Santorum tells Obama how to be a role model for African-Americans: Take your wife to a bar and have a shot.

By Amanda Terkel on Jun 2, 2009 at 3:42 pm

Last night on Fox News, former Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick Santorum jumped on a popular right-wing meme and criticized President Obama for taking his wife on a date to New York City for dinner and a Broadway show. Santorum said that Obama is a “role model…whether he likes it or not, in the African-American community.” He then told Obama to act like a role model and…take his wife “down to the corner bar and have a drink, a shot and a beer”:

And you have an African-American community, particularly in the poor inner city areas, we’re looking at out of wedlock birthrates in three quarters to 75 percent (sic) of children being born out of wedlock. Marriage is an institution that’s a bridge too far for too many African-American woman and is not desirable among African-American males.

Here we have a president of the United States who says that marriage is cool. You have respect for your wife, and you treat her with the respect and dignity that she deserves. And she is part of this team. And it’s not just part of professional team, but it’s also part of a personal, romantic team. I think that’s all great. So I think it’s important that he keeps having his date night. [...]

I think he has to realize that flying to New York is…self-indulgent. Go down to the corner bar and have a drink, a shot and a beer. It does not matter where you go with your wife, is that it’s with your wife.

Steve Benen writes, “I’m not sure which part of this is the most ridiculous — Santorum’s condescending attitude, his errors about African-American families, his apparent belief that he’s qualified to give dating advice to the president, or the fact that this discredited former senator continues to be a fixture at major news outlets.”

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Security

The President Should Drop The Phrase ‘Muslim World’

By Peter Juul, Guest Blogger on Jun 2, 2009 at 3:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

barack_obama_thumb This Thursday, President Obama gives a much-anticipated speech at Cairo University in Egypt. The president himself is billing his speech as an “occasion to deliver a broader message about how the United States can change for the better its relationship with the Muslim world.” Outside observers and commentators have concurred with this assessment in order to deliver their own prescriptions or engage in handwringing over the speech’s content.

Despite differences, it seems that all parties agree that there is a “Muslim world” that President Obama can speak to. But as Parag Khanna pointed out last April, there has been no “Muslim world” in the sense of a unitary politico-cultural entity since the Middle Ages. Indeed, people of Muslim background and ancestry are one of the most diverse groups in the world in terms of geography, ethnicity, and politics. Populations of Muslim background and ancestry stretch from the United States to Indonesia and from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. It makes little sense to lump such a diverse group of people into a monolithic “Muslim world.” As Khanna noted, “Speaking to all Muslims is speaking to none of them.”

Ironically enough, President Obama recognizes this fact. In an interview with the BBC previewing his trip to the Middle East and Europe, the president acknowledged, “There are actually many sides to this. Because one of the misperceptions about the Muslim community is that it’s somehow monolithic, setting aside differences between Shia and Sunni.

The Muslim country that I lived in when I was a child, Indonesia, obviously, is very different from Pakistan, very different from Saudi Arabia. And so we have to also recognize that there are going to be differences based on national identity, and not just faith.

Better yet, we need to recognize that there’s considerable political, religious, and social diversity within Muslim-majority countries just as there is diversity within our own. Making all people of Muslim background into religious automata, as the “Muslim world” formula does, is both demeaning and counterproductive.

Lumping diverse people into one box harms U.S. national security interests. First, as Khanna points out, it reinforces the “archaic Islamist fantasies” of Osama bin Laden and other global terror groups. The United States really shouldn’t be in the business of doing the intellectual heavy lifting of its enemies. Moreover, it makes it more difficult to see people of Muslim background as human beings with diverse needs, wants, and hopes -– not all of which are religious, as the “Muslim world” framework implies.

Rather than delivering an address to the “Muslim world” in Cairo, President Obama should acknowledge the diversity that exists within that construct. He should pledge, as President Kennedy did over 45 years ago, to make the world safe for that diversity.

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Climate Progress

Must-see TV on ABC tonight — “Earth 2100: Is this the Final Century of our Civilization?”

By Joe Romm on Jun 2, 2009 at 3:34 pm

Tonight at 9 pm on ABC, “Bob Woodruff explores what might be the worst case scenario for civilization.”

Hurray for the mainstream media exploring the worst-case scenario aka Hell and High Water! I am very interested in your thoughts on this show — before and after. One of the most commented on posts of this year was “How likely is it that Global Warming will destroy human civilization within the next century?”

You can see video excerpts and viewer submissions on what looks to be an excellent website:

Experts say over the next hundred years the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results….

“If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert,” says John P. Holdren, science advisor to President Obama. “We will indeed drive the car over the cliff“….

“A few hundred years down the line, they’ll look back and say the dark ages began with the twenty-first century,” says E. O. Wilson, an award-winning evolutionary biologist and professor at Harvard University.

Here’s more on the two scenarios the show lays out for humanity’s future:

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Yglesias

The War on Poverty: Now With Demographic Details

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 2, 2009 at 3:14 pm

Brendan Nyhan sends me a link to this chart which shows the changes in poverty rate in more detail than the graph I posted this morning.

As this makes clear, the big sustained drop in poverty has been among senior citizens. And I think that should be no surprise as Medicare is the largest and most sustained Great Society program. The scope of Social Security was also expanded a lot during the 1950s and I believe it was made more generous during the 1960s. It also seems that you can’t claim any substantial Great Society success in terms of reducing the poverty rate among working-age people, aged 18-65. For kids, it looks to me like you had some meaningful progress that’s since been partially reversed by the changing demographics (for ideas on how to create new reductions in child poverty, check out CAP’s Half in Ten program).

So to be charitable to critics of the “war on poverty,” I think you can say that even though the Kennedy/Johnson years were a big success in terms of reducing poverty, the specific initiatives undertaken by the Office of Economic Opportunity were not at the forefront of this success.

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Climate Progress

A useful summary of Waxman-Markey

By Joe Romm on Jun 2, 2009 at 2:56 pm

The Energy and Commerce Committee finally released a summary (here) of the American Clean Energy and Security Act as reported by the Committee on May 21 by a vote of 33 to 25. Here are the key provisions:

Require electric utilities to meet 20% of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020.
Invest in new clean energy technologies and energy efficiency, including energy efficiency and renewable energy ($90 billion in new investments by 2025), carbon capture and sequestration ($60 billion), electric and other advanced technology vehicles ($20 billion), and basic scientific research and development ($20 billion).
Mandate new energy-saving standards for buildings, appliances, and industry.
Reduce carbon emissions from major U.S. sources by 17% by 2020 and over 80% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels. Complementary measures in the legislation, such as investments in preventing tropical deforestation, will achieve significant additional reductions in carbon emissions.
Protect consumers from energy price increases. According to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, the reductions in carbon pollution required by the legislation will cost American families less than a postage stamp per day.

The clean energy investments are based on EPA’s estimate of likely allowance cost, which strike me as maybe 25% high. Yes, the CCS funding is too high (and the 2020 target is still too low). The renewable energy standard is also too weak, but establishing any energy efficiency standard is important. I will do a separate post on the building standards, since they are actually pretty impressive.

Here are extended excerpts of the longer summary, which provide a pretty good guide to a bill that, if it becomes law, would lead to a clean energy revolution that replaces most of our existing energy infrastructure over the next few decades:

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Economy

Finding A Better Way To Evaluate Teacher Effectiveness

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 2, 2009 at 2:55 pm

blackboard The New York Times has a good piece today on the challenges facing Education Secretary Arne Duncan as he goes about trying to reform our busted education system. As Chicago schools chief, Duncan’s claim to fame was closing down ineffective schools and reconstituting them as smaller institutions under new management. Duncan is evidently set to “persuade scores of local districts” around the country to do the same.

Of course, this approach causes some problems, namely with the teachers that are dismissed when a school shuts down. One of the goals of a school closure is to provide an opportunity to rehire effective teachers while letting the ineffective ones go, but this is much easier said than done. For instance:

The Chicago contract gives tenured teachers in schools shut down for low performance 10 months to be rehired by their reconstituted school’s new leader or by another Chicago principal, after which they lose their job. About 8 in 10 find jobs at other Chicago schools…Contracts in many other cities give teachers who lose positions more extensive rights, which could make school makeovers harder, experts said.

And it’s not only difficult to get rid of ineffective teachers, but as new report from The New Teacher Project shows, its difficult to even come to a determination regarding which teachers are effective, because of shoddy evaluation systems in most schools:

In districts that use binary evaluation ratings (generally “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory”), more than 99 percent of teachers receive the satisfactory rating. Districts that use a broader range of rating options do little better; in these districts, 94 percent of teachers receive one of the top two ratings and less than 1 percent are rated unsatisfactory.

As Andrew Rotherham at Eduwonk put it, “despite all the rhetoric about how important teachers are and despite the importance of people in a labor-intensive field like education, the lack of systematic attention to teacher effectiveness in education is shocking.” Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that, of all the factors in the education system, “teachers have the greatest impact on student achievement.” Yet, when it comes to evaluation, most school systems just say that everyone is fine, which means that great teachers aren’t identified and emulated, while bad teachers aren’t forced to change their ways.

In a report examining policies to ensure that all students have access to effective teachers, CAP’s Robin Chait pointed to the Teacher Advancement Program — under which trained evaluators visit a teacher’s classroom four to six times a year — as a good model to use, adding that “evaluation information should then be used to inform a variety of policies related to teachers, such as compensation, retention and tenure.” In any case, Duncan’s plans won’t do much good if schools are closed and reopened without any way of knowing that the teachers are better.

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Politics

White Supremacist Group Posts Doctored Photo Of Sotomayor With KKK Hood

By Amanda Terkel on Jun 2, 2009 at 2:43 pm

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog notes that the Council of Conservative Citizens — a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “brazenly racist group” — has put up a doctored photo of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. In the picture, Sotomayor is wearing a KKK-type hood. On her robe is a raised fist and the words “La Raza”:

The right wing has been outraged over the fact that Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization. Last week, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo made a similar smear against Sotomayor and the group, calling it a “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses“:

If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

“La Raza,” in fact, translates as “the people,” not “the race.” ThinkProgress also spoke to an NCLR spokesperson who confirmed that the logo in the CCC photo is not affiliated with the organization in any way.

CCC has been courted by prominent conservatives such as former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has since renounced the organization. As Tom Edsall wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1998:

The CCC, which has strong ties to the old white Citizens Councils, is considered racist by conservatives and liberals. Many of the most prominent figures in the organization are proponents of preserving the white race and culture, which they see as under assault by immigration, intermarriage and growing numbers of Hispanic Americans.

In the spring 1992 newsletter, provided by a Dallas man, Ed Sebasta, who has followed the organization’s activities, Lott is pictured speaking to the group with its banner in the background.

In his speech, Lott, according to the newsletter, called the Citizen Informer, warns against the forces supporting government spending: “We need more meetings like this across the nation” to offset these liberal pressures. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries.”

Last week, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke also embraced the position that Sotomayor is racist, while claiming that he, on the other hand, has “consistently supported true equal rights.”

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Media

Prestige Cross-Pollination

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 2, 2009 at 2:28 pm

I’ve complained a few times about the habit of distinguished economists using prestige acquired within their field to pass off sloppy work in other fields. Most recently, we saw Greg Mankiw take an interesting paper about the economics of taxing people based on height and turn it into some pretty half-assed moral philosophy. Something similar is going on with Martin Feldstein’s recent op-ed against the Waxman-Markey climate/energy bill.

As Dave Roberts explains, Feldstein’s characterization of the bill isn’t really correct and some of his economic analysis is debatable. But beyond that, the key point on which Feldstein’s argument turns actually has nothing whatsoever to do with economics. Instead, the key move is the observation that US emissions curbs will do little to save the world unless emissions are also curbed in the key developing economies.

This, however, is not a point that anyone disputes. Feldstein’s contribution is the hypothesis that it would be better to forestall any domestic US action until such time as an all-encompassing global agreement can be reached. Whether you think this is right or wrong, this is clearly a proposition about international relations and the domestic politics of China and India rather than a proposition about economic analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill. And it’s not a proposition that anyone actually working in the field of climate policy or diplomatic relations with China seems to agree with.

Obviously, as a blogger I’m not one to say that people should need to know what they’re talking about in order to speak. But real estate on the Washington Post op-ed page is a valuable commodity. Presumably the reason the Post is interested in Feldstein is his expertise in economics. So there’s no reason for them to be running an op-ed whose key contention has nothing to do with economics.

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Politics

Gibbs: McHugh and Obama ‘both don’t think [DADT] is working for this country right now.’

By Ali Frick on Jun 2, 2009 at 1:56 pm

Today, President Obama named Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) as his nominee to be Secretary of the Army. Though neither Obama nor McHugh discussed the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today said McHugh shares Obama’s commitment to repealing the ban, which isn’t “working for this country right now”:

It’s obvious from those statements and other statements that Congressman McHugh has made that he and the president are in agreement on changing the policy they both don’t think is working for this country right now. And it’s a priority of the president’s.

It’s not clear to which statements Gibbs is referring. McHugh has kept his personal views on the issue rather quiet, though he criticized the military and the Defense Department for refusing to testify on the issue. Watch it:

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Health

Megyn Kelly And Financing Health Care Reform With Higher Taxes

By Igor Volsky on Jun 2, 2009 at 1:50 pm

This morning, during an interview with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly argued that Americans don’t want to pay higher taxes for universal health care coverage:

We get emails from our viewers all the time. They don’t want higher taxes! They don’t want any more. They don’t want you to tax their health care benefits. They don’t want a Value Added Tax, a sales tax on their goods. Universal health care sounds good in theory but they don’t want to be taxed even more than they already are.

Watch it:

As Peter Orszag and a good number of bloggers explained, “health reform is the best chance to put costs on a sustainable path over the long term. But over the short term, it takes money. And there’s no clear congressional consensus over where to find the money.” But Americans are more willing to finance health care reform through higher taxation than Megyn Kelly suggests. The most recent polling shows that 47 percent “prefer a health care reform plan that raises taxes in order to provide health insurance to all Americans”; 47 percent do not.

Matt Yglesias is right to suggest that “the problem is that even if you have a senator who’s willing to raise taxes in the face of 47-47 public opinion, you have an additional hurdle when the subject turns to any particular tax,” but I would also argue that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes for health care security. Pay a little more for your beer and protect yourself from astronomical health care bills. Makes sense to me!

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