And despite the passage of Arizona’s positively revolting “illegal to be brown” law, I have to admit that perhaps an unintentional benefit is the mobilizing of religious and evangelical communities against it (always a good thing to see faith translated into social action).
As noted here…
When Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony heard about Arizona's new immigration-enforcement law, the Catholic leader reacted with some good old-fashioned righteous anger. Taking to his blog, Mahony blasted the measure as the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigration law, comparing it to German Nazi and Russian communist techniques that forced individuals to turn one another in.And immigration may be one of the very few issues that a certain 43rd president actually got right during his term in office (with brother Jeb dutifully carrying on the fight here). However, I believe that was only because even he knew that the Repugs couldn’t survive by alienating the fastest growing voting bloc in this country (and as Media Matters tells us here, the flow of misinformation on this subject will likely continue far into the future, thus hindering the chances of desperately needed reform).
Mahony is hardly the only religious leader outraged by Arizona's approach to immigration, which requires police to ask for papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. The progressive Evangelical leader Jim Wallis has declared the state's new law a social and racial sin. The president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society declared that by passing the law, Arizona has taken itself out of the mainstream of American life. And Mahony's Catholic colleague the bishop of Tucson has suggested that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) join lawsuits challenging the law.
So let’s not try to explain them away (poor standardized test scores, that is). Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.Really, I just wish Murray would come right out and tell us that he believes rich people from well-to-do backgrounds are just innately better than anyone of different complexions from poor neighborhoods and be done with it (yes, this is snark...and no, I'm not in love with standardized tests either, but how else is Murray proposing to measure performance?).
Here, he complained that the book he co-authored, “The Bell Curve,” was dismissed as “racist pseudo-science.” However, it’s hard to take Murray’s griping seriously considering, as Kevin Drum tells us, Murray basically ignored gains in “Black cognitive ability” from about 1972 to 2002 in a study cited here.
And let’s not think Murray’s own brand of elitism is restricted to race or class; here, he argued for abolishing B.A. programs at college universities, arguing that some kind of a certificate of expertise, or something, was more beneficial to a prospective employer instead (this no doubt warmed the cockles of J.D. Mullane’s coal-black heart, among others).
Besides, Murray didn’t have a problem with IQ tests, as opposed to those of the standardized variety, when he arrived at the following conclusion (here)…
In the April, 2007 issue of Commentary Magazine, Murray wrote on the disproportionate representation of Jews in the ranks of outstanding achievers and says that one of the reasons is that Jews "have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested." His article concludes with the assertion: "At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God's chosen people.Yep, whoever decided to give Murray column space in the Times today was a meshugeneh, all right.
Pawlenty is the successful conservative governor of one of the most liberal states in the union -- as if Ronald Reagan had been elected in Sweden. One explanation is his disarming, beer-sharing niceness, which is among Minnesota's main exports to the nation (exception: the seething Sen. Al Franken).This tells us that, out of 100 U.S. senators, Al Franken was the only one who gave a damn enough about rape victim Jamie Leigh Jones, a former KBR employee, to ensure that she received her proverbial day in court. If that qualifies as “seething,” then we should have plenty more of it.
Gerson continues (from the preceding paragraph)…
If the problem is deficits, Pawlenty believes he is the solution. From 1960 to 2002, state spending in Minnesota increased by an average of 21 percent every two years. As governor, Pawlenty has held the growth of spending to just over 2 percent annually. Last year, he cut state spending in real terms -- the first time that has happened in 150 years. "We cut everything except public safety and K through 12 education," he says. "We changed the entitlement structure." All while moving Minnesota off the list of the top 10 most heavily taxed states.I can’t think of a word to describe how funny it is that Gerson utterly ignores the profligate fiscal waste of Reagan’s term in office when comparing Pawlenty to him, to the point where, after Reagan’s legendary 1981 tax cut, he raised taxes not once, but twice (here).
Gerson also tells us the following (I know I’m going backwards in Gerson’s column, but there’s a method to my madness here)…
"A few days ago," (Pawlenty) relates, "I was having breakfast with my wife, my 91-year-old mother-in-law and daughters, 17 and 13. On TV there was a news report about the financial situation in Greece. Out of the blue, my 13-year-old said, 'This is going to be us pretty soon.' I almost dropped my fork. This is an eighth-grader."Oh yeah, this tells us more about that moment from the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate. And as is just about always the case, it involves something Carter was indeed mocked for at the time, though he was proved to be prescient later (also, I’m ignoring Pawlenty’s comparison to Greece on purpose; he should brush up on Paul Krugman before he decides to open his mouth on that topic).
It sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter in 1980, telling the much-mocked story of a discussion on nuclear proliferation with his 13-year-old daughter, Amy.
For you see, Reagan eventually took up the cause of nuclear proliferation himself, to the point where, as noted here, he obtained “a scaled-back settlement involving the reduction of intermediate-range nuclear forces was reached in 1987” with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev (I would argue that Reagan did this out of political expediency due to Iran-Contra fallout, but the point is that he did it all the same).
And I don’t see why Pawlenty is considered to be so great, maybe because the Repugs have no one better to offer. As noted here, he was on John McCain’s “short list” to be veep in 2008 before a certain moose-hunting former Alaska governor got the nod instead. However, Pawlenty is a tried-and-true Repug in the sense that he vetoed all 34 bills from the state congress, controlled by the Democrats, including an increase in the gasoline tax to pay for bridge repairs after the I-35W collapse, and he refused to take Project Vote Smart’s National Political Awareness test, for what it’s worth.
Oh, and who can forget this utterly charming moment from Pawlenty during the CPAC brown shirt gathering in which he told the assembled lemmings that they should act like Elin Woods and take a nine-iron and knock the window out of big government, or something?
And before I let this go, I should bring you the following item, as long as I'm on the subject; perhaps in a tribute to the fiscal irresponsibility of its namesake, the Ronald Reagan building in California is now up for sale to help pay down the state’s indebtedness.
Tee hee hee…
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