decent Salaries, According to One Horrible Politician [Politics] (jezebel.com)
• AL Lawmaker Says Teacher Pay Raises ‘Against Biblical Principle,’ But Not His (crooksandliars.com)
• Alabama Republican Senator: Low teacher pay mandated by God (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Alabama Republican Lawmaker: Teacher Payraise “Unbiblical,” Defends 62% Legislator Payraise (warmsouthernbreeze.wordpress.com)

Birthers: Lacking the sense God gave chickens

Birthers are still claiming the Earth is flat, still looking for a missing link, still claiming Judge Crater didn’t go missing, and still embarrassing America?

Yep.

Obama's birth certificate - Image via Wikipedia

Orly Taitz was in court in Georgia, losing another case because she lacks even a whiff of a scintilla of an iota of evidence to back any of her claims that President Barack Obama was not born in Honolulu, Hawaii, as his now-released long-form birth certificate, short-form birth certificate, contemporary newspapers, eyewitnesses and all other evidence indicate.  They have no evidence, and they have clowns for lawyers:

In court filings, Obama’s legal team has called the “birther” allegations baseless and the criticisms of his birth records “patently unfounded.” The filings also noted 68 similar challenges filed have been dismissed and, during a 2009 challenge, a federal judge in Columbus fined Taitz $20,000 for “frivolous” litigation.

But I stumbled onto a wildly misnamed blog, The Constitution Club*, where the issue is given credence and way too many electrons.

(Are lobotomies legal, again?  Can people perform self-lobotomies?  Just wondering.)

I added some references to sites in the real world, so that anyone not totally insane might find an anchor in reality and follow the threads back to the light.

The post’s author, Daniella Nicole, tried to make a defense of the birthers insane, destructive antics.

I responded, but you never can tell when the birthers will plug their ears, cover their eyes and start singing “Born in the U.S.A.” at the top of their lungs to avoid information that would require them to appear sober.  My comment went straight to “moderation.”  Probably too many links, or too many high-quality links (thank you, Cornell University Law Library’s Legal Information Institute).   For the record, here’s my last reply to Daniella Nicole:

[Daniella Nicole wrote:]

I daresay any of the GOP contenders, or to use your reference, SNL’s the Church Lady, Frankie and Willie or one of the Coneheads, would all be better than the clown (or Homey D. Clown from In Living Color, if you will) currently in office.

Excuse me. I had mistaken you for an American, a patriot, and someone who bears no ill will to the American people.

Unless Obama has lied about who his father is and the birth certificate is a fraud (which would raise other legal issues), Obama is NOT a natural born citizen. Period.

“Born on American soil” means “natural born American citizen.” Obama was born on American soil. End of your argument.

BUT, had he been born on foreign soil, with one American citizen parent, he would still be a natural born citizens — as is John McCain, born in Panama (and not on a military base, but in the local Panama hospital).

Remind me never to refer any of my clients or friends to you for immigration advice.

The Supreme Court actually set the precedent of defining natural born as born of two American citizen parents in the 1875 case Minor v. Happersett. Note it was not a dicta, which is an authoritative statement by a court that is not legally binding, but an actual precedent, which is a rule of law established for the first time by a court and is referred to by other courts afterwards.

The holding in Minor was that women are not voting citizens. The case dealt with Mrs. Minor’s attempt to register to vote. Obama is not a woman, and the issue you’re talking about has nothing to do with registering to vote. So, if the case says what you claim, it MUST be in obiter dicta. [Obiter dicta means those parts of the decision in which the court explains how and why it ruled as it did, but NOT the key ruling itself.]  No offense, but you really could use some legal training. At least get a Black’s Law dictionary, will you?

Here, read excerpts from the opinion:

The question is presented in this case, whether, since the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, a woman, who is a citizen of the United States and of the State of Missouri, is a voter in that State, notwithstanding the provision of the constitution and laws of the State, which confine the right of suffrage to men alone. We might, perhaps, decide the case upon other grounds, but this question is fairly made. From the opinion we find that it was the only one decided in the court below, and it is the only one which has been argued here. The case was undoubtedly brought to this court for the sole purpose of having that question decided by us, and in view of the evident propriety there is of having it settled, so far as it can be by such a decision, we have concluded to waive all other considerations and proceed at once to its determination.

So it would be error to claim the case got to the issue of who is a “natural born citizen” at all. It did not.

And, had you read the case, you’d know that. In fact, the case says the opposite of what you claim. It says:

Additions might always be made to the citizenship of the United States in two ways: first, by birth, and second, by naturalization. This is apparent from the Constitution itself, for it provides [n6] that “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” [n7] and that Congress shall have power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Thus new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.

The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [p168] parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words “all children” are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as “all persons,” and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.

Under the power to adopt a uniform system of naturalization Congress, as early as 1790, provided “that any alien, being a free white person,” might be admitted as a citizen of the United States, and that the children of such persons so naturalized, dwelling within the United States, being under twenty-one years of age at the time of such naturalization, should also be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States that might be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, should be considered as natural-born citizens. [n8] These provisions thus enacted have, in substance, been retained in all the naturalization laws adopted since. In 1855, however, the last provision was somewhat extended, and all persons theretofore born or thereafter to be born out of the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were, or should be at the time of their birth, citizens of the United States, were declared to be citizens also. [n9]

If you’re going to opine on citizenship, you would do well to read a summary of actual citizenship law, and don’t take the odd rantings of anti-Obama people on the internet.

Dani said:

Interestingly, many refer to Vattel’s definition of natural born (which is essentially the same thing and may have influenced the founders in their work on the Constitution), but it is not Vattel that sets legal precedent. The Supreme Court can and did set the precedent in the matter in 1875.

Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875) most assuredly did not rule that a child must have two U.S. citizen parents to be a citizen, nor to be a “natural born” citizen. Read the case’s key sections above.

The precedent that is important here is the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, a man who, like Obama, had a father born in a foreign country, and who was not a citizen of the U.S. at the time of Arthur’s birth. While opponents tried to make an issue of this in the campaign of 1880, it was a non-starter. You know the rest — Arthur was elected vice president under James Garfield, and ascended to the presidency upon Garfield’s death after being shot (no, Orly Taitz was not the shooter). So, had Hapersett had anything to do with presidential eligibility, it would have applied to Arthur. Since Arthur served out his term as president, it’s pretty clear that the actual precedent supports Obama’s eligibility 100%.

Somebody told you a tall tale about the case — it’s about whether a woman may vote, not about what is a natural born citizen. Seriously, how could anyone confuse those issues?

Congress in 2008 (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) also defined natural born as having been born to two American citizen parents when a challenge to John McCain’s eligibility was issued.So, even by the standard and definition of Congress, including Obama himself, he is not legally qualified or eligible.

1. That was a non-binding resolution, stating the opinion of the U.S. Senate.
2. The resolution, S. Res. 511 in the 110th Congress, ( does NOT say “two American citizen parents,” but instead refers to children born to “Americans.” Obama’s mother was an American.
3. Obama was born on American soil, and so the resolution, covering kids born outside the U.S., is inapplicable, and off the mark.

Obama was not born to two American citizen parents, by his own admission and via the birth certificate which he has provided to America. Ergo, he is not a natural born American citizen and does not meet the Constitutional requirement for the office of President of the United States of America. As such, not only is he not legally qualified to be in the office he currently holds, but he is not legally eligible to be on any ballot in the U.S. for the upcoming election. Period.

Except, none of the laws you cite says what you’d need it to say. Obama is natural born because he was born in the U.S. He is also natural born having been a child of a U.S. citizen. He is fully legally qualified — at least, to people who know the law, and who appreciate that it’s necessary to follow the laws.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Your wishes do not change the law. Your misstatements of the cases and the laws do not change the laws. Your wish to find something bad against Obama, a good man and a good president, does not give you a leg to stand on, nor a horse to ride.

And how, pray tell, is using legal means to resolve serious legal matters “polluting the courts”? That is what they are there for.

Junk lawsuits. Nuisance suits. Orly Taitz has already been fined for making these nuisance claims. The evidence needed to challenge Obama’s eligibility simply does not exist, except in the fevered and overactive imaginations of those crazies. The stuff in Georgia this last week is a supreme embarrassment to America — but thank God, the courts got it right.

But by all means, continue to stamp your foot and blather on about this. Your work on this insane and hopeless issue keeps you off the streets, and out of real politics. You can’t do damage to a school board race while you’re lost in the ozone on citizenship and Obama.

_____________

* Maybe by “Constitution Club” they mean “a club with which to beat the Constitution,” and not a group of people joining together in a noble cause, you think?

More, Resources, and Related Articles

• Always a good source on birtherism, Oh, For Goodness Sake
• We Got Mail from a Birther (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• What Really Happened in a Georgia Courtroom on January 26, 2012? | Western Journalism.com (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• The Birthers Go Down To Georgia (outsidethebeltway.com)

Earlier at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub

• Constitutional right to be stupid:  Birthers at it again
• Goldie Taylor at The Grio:  Why Obama shouldn’t have to “show his papers”
• Birthers claim Obama born in Millard Fillmore’s bathtub in 1853
• Stubborn birthers soldier on
• Obama’s eligibility:  California court tossed the case out
• Birther karma:  Hoaxsters get hoaxed on Kenya birth document
• Crazies never think they are
• Birther control
• Birthers:  “We choose to wallow in the gutter”
• NBC on the Obama birth certificate issue
• Anti-Obama blogger indicted for threatening Secret Service agent
• FAIL repeated:  Challenges to Obama’s eligibility
• Without hysterics, the Obama eligibility issue
• Obama’s birth certificate:  Astrologers bring sound reason (!)
• 6 ways challenges to Obama’s eligibility fail

Fruits of the Republican War on Education

You didn’t think it was working already?

This story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, which is why Republicans discourage newspaper publishing, and why they discourage programs to teach people to read well and remember history.

In South Carolina, a discrepancy on federal spending

Campaigning Republicans draw cheers with their calls for cuts to government programs. But the state benefits from such programs to a greater extent than many others.

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

January 14, 2012, 7:55 p.m.

Reporting from Beaufort, S.C.—

When Rick Santorum stood in front of voters at a yacht club in this small town and pledged to slash government spending, especially entitlement programs, Nancy Garvin knew she had found her candidate.

Garvin, 54, said she was sick of seeing government squander money through agencies that don’t do anything, and wants expenditures cut “in half.”

Washington is throwing money away through a lot of wasteful spending,” she said, sitting at a picnic table beneath trees draped in graying Spanish moss.

But Garvin, whose husband, a carpenter, has been out of work for four years, depends on the very government she wants to see cut back. She collects disability insurance — it is what she and her husband have survived on as he’s looked for work. Her mother is on Social Security. Garvin herself used to work as a nurse at a hospital where many patients paid for services through Medicaid, another program using federal money.

Garvin’s views are similar to those of many Republican voters in this conservative state, where candidates pledging to cut government spending were met with resounding applause last week, and where former Gov. Mark Sanford tried to refuse federal stimulus funding on principle.

South Carolina and its residents benefit from government spending, more so than many other states. For every dollar the state pays in federal taxes, it receives $1.35 in federal government benefits. By contrast, California receives only 78 cents for every dollar it pays in taxes.

“We get more back from the federal government than we send in terms of revenue,” said Doug Woodward, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina. “But I’m not sure that a lot of voters would even care if they heard that. When they say they want to see less spending in the state, they’re referring to entitlement programs.”

Much of the money spent in South Carolina goes to the programs that make up a big chunk of the federal budget — defense, Social Security and Medicaid. The state has seven military bases, and received $7 billion in Defense Department spending in 2010. One in five residents in South Carolina receives Social Security benefits — compared with just 13% in California. As an aging state, South Carolina will be more dependent on federal programs such as Social Security in the coming decade, according to AARP.

“People want to see lower government spending, especially on the Republican side,” said Karen Kedrowski, a politics professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. “But when they’re asked specifically about high-dollar items, including Social Security and defense, they are not willing to accept significant cuts.”

Kedrowski’s university recently polled South Carolina Republicans to ask about reducing the deficit by making cuts to government programs: 73% of voters said they weren’t willing to have their current Social Security or Medicare benefits reduced to address budget concerns. More than half said they weren’t willing to cut defense spending either.

It’s not just wealthy Republican voters in the Palmetto State who say they eschew entitlement programs, Kedrowski said.

“There’s also a disproportionate number of low-income people who vote Republican because they respond to the populist messages, even when it is against their economic interests to do so,” she said.

Sheila Barton, 56, runs a floral shop in Pickens, a town that Rick Perry visited recently to stroll down Main Street and shake hands with store owners and residents.

“Americans don’t want a government that’s playing a bigger role in their lives,” Perry had said at a speech earlier that morning. “No one’s ever come up to me and said, ‘We sure need to have more government in our lives.’”

Barton agrees — in principle.

“There’s a lot of things that are wasteful,” she said, but when pressed to name some, she said she couldn’t really think of any off the top of her head. Defense spending should be increased, she said, and people who have paid into Social Security should receive their benefits. And local government programs need more funding, she said — she’s currently a guardian for local children through the court system.

There is some evidence that South Carolina’s opposition to government spending might further strangle the state’s already weak economy — if it leads to cuts in Social Security. Roberto Gallardo of the Southern Rural Development Center says that economies in many small towns in South Carolina are increasingly dependent on Social Security payments.

The percentage of total personal income in South Carolina coming from Social Security’s Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance programs was 7.6% in 2009, up from 3.8% in 1970. South Carolina ranks eighth in the nation on the group’s Social Security Dependency Index, which measures how reliant local economies are on Social Security payments for job creation and consumer spending. Neighboring North Carolina ranked 23rd.

That means candidates have to walk a fine line here — promising to cut government to alleviate voters’ fears, while still preserving the programs that require most of the spending. How else to appeal to such voters as Clifton Anderson of Camden, who went to see Rick Santorum speak in a diner in Ridgeway?

“His ideas of downsizing government are most important to me,” said Anderson, about Santorum. He continued, in the next breath: “I also like his idea about strengthening defense.”

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Republicans Unfit to Govern Dept: All laws must quote from the Magna Carta

For a biologist, P. Z. Myers is really good at finding historical and legal error, you know?  He’s got this post up at his FreeThoughts blog — I copy here in the entirety because I’m laughing too hard to rewrite it.  And P. Z. writes well, and he won’t mind:

New Hampshire has some world-class lunatics

Too bad they’re in the legislature. The latest wacky idea from a trio of Republicans is to require that all new bills reference the Magna Carta.

House Bill 1580 is the product of such a brainstorming session this summer between three freshman House Republicans: Bob Kingsbury of Laconia, Tim Twombly of Nashua and Lucien Vita of Middleton. The eyebrow-raiser, set to be introduced when the Legislature reconvenes next month, requires legislation to find its origin in an English document crafted in 1215.

“All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived,” is the bill’s one sentence.

You might be wondering why the Magna Carta . . . I think the three stooges should be wondering that, too.

Vita admitted he needs to “bone up” on the content of the charter

In other words, he has no idea what’s in the Magna Carta. I’m guessing he’s also a Christian of the the type that has a similar reverence for the contents of a document they’ve never read.

Yeah, I’ll have a little more to say about it later — especially about how this cuts just the opposite of what Republicans have been screaming about for much of the last four years.

Geographic literacy and logic become victims in Republican presidential campaign in Iowa

Rick Perry shooting at the coyote in the sky - Mad Mike's America

Sidney Crosby, Toronto Maple Leafs - Business Insider

_____________

I have it on good authority that Rick Perry will not be taking the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) Exit Level test for juniors this spring.  He’s probably not ready for it, according to this report in the New York Times.  It may be that no Republican in Iowa is ready for it, either.

Energy: The audiences at Mr. Perry’s events seemed somewhat unmoved by parts of his speech that talked about job creation. But when it came to energy and oil, they perked up.

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a loud round of enthusiastic applause.

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry’s assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is “not good policy, it’s not good politics and frankly it’s un-American.”

I wonder if it’s un-Canadian.

See also:

• Blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Does Rick Perry plan to annex Canada?”
• Daily Kos wonders:  “I can’t imagine why Republicans aren’t rallying around this guy.  He’s perfect for them.”
• Mad Mike apologizes to Canada for Rick Perry
• Addicting Info
• Jeff Weintraub worries that Perry may be making Ron Paul into a prophet

Why you should be concerned about mercury pollution

Mercury poisoning marches through our culture with a 400-year-old trail, at least.  “Mad as a hatter” refers to the nerve damage hatmakers in Europe demonstrated, nerve damage we now know came from mercury poisoning.

In the 20th century annals of pollution control, the Minimata disaster stands as a monument to unintended grotesque consequences of pollution, of mercury poisoning.

A key Japanese documentary on the disaster is now available from Zakka Films on DVD, with English subtitles.

Anyone who scoffs at EPA’s four-decades of work to reduce mercury pollution should watch this film before bellyaching about damage to industry if we don’t allow industry to kill babies and kittens in blind, immoral pursuit of profit at public expense.

American Elephants, for example, is both shameless and reckless  in concocting lies about mercury pollution regulation (that site will not allow comments that do not sing in harmony with the pro-pollution campaign (I’d love for someone to prove me wrong)).  Almost every claim made at that post is false.  Mercury is not harmless; mercury from broken CFL bulbs cannot begin to compare to mercury in fish and other animals; mercury pollution is not minuscule (mercury warnings stand in all 48 contiguous states, warning against consumption of certain fish).  President Obama has never urged anything but support for the coal-fired power industry — although he has expressed concerns about pollution, as any sane human would.

Republicans have lost their moral compass, and that loss is demonstrated in the unholy campaign for pollution, the campaign against reducing mercury emissions.  It’s tragic.  Action will be required in November to stop the tragedy from spreading.  Will Americans respond as they should at the ballot boxes?

Can you watch “Minimata:  The Victims and Their World,” and not urge stronger controls on mercury emissions?  Can you support the murder of children and workers, for profit?

Bigger ditch + higher speed = (Greece X Russia)

What to do about the economic ditch the Republicans have driven the economy into?

Campaign aides to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and Mitt Romney advocate finding a bigger ditch and hitting the gas pedal sooner and harder.

No, seriously:  Jon Huntsman’s economics advisor, a woman with years of experience working for a balanced budget, suggested that Paul’s proposal of cutting $1 trillion from spending in 2013 lacks a great connection to reality.  Aides to the other three, after taking another toke of godknowswhat, said they could do even more cutting.

It’s as if General Washington’s physicians, interviewed December 15, 1799, claimed they could have saved Washington’s life had they bled him two or three more times — but unfortunately, he was out of blood.

At a Wednesday panel discussion hosted by the America’s Future Foundation, a club of young libertarians and conservatives in Washington who meet regularly over beer to network and debate about politics, Jennifer Pollom, Huntsman’s economic director, joined campaign aides for Gary Johnson, Ron Paul and a former Mitt Romney staffer to discuss why their candidate would best represent conservatives as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. The real fun (by D.C. standards) started when Jack Hunter, a blogger for Paul’s presidential campaign, touted his boss’s promise to slash $1 trillion from the federal budget.

“Having been on the Budget Committee and having worked in the federal government and in the Senate for quite a while, I think a trillion dollars is kind of ludicrous,” said Pollom, who formerly served as the counsel for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. “That’s my personal opinion, that is not the stance of Governor Huntsman. We’re more concerned about tax policy right now. We’re deeply concerned about the deficit and the debt, but we’re more concerned about jobs and freezing spending where it is right now.”

That didn’t play well with the representatives for Johnson and Paul, two of the most libertarian-leaning candidates in the race. (Johnson’s plan goes further than Paul’s. He has vowed to balance the budget in his first year, which would require cutting even more than $1 trillion.)

“To call that ludicrous is actually a little surprising because this idea that we can year after year continue to spend more money than we’re taking in, to me that actually seems to be the pretty ludicrous idea from a fiscally conservative perspective,” said panelist Jonathan Bydlak, the finance director for Johnson’s campaign.

“I personally think that cutting a trillion dollars in one year off the budget–I use ‘ludicrous’ sort of loosely–but I don’t think it’s practical,” Pollom said later during the panel. “It may be an excellent aspirational dream but speaking in the real world, I don’t know that it’s actually practically going to happen.”

That’s when Derek Khanna, a panelist who worked for Mitt Romney’s finance team in 2008, jumped in.

“The idea of one trillion is not ludicrous,” Khanna said, which prompted Pollom to put her finger to her head like she was pulling the trigger of a gun. “I think that the idea of saying that being able to balance the budget is ‘ludicrous’ is kind of disturbing. We’re all here saying we support the balanced-budget amendment, but in the end we won’t support cutting a trillion dollars. It seems to be a bit disingenuous.”

What in the world could these stooges be referring to in cutting?  I can see it now:  ‘What do we need Homeland Security for, anyway?  FAA doesn’t fly any airplanes — what could possibly happen if we just shut the agency down tomorrow?  Surely we don’t need more than one aircraft carrier, one for the Pacific, and one for the Atlantic — we don’t have any territory in the Southern, Indian, or Arctic Oceans.’

You can almost hear Ron Paul, wide-eyed, explaining:  ‘President Obama is hurting the energy industry.  BP found a way to quickly get millions of barrels of oil out of ground under the Gulf of Mexico, oil we need to run industry — but Obama made them stop!’

In other news, perhaps, The Onion is considering closing down — they can’t parody this stuff any more.

War on Christmas: Truce would be more in the spirit, no?

Kate at The Radula wrote good thoughts on the imaginary, but still destructive, “War on Christmas”:

Perhaps, dear followers of Christ, there is no war on Christmas.  Perhaps the war is on the world, a war that YOU are waging on other religions, other cultures, and those who have equal faith, and equal right to express their faith (or lack there-of).  Perhaps you feel that even acknowledging that there are other ways to believe, (God help anyone who says “Happy Holidays”) is an attack on you, but isn’t acknowledging your holiday while acknowledging that there are others the loving and peaceful solution?  Why does the Hindu, the Jew, the Muslim, the Atheist, HAVE to wish you a Merry Christmas, and ignore their own faiths and the faiths of others?

There’s more, and you can buy a nice t-shirt to give to your genius daughter or son, at Kate’s site.  (Or maybe this shirt.)

If stupid and arrogance shone like the Sun . . .

. . . we could solve all energy crises forevermore.

Over at Watt’s Up With That, the leading anti-science blog on the web, Anthony Watt turned the podium over to the indefatigable, often inscrutable, sometimes-funny-but-almost-always wrong, Willis Eschenbach, who worries about when solar power may run out:

Their study includes “renewable” sources like solar, although I’ve never found out exactly how they plan to renew the sun once it runs out.

In a just and sane world, Dave Barry would be preparing to sue Eschenbach for infringing on Barry’s humor patent.

Just when will energy from Old Sol run out?  The Sun will die one day, but well after President Obama’s second term has expired, and long after all current photo-voltaic devices have worn out from providing cheap energy.

The facts:

Our Sun won’t last forever. Dr. Carolyn Brinkworth explains the ramifications for our home planet in this ‘Ask an Astronomer’ video.

What Will Happen to the Earth When the Sun Dies?, posted with vodpod

Shorter Eschenbach:  Don’t worry about cleaning the air to fight global warming, because in the looooooooooooooooooooooooooooong run, we’re all dead.  Certainly after 4 billion years.

 

Constitutional right to be stupid: Birthers at it again

Where are the Republicans to stop this waste of time and money?

I get e-mail, from the Obama bunch; can you believe it?:

Ed –

It’s no surprise that professional conspiracy theorists are still on the birth-certificate warpath — but now elected officials are getting their backs.

Yesterday, four Republicans in the New Hampshire State House supported a hearing requested by a group of birthers who want President Obama officially removed from the state’s primary ballot.

It’s not clear whether all this is a smokescreen or whether these dead-enders actually believe this stuff. But they aren’t letting the facts get in their way — one group in Arizona has even demanded that the President “release the microfiche” of his birth certificate.

Sadly, I don’t have any microfiches on hand, but we have the next best thing: In honor of birthers everywhere, we’re re-releasing the campaign’s limited-edition “Made in the USA” mugs.

Donate $20 or more today and we’ll send you one — complete with a reprint of the President’s birth certificate on the side for everyone to see.

Here’s what one of the state representatives backing the effort had to say about yesterday’s hearing: “I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I could take [the long-form birth certificate] apart and see that it was fraudulent.”

Well, I won’t argue with one part of that statement.

There’s clearly nothing we can do to satisfy this crowd — or anyone else who insists on wasting time and energy on nonsense like this.

But when it starts to make your head hurt, I’ve found the best remedy is to have some tea in my “Made in the USA” mug.

Works like a charm. I recommend Earl Grey:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Birth-Certificate-Mug

Thanks,

Julianna

Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America

More:

• Oh, For Goodness Sake! has details and video

Claxons sounding from the navigation room: Titanic Republicans plunge full speed ahead to that iceberg

A veteran Republican Congressional insider wrote:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-​year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-​related travel — how prudent is that? — in order to strong arm some union-​busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis

Sheesh!  And I thought they were crazy in 1985!

David Badash analyzed Lofgren’s article, at the New Civil Rights Movement:

GOP veteran Congressional staffer of 28 years, Mike Lofgren, who retired in June, just published a 6114 word attack on today’s Republican party, classifying them as “an apocalyptic cult” “full of lunatics.” Unsurprisingly, it’s gone viral. Included within Lofrgren’s 28 years in Congress is his “16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees,” according to his bio. James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, calls Lofgren “a familiar and highly esteemed figure.” Lofgren likens today’s Republican Party to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic, and observes that “legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.”

Also unsurprisingly, Lofgren talks about the GOP’s attacks on same-​sex marriage, several times.

And almost exactly like we at The New Civil Rights Movement have been doing, Lofgren particularly targets Steve King, Michele Bachman, Paul Broun, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, and Allen West. (Good to know we’re on the right track!)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Tony Sidaway.