I went to the Memphis Redbirds playoff game against the Oklahoma City Redhawks last night, and the crowd was pathetic. I know it’s “only” AAA, but it’s a playoff game, people! The Redbirds tied for the best record in the PCL! And the weather was nearly perfect! To top it off, the Redbirds were even offering half price seats. So you could get into the park for as little as $2.50, and the best seats in the house were just $9.

Attendance was officially listed at 3,473, but I’d be surprised if there were many more than half that many people actually in attendance at Autozone Park. For reference, capacity at Autozone Park is 14,320, so even if the official attendance number is correct, the park was less than 25% full for a playoff game.

Better than half of the concession stands were closed, including all of the ones on the club level, owing to the low crowd turnout.

If consistently putting a winning team on the field (the Redbirds won the PCL title last year) won’t put asses in the seats at Autozone, what will?*

* – Post game fireworks, apparently. But not baseball, it seems.

This is hideous:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

By a 6-to-5 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer prisoners to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the case on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured in captivity — and that Jeppesen was complicit in that alleged abuse.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher described the case, which reversed an earlier decision, as presenting “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” But, he said, the majority had “reluctantly” concluded that the lawsuit represented “a rare case” in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have a day in court.

I hate the fact that our political system presents me with a choice between the party that approves of and practices torture and the party that approves of and defends torturers. The Obama administration did not have to argue this case. They could have allowed these tortured men to have their day in court. Instead they not only defended the torturers, they used the most odious tool of the military-police state: the states secret privilege. This privilege was invented out of whole cloth in the 1950s so that the Air Force could hide the fact that maintenance negligence lead to a crash that killed Air Force personnel. At it’s heart the states secret doctrine claims that national security is so much more important than your rights that evidence cannot even be heard in a closed and controlled courtroom. It is the ultimate police state tool: we can do anything we want to you and you can never do anything about it because what we did was so important to the health of the state. Even, according to the Bush and now Obama administrations, the fact that you were tortured. Pinochet would have loved that doctrine.

Our foreign policy and our foreign policy elites are hopeless corrupt. They are addicted to violence, convinced that it is serious and tough instead of lunatic and cowardly to resort to war and torture first and always. This rot has infected both parties and almost all of our primary institutions. Getting the military-police state under control is perhaps the most important domestic battle in our country. Unfortunately, it looks as if almost no one in the courts, in politics,or in the media is on the right side of that fight.

Cincinnati Reds, in 1st place, last Monday home game: 8/30 vs. Milwaukee. Attendance: 14,589

Milwaukee Brewers, 4th place, 10 games below .500, last Monday home game: 9/6 vs. St. Louis. Attendance: 35,190

Reds fans just don’t deserve winning baseball.

I’ve been remiss in not reading LarryE‘s in a while, but now that I’m catching up, I see that he’s been on fire of late. See, for example, his writings on Social Security, or on the Park51 “controversy” (also here), or on conservative tax policy BS.

This is interesting:

The man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the LORD.”
2
Next she bore his brother Abel. Abel became a keeper of flocks, and Cain a tiller of the soil.
3
In the course of time Cain brought an offering to the LORD from the fruit of the soil,
4
while Abel, for his part, brought one of the best firstlings of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering,
5
but on Cain and his offering he did not. Cain greatly resented this and was crestfallen.
6
So the LORD said to Cain: “Why are you so resentful and crestfallen?
7
2 If you do well, you can hold up your head; but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door: his urge is toward you, yet you can be his master.”
8
Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out in the field.” When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
9
Then the LORD asked Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
10
The LORD then said: “What have you done! Listen: your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil!
11
Therefore you shall be banned from the soil that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
12
If you till the soil, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a restless wanderer on the earth.”
13
Cain said to the LORD: “My punishment is too great to bear.
14
Since you have now banished me from the soil, and I must avoid your presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth, anyone may kill me at sight.”
15
3 Not so!” the LORD said to him. “If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged sevenfold.” So the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest anyone should kill him at sight.

This is one of the more interesting passages in the Bible. Despite its appearance, I don’t see how this passage can be about the appropriateness of worship before God. At no point does the Bible say anything about why God rejected Cain’s offering, only that He did. If this was about how to worship God, the reason Cain’s offering was rejected would be of paramount importance. It would be central to the story. But the Bible doesn’t discuss that aspect of the story at all.

Instead, it clearly shows God having mercy, of a kind, to Cain. Step back for a moment and look at what Cain has done. If you accept the story of the Bible as an absolute truth, Cain has murdered not only his brother but fully 25% of the human race in existence at the time*. Hitler and Pol Pot on their best days never envisioned such carnage. And yet God lets him live. More, God ensures that anyone who would take vengeance on Cain would be punsihed seven fold. The mark of Cain, then, is as much a protection as a punishment. God, it seems, is not a fan of the death penalty. God, in fact, doesn’t appear to be a fan of the kind of punish forever nonsense that “law and order” types like to advocate. God delivers a punishment, and then not only lets Cain get on with his life but takes active steps to ensure that he is unmolested.

Glen Beck, I am sure, would think that God was coddling a criminal. But it is certainly interesting that the Bible, written at a time when life was much, much more violent, holds out against disproportionate punishment and for a kind of rehabilitation for criminals.

*Yes, I realize that this is pretty quickly contradicted. Heck, it is even contradicted in the passage quoted. But at this point, the Bible clearly says there are only four people worth mentioning, so lets just roll with it.

This has two really good ideas:

The plan envisions extending and revising a broad transportation policy bill that is usually renewed every five years or so but has been stalled in Congress. Although Mr. Obama is calling for investment over six years, the White House said it would be front-loaded with an initial investment of $50 billion in taxpayer money, followed by more spending in later years, to help create jobs as early as next year.

The administration said it would work with Congress to find ways to pay for the plan so that it would not add to the nation’s rising deficit. The White House is proposing to cut tax breaks and existing subsidies for oil and gas exploration and production as one way to pay for the plan, but officials said Mr. Obama is open to other ideas. Historically, transportation projects have been paid for largely with dedicated taxes like those on gasoline.

Mr. Obama also called for what the White House is describing as an “infrastructure bank” that would focus on paying for national and regional transportation projects by pooling private money with public investment. He said the bank would eliminate a patchwork system in which transportation projects are financed through Congressional earmarks rather than based on merit.

First, the infrastructure bill itself. Despite Republican idiocy, this is great policy. The government builds roads and basic infrastructure, not the private sector. And there is no doubt that our infrastructure is in dire need of substantial repairs and modernization. The politics are good as well: if you vote for us, we will fix your roads and trains and airports and make sure the country doesn’t fall farther behind Europe and China. if you vote for the GOP, they won’t and you can watch your children’s future be shipped to Germany or China.

The second good idea is the infrastructure bank. Right now, infrastructure in this country is assigned through a really ugly process of horse trading, power politics and earmarks. An infrastructure bank could be used to eliminate much of this inefficiency and to take some steps to ensuring that infrastructure projects are funded based on ROI and need. That in and of itself is an enormous step towards better government and a stronger country.

Good politics and good policy. More like this please.

Isn’t wonderful? It gets children sold as cheap labor:

For nearly half a decade, Escambia Charter School hired out a group of students to cut roadside grass and weeds during class time for about 32 hours per week.

The privately run high school made about $200,000 by paying the children less than required under a state Department of Transportation contract. Meanwhile, it continued accepting tax money from the state Department of Education to teach the children five hours a day.

Until state prosecutors investigated complaints from teachers at the campus north of Pensacola, the falsifying of attendance records, course schedules and grade reports went unchecked.

Even after pleading no contest to grand theft, the school remains open. No more than 12ƒ|percent of its students have ever been able to read at grade level, test scores show.

The fact that this school got to stay open is just the icing on the cake. The fact that this happened at all is inexcusable. It would never have happened in a public school, but a public school is a public trust and not run to enrich the owners. This is the inevitable result of the charter movement: children used as essentially slave labor, their education and good health thrown overboard in the pursuit of profit. The moment you introduce a profit motive into education, you are condemning some children to, at best, a terrible education. At worse, you are condemning them to conditions that are actually harmful. Educating children is hard, otherwise we wouldn’t have bad schools. The easiest way to make money off of a school is to deliver substandard education in sub standard conditions. The people in this school just took it to the next obvious level.

And spare me the pieties about the free market. Since the school is still in business, it is obvious that the free market won’t fix these problems. And even if it did, then so what? The problem is that this took place in the first place. Educating children form disadvantaged background is hard. If it wasn’t, as I said before, we would not have an allegedly poor education system. But this kind of abuse is built into the charter school concept.

If the charter schools are supposed to answer only to the market, then we know for certain a subset of them will be these kinds of schools, profit mills that don’t give a damn about the kids. We can argue about the percentage of those profit mills, but is is inevitable that they will arise. The whole point of charter schools is to allow experimentation on children. And, like all experiments, it is inevitable and well known going in that many will fail. That means the charter movement is deliberately throwing away the lives of children in the vain hope that there will somehow be, amongst all the drek that they know will infest the system, a magical bullet that will solve all of our education and needs on the Mighty Market Man to be discovered. The charter school movement deliberately condemns children to programs that it knows will not work, because failure is not a source of shame, it is the entire rationale behind their movement.

Schools like this are the inevitable price of the charter movement and its proponents are counting on them and the lives they ruin. Because without their model depends on charter schools failing and thus on children’s lives being ruined. They aren’t trying to help all the children and they don’t care that they ruin lives. The school above is just an extreme example of the inevitable damage the charter movement sets out to inflict upon children.

Sangin is crisscrossed with irrigation ditches. At one wide canal, Marine engineers had erected a metal bridge to allow the troops to penetrate towards the Helmand River and slice through Taliban strongholds. The Taliban figured that out, though, and an insurgent sniper had recently wounded two Marines at the bridge.

It was a spot that made the Marines nervous.

“Hey, sir, don’t get out of the vehicle until I lay down a sniper screen,” Gunnery Sgt. Mark Shawhan, an agnostic with a suspicion of organized religion, instructed Chaplain Moran before the patrol. “That’s where he’s been getting us, and when you cross the bridge—RUN.”

Lt. Moran wasn’t troubled. “I believe the Lord is going to protect us,” he said. But he wondered aloud whether to finish his Meal, Ready-to-Eat packaged lunch before heading to the armored vehicle.

Gunny Shawhan shook his head in disbelief.

— scene from a rather nice look at an atheist assigned to protect chaplains.

Once there was a deeply religious man who lived in a valley at the foot of an old dam. One day, after a week of heavy rain, the local power company, who owend the dam, had an engineer go on television and tell people to leave the town, the dam might not hold until the rain stopped next week. The man though to himself “The Lord will provide.” and decided to stay.

The next day, the dam began to crack, and water filled the streets of his town. A neighbor came buy with a boat and told the man that he would take him to safety. The man declined, politely, and said “The Lord will provide.”

By nightfall the waters had risen to cover the first floor. A local fisherman brought his boat up alongside the man’s window and offered to take him to safety. Thye man declined, politely, and said “The Lord will provide.”

By the next morning, the waters had risen to near the tops of the roofs. A Coast Guard helicopter spotted the man and tried to save him. But despite twenty minutes of pleading, the man declined, politely, and said “The Lord will provide.”

In an hour, the water had swept the man away.

When he got to heaven, the surprised man confronted God. “My Lord, why did you forsake me?”

And the Lord spoke, saying “What are you, thick? I sent a weather forecast, an engineer, a car, two boats and flipping helicopter!”

I cannot stressenough how deeply, deeply offensive the chaplain’s attitude is. It implies that the effort and the bravery of the young men around him is worthless or worse, not the result of their efforts but the special gift of God not to the men guarding him but to the chaplain. It implies that every little child blown to kingdom come by a stray predator drone, every soldier who catches a bullet, every civilian filled with the shrapnel of a roadside bomb died because God refused to protect them. It implies that their deaths were not the preventable consequences of the cruelty and stupidity of men but of the neglect of God. It excuses the believer form having to act to prevent more children form being killed, because God would protect them if he wanted them to live. It is, not to put to fine a point on it, evil.

I hope that his careless, un-Christian attitude doesn’t get anyone killed or hurt.

There is a Murphy’s-Law-type rule holding that any time you flame someone for a spelling error, your flame will contain a spelling error. Aside from the simple childishness of it, that’s one reason why grammar and spelling flames on the Internet are considered uncool.

The right wing – abetted by the sadly diminished Washington Post and CNN – is now ginning up a Web-wide flame war over an “error” WaPo writer Jamie Stiehm claims to have found in Obama’s new Oval Office rug- the one that has quotes from American historical figures around the margin. Naturally, it isn’t an error. And naturally, the wingers are in high dudgeon mode, with cluelessness shields fully deployed.

Stiehm notes:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports [sic - hee hee!], this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from [Martin Luther King, Jr.].

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. . . .

King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure.       . . .

Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

As Stiehm’s own article makes explicitly clear, the phrase on the rug is in fact a direct quotation from King, whose statement was a paraphrasal, but not a quotation, of Parker. Parker expressed the sentiment first, using particular and notable language, but King’s words – while obviously paraphrased – are his own formulation, pithier and distinct in its own right. It is that statement that is quoted on the rug, and it is properly attributed to King. Nothing about that quotation asserts that King did not have inspiration for the language he used, but the words quoted are his, and it is correct to say so. (Perhaps the rug needs a footnote. It’s heartening to see a sudden enthusiasm for scholarship and factual accuracy emerging from the right wing.) Contrary to Stiehm, it is, in fact, a “King quote”. King got it from elsewhere, changed it, and made it his own. As Stiehm notes, he didn’t hide that fact – but that also doesn’t mean that his own version of it was not his own words. If the quote on the rug were attributed to Parker, that would be an error. The attribution, to King, of King’s words, is correct.

This is standard practice in every scholarly field – the APA, MLA, and Chicago manuals all specify exactly accurate quotations with attribution to the source of those words. (It might also be in order to acknowledge that they were paraphrased from elsewhere, but that is an issue of completeness, not accuracy.) Ironically, the styleguides used by major news outlets, including the Washington Post, also specify strictly accurate quotation. By the rules of the newspaper that published this story, attributing that quotation to Parker, as Stiehm insists on, would be invalid. But the Post has joined the right-wing rabble of late, and their standards have slipped badly. I don’t know if this is scandal-mongering on their part, or just a too-clever-by-half  reporter playing “gotcha”, but it’s factually wrong, and irresponsible.

It’s especially so in the case of King, who was known for his erudition and his frequent quotations and paraphrasals from famous sources. The Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, AL, is inscribed with the quotation “. . . until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” – attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a paraphrasal of a verse from the Bible. There is no footnote. Maybe they know something the Washington Post, and our legions of slavering wingnut epistophobes, do not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090305100.html

Just a few thoughts here, guys:

1. There’s a zipper on your pants for a reason. It’s so you can get your junk out and do your business at a urinal without disrobing. It’s easy to use, unless you are supremely under-endowed, and you ought to make a habit of it.
2. For the reason above, it is entirely unnecessary, in a public or semi-public men’s room, to almost completely drop your pants and pull your undies halfway down simply to free one relatively accessible part of the anatomy just behind the zipper, while standing at a urinal.
3. It is not merely unnecessary, but highly inadvisable, for many reasons, to walk away from the urinal with your pants still down around your knees, stuffing things back in your underwear and untucking your shirt with one hand while clutching your flapping belt and pantswaist with the other, and then hike up your pants and buckle your belt while still walking across the open area of the men’s room. Especially if I am standing in that area.
4. And don’t look at me while I’m pursuing my mirror-gazing hobby.

My feelings about my job have not changed.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to this:

The notion that “slut-shaming” and “nose-cutting” have the same deeper meaning–presumably a fear of women’s sexuality, though Digby doesn’t say this–is true as far as it takes you. Likewise the notion that black people should be slaves, the notion that they should be shipped back to Africa, that they should be segregated in communities, that they should not be allowed to intermarry, also have the same root cause–that blacks are unequal to whites. At varying points, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Calhoun, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses Grant held one or all of these views, and all probably died thinking blacks were unequal to whites. But that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Lincoln and Grant aren’t “less evil” versions of Calhoun.

As is often the case, with arguments that lead with analogy, the point isn’t to clarify anything, it’s to turn heads. Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not think you claim that Glenn Beck is the white Malcolm X because you think it’s a particularly astute analysis; you do it because it will get you on the Atlantic Wire. I don’t believe you claim that the American right’s tactics are “almost indistinguishable” from the Taliban because you think it’s adroit and original. You do it to elbow your way up the best-seller list.

Standard disclaimer: I did little bit of tech work for Markos when Daily Kos was starting it’s move to Scoop, he linked to my Amazon wish list as thanks. Further disclaimer: I don’t think Markos is good for the left. Not for over-heated rhetoric, becasue I haven’t read the book and cannot comment on that aspect of it. Rather, I think his focus on partisanship over ideology is bad for both the ideology of the left and for the politics of the Democratic Party, the current tool best suited for advancing a leftist agenda. TNC is correct that analogies can be taken too far. And he is further right that a difference of degree can be wide enough to be a difference of kind.

But the Focus on the Family thinks that children should be beaten and abused rather than have anti-bullying laws that would protect children suspected of being gay. Top religious right leaders refused to condemn the murder of Dr. Tiller. GOP Senators and right wing power brokers made light of the terrorist attack on the IRS in Austin. The last GOP Vice Presidential candidate refused to call abortion bombers terrorists. Much of the right wing is actively trying to prevent Muslims from exercising their rights to the free expression of religion. I could go on and on.

So we have a disregard for the physical safety of people the religion disapproves of, refusal to condemn religious and politically motivated violence, and the turning of the denial of religious freedom into a campaign issue. Yes, differences of degree are important, and no the right wing in this country is not as violent as the Taliban. But they clearly move to restrict the rights of people of religions and genetics unacceptable to them and they clearly do not rush to condemn violence in the services of causes they support. I cannot see how that is a large enough difference of degree to constitute a difference of kind.

1. Reading xkcd at work and looking up the obscure references on Wikipedia.
2. Standing at the large bathroom mirror and playfully touching my own reflection, noting that the apparent distance to the image in the mirror is twice the distance to the actual mirror, which, when it’s recently cleaned by the housekeeping staff, is essentially invisible and gives me a “through-the-looking-glass” experience which is quite fascinating, while listening carefully for anyone coming through the door and then quickly pretending I was just washing my hands.
3. Fantasizing about quitting unexpectedly and making the triumphant farewell rant that I know in reality will never happen.

I fuckin’ hate my job.

The charter school miracle is apparently not such a miracle. New Orleans schools improved more before Katrina than afterward:

Between 2002 and 2005 (based on numbers from the Times-Picayune), test score growth in 4th grade among all NOLA public school children was 18 points in ELA and 16 points in Math. Between 2007 to 2010 test score growth among NOLA children was 19 points in ELA and 10 points in Math.

In 8th grade between 2002 and 2005, NOLA students gained 21 points in ELA and 8 points in Math. Between 2007 and 2010, 8th graders gained 13 points in ELA and 11 points in Math. So the real story is not nearly so clear cut as the corporate foundations’ glossy brochures proclaim.

In 10th grade, Louisiana students take the Graduate Exit Exam (GEE). There, the gains since Katrina are more aligned with the public relations messaging. Before Katrina, English and Math gains were 1 point and 9 points over three years, respectively. Since Katrina, English gains are 15 points and Math gains are at 18 points. Signficant, indeed.

Okay, maybe thats not entirely fair. Katrina was a catastrophic event with horrific consequences that the city still has not recovered from. Maybe, then, we should see how much the charter schools are improving compared to the public schools:

Another surprise is in store for those who believe the charter schools are clearly the panacea for urban schooling in NOLA and, therefore, appropriately destined to replace the regular public schools there. However, whether operated by the Recovery School District or the Orleans Parish School Board, the charters are getting trounced in terms of test score growth by the regular public schools. Based on figures from the 2010 Cowen Institute Report, the regular public schools had higher student test score growth in 8 of the 12 categories measured, for an growth advantage of exactly 2:1. Do download the Report, and have a look for yourself on page 27. Click chart below to expand:

Oh.

Well, maybe the charter schools have harder to educate students:

The lack of special education services offered by the NOLA charters has become a scandal unto itself, with the Orleans Parish School Board regular schools now enrolling 9.3% special education students, compared with 5.2% special ed among the OPSB charter schools. Among the Recovery School District (RSD) regular publics, the percentage of special ed students is 12.6, compared to 7.8 percent special ed student in the RSD charters. Yet even with these academic disadvantages to which may be added the fact that the regular publics must absorb ELL students and the behavioral and academic casualties from the charter schools, these “schools of last resort,” are, nonetheless, out-performing the charters in terms of student growth in 8 categories, compared to 4 for the charters. We may safely conclude, I think, that the charterites and the charter industry have much better public relations than they do pedagogy.

Well, the charter schools still offer a way to punch those hippie teachers, so they must be better.

Twenty years from now, our children are going to read these stories and and have our heads.

You know, if you read Genesis, it gets pretty hard pretty quickly to think of God as just or loving. First he sets human beings up to fail and lose immortality. Then He assigns blame in a rather unfair manner:

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
7
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
8
2 When they heard the sound of the LORD God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
9
The LORD God then called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?”
10
He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.”
11
Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked? You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!”
12
The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me–she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.”
13
The LORD God then asked the woman, “Why did you do such a thing?” The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.”
14
Then the LORD God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.
15
3 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”
16
To the woman he said: “I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master.”
17
To the man he said: “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, “Cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life.

Now, granted, God does make life hard for Man. But he places Woman in a completely subservient position to Man. The blame here is very clearly on the head of the Woman. She not only suffers the same hardships as Man does (even if you accept the dubious proposition that Woman is spared the field work, she still dies and she still suffers the effect of a lack of abundant food) with the added joy of physical pain during childbirth and being made subservient to the Man. Clearly, God blames the Woman for the transgression more than the man. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.

Man eats the fruit out of his own free will. He even admits it: Woman did not force him to eat the fruit: “The woman whom you put here with me–she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.” He just took it an ate it. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t know — the Bible clearly states that the Man was with the Woman when she and the snake had their little chat. He chose to eat the fruit with nothing in the way of evident coercion. Yet he blames his wife instead of taking his share of the blame. And God agrees with him, punishing her more than him. That is the farthest thing from fair. The two of them made their own choices of their own free will under the exact same set of circumstances. They deserve the same level of punishment.

So far the God of the Bible does not impress. He seems capricious and arbitrary, setting up unfair tests and imposing unfair and uneven penalties for failing those unfair tests. There may be reason to fear God at this point, but there is precious little to suggest there is a reason to love Him.

So says the CBO and other non-partisian budget sources:

There’s only one problem with Boehner’s message: so far, the things that Republicans have said they want to do won’t actually boost employment or reduce deficits. In fact, much the opposite. By combing through a variety of studies and projections from nonpartisan economic sources, we here at Gaggle headquarters have found that if Republicans were in charge from January 2009 onward—and if they were now given carte blanche to enact the proposals they want to—the projected 2010–2020 deficits would be larger than they are under Obama, and fewer people would probably be employed.

If we lived in a just world with a functioning press, every GOP leader, at least, would be made to answer this simple question: why should the American public vote you into power when non-partisan budget experts agree that your stated plans would lead to higher deficits? Given the state of our oh-so liberal media, I predict that this question will be asked precisely zero times.

Or so says this report:

While there are good reasons for concern about the current system of teacher evaluation, there are also good reasons
to be concerned about claims that measuring teachers’ effectiveness largely by student test scores will lead to improved
student achievement. If new laws or policies specifically
require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores
do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might
well be terminated than is now the case. But there is not
strong evidence to indicate either that the departing
teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that
the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective
ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that
teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning
if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student
test score gains.

(Sorry for the formating: PDFs suck)

I would encourage you to read the entire report but the gist of it is that there is zero evidence that standardized test scores are an accurate proxy for teacher effectiveness. A representative passage follows:

For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.

A study designed to test this question used VAM methods to assign effects to teachers after controlling for other
factors, but applied the model backwards to see if credible results were obtained. Surprisingly, it found that students’
fifth grade teachers were good predictors of their fourth grade test scores. Inasmuch as a student’s later fifth grade teacher cannot possibly have influenced that student’s fourth grade performance, this curious result can only mean that VAM results are based on factors other than teachers’ actual effectiveness.

It has been a constant refrain form the left that we are reality based, that when the evidence changes, we change our mind. And while that is generally true, the left is no more immune from ideological biases than the right. And the professional left in this country is deeply invested in the notion that fixing teachers will fix our schools and that hihg stakes tests are the be all end all of measuring teacher effectiveness. There is, even under the most charitable reading of the data, no evidence that standardized tests are a realistic proxy for teacher effectiveness and quite a bit of evidence for the opposite conclusion.

Yet in official Washington, tests designed to fire teachers are the beginning and the ending of educational reform. Despite the evidence, the ideological inclination to punch hippies — in this case, low status, practically powerless, largely female public school teachers — is far, far more powerful than the actual data. Obama’s education plan is another variation of kill the teachers who don’t give good tests scores. If the accumulated weight of these studies changes that, then the professional left can join the rest of us in the reality based community.

I am not holding my breath. Hatred of teachers runs far, far deeper in our political and punditry classes than does love of facts. It cannot be reform, after all, if it doesn’t punish the teachers. Whether or not it helps the children is, based on this evidence, a secondary concern at best.

The GOP built its power on the Southern Strategy. After the Democrats finally, a hundred year too late, did the right thing and removed the racists from their party, the GOP welcomed them with open arms. For the next forty years, the GOP used the power of racism to leverage themselves in power. That strategy is harder and harder to execute as the country has grown more openly tolerant. A country that elects a black man named Hussein Obama is not one, after all, where coded racial appeals are guaranteed electoral winners. It seems, though, that the GOP has found another minority to kick around: Muslims.

The proposed Muslim community center has brought out all of the right wing hatred and vitriol. Party leaders from Palin to Gingrich to Limbaugh have all attacked the temerity of Muslims wanting to build near Ground Zero, even though the Muslims in question have as much connection to Al Qaeda and the Jesuits do to the Real IRA. In Tennessee, a proposed mosque became the focal point of the local GOP, with primary contestants insisting that a mosque in middle Tennessee would be the end of America as we know it.

It has paid off. The GOP has been able to dominate the news for weeks now with their attacks on all Muslims instead of having to defend their refusal to allow small business aid to come to a vote or their renewed interest in privatizing social security or their deeply unpopular stance to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans. And, hey, if a person gets roughed up because he looks a little Muslim, or the equating of all Muslims with terrorists gives an unhinged person a violent target for his insanity, or a mosque building site suffers a little preemptive arson, well, no one ever won a Congress without breaking a few eggs. At least three civil rights workers haven’t been murdered trying to end anti-Muslim bigotry, right?

Though, if they had been maybe a future GOP hero could go to the Real American Town where they were and start his or her presidential campaign by sending coded messages to the bigots.

Sorry for the absence and missing the last two weeks of Agnostic Reads a Bible. I have relatives in town, vendors in town, and my wife is on jury duty, so my schedule is a mess. Back in a couple of days, with at least one belated bible read.

…in the coffin of Paul Ryan’s “roadmap,” via Bruce Bartlett:

I also note that the actuaries’ memo is really a stake in the heart of Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan. The actuaries are saying that it is so unlikely that Medicare cuts already in law will be implemented that they should just be ignored. But Ryan would impose far more Draconian cuts. How likely is it that they would be implemented even if they could ever be enacted into law (which is politically impossible anyway)? The actuaries are basically saying that the chances are zero.

But Ryan will, of course, continue to insist that his plan is both realistic and achievable, and that “Washington” is out to get him.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Jacob Davies. And if that’s not good enough, commenter Peter wins the thread early on:

But but but but it’s hallowed groooound!

And when construction is complete it will come with hallowed office space and a hallowed shopping complex. But a place of worship two blocks away would desecrate it!