The academic performance of millions of children is going unreported because “many schools with small minority populations don’t have to keep track of how their minority subgroups are performing” under No Child Left Behind.
Sen. Lamar Alexander David Horowitz
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) delivered the keynote speech at the Students for Academic Freedom conference, a group started by right-wing activist David Horowitz. Alexander heaped praise upon Horowitz, calling him a “geniune, dedicated, experienced, and [un]usually successful movement leader.”
A look at some of the things this “leader” has said:
Guns don’t kill black people, other blacks do. [Salon, 8/16/99]
Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. [FrontPage, 1/3/01]
The so-called ‘peace movement’ today is led by the same hate-America radicals who supported America’s totalitarian enemies during the Cold War”¦They are the friends in deed of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. [FrontPage, 4/7/03
Now Horowitz is taking on professors. His new book lists 101 professors he considers “dangerous” based on false allegations, smears, and manipulations of fact. Last week he called one student who questioned his conclusions “deaf and brain-dead” and told another, “You do not have the mental capacity to understand.”
Truly a man worthy of a senator’s salute.
For more information on Horowitz and his misguided campaign, check out Campus Progress’s Horowitz Watch.
Is Covert Military Action in Iran ‘Under the CNN Line’?
Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner stirred interest last week by stating that “the decision has been made and military operations are under way” in Iran. In an interview yesterday, Gardiner discussed a similar series of covert military operations that occured in Iraq in 2002 — months before either the full-scale invasion in March 2003 or even the passage of the Congressional Iraq resolution in October 2002.
Then, in mid-2002, U.S. and British forces “doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq…in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war.” The bombings received scant attention from the traditional media at the time, but that was by design. According to Gardiner, Rumsfeld had told the military, “you can begin to bomb Iraq, but don’t let it appear on CNN“:
COL. SAM GARDINER: Well, the evidence is beginning to accumulate that a decision has already been made to use military force in Iran. Now, let me do a historical thing, and then I’ll tell you what the current evidence is. We now know that the decision and the actual actions to bomb Iraq occurred in July of 2002, before we ever had a U.N. resolution or before the Congress ever authorized it. It was an operation called Southern Focus, and the only guidance that the military — or the guidance that the military had from Rumsfeld was keep it below the CNN line. His specific words. The evidence that we’ve already –
AMY GOODMAN: Keep it below what?
COL. SAM GARDINER: The CNN line. In other words, I don’t want this to appear on CNN, okay? That was his guidance to the military, you can begin to bomb Iraq, but don’t let it appear on CNN.
Reports by Seymour Hersh and others indicate that U.S. forces are already working in Iran: marking targets, “working with minority groups” and exiles, and “encourag[ing] ethnic tensions.” Will traditional media outlets avert their eyes again?
Read the full interview HERE.
How do I love marriage? Let me count the ways.
Coloradans for Marriage is a right-wing group “pushing an anti-gay amendment in their state. To support their cause, they’ve created a list of all the great things about marriage,” mcjoan writes at DailyKos. “It’s, um, a bit sparse.”
Rice Calls Brutal Oil-Rich Dictator a ‘Good Friend’
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, two weeks ago, lamenting how energy politics ‘warp’ foreign policy:
“I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as secretary of state than the way that the politics of energy is — I will use the word ‘warping’ — diplomacy around the world,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 5.
Condoleezza Rice, last week, sharing a photo-op with Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Nguema is “one of the most brutal, most corrupt and unreconstructed dictators in the world”; he also controls the third-largest oil reserves in Africa:
The Washington Post noted this morning, “The meeting with Mr. Obiang was presumably a reward for his hospitable treatment of U.S. oil firms, though we cannot be sure since the State Department declined our invitation to comment.”
Unfortunately, Rice’s backslapping with a vicious dictator is nothing new:
In 2003, the Bush administration reopened the embassy [in Equatorial Guinea], a move sharply criticized by human rights groups as a favor to the oil companies and to Obiang. Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, decries current U.S. policy, saying that Bush administration officials are “big cheerleaders for the government — and it’s an awful government.”
Read more in this excellent Mother Jones profile.
National Review’s Kurtz: The Goal in Iraq is ‘Proof of Resolve Against Iran’ Not ‘Peace and Democracy’
This morning, The National Review’s Stanley Kurtz explained the real purpose of U.S. operations in Iraq:
We need to see peace and democracy in Iraq is icing on the cake. The real goal is the proof of resolve against Iran and others. If the public sees that, it might change its view of what’s important and what success means.
So 2377 U.S. troops (and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians) have died, not to accomplish anything meaningful in Iraq, but to “prove” something to Iran and other countries.
This is the kind of warped perspective that’s necessary to justify the President’s approach. It doesn’t matter how unsuccessful the strategy is, “staying the course” is an end unto itself.
McClellan’s replacement?
The WSJ’s Washington Wire says it may be Dan Senor, who was formerly spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. (A month ago, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes said Senor “would be a perfect successor.”)
$484,475.
Campaign funds Tom DeLay raised in the six weeks before he announced his retirement from Congress, bringing his total cash reserve to $1.4 million. (DeLay can now use that money to pay for his legal bills.)
Rumsfeld: War Critics Being Manipulated By Zarqawi and Bin Laden’s ‘Media Committees’
Yesterday on Rush Limbaugh, embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that those who criticize the Iraq war are being manipulated by terrorists, including Zarqawi and bin Laden, through the U.S. media:
There have always been people who have opposed wars…I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.
They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it.
So, according to Rumsfeld, the media isn’t just failing to report the “good news” from Iraq, it is being actively manipulated by terrorists. Those that are critical of the war are simply buying into the propaganda.
The only way to circumvent the terrorist-influenced U.S. media, apparently, is to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
New OMB Director nominated.
President Bush has tapped Rob Portman, the current U.S. trade director (since U.S. trade efforts have been such a smashing success lately).
