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Thursday, July 17, 2008
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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Interesting Editorial in the Washington Post
The Washington Post criticized Obama's Iron Timetable.
Rick Garnett & Barack Obama
I suggested in an e-mail to Rick that his posting earlier today might be misleading: Jonathan Alter (Newsweek) said that Barack Obama should stand up to the teachers' unions, not that he should support school vouchers. (Standing up to the teachers' unions doesn't entail support for school vouchers.)
Well, it now appears that Sen Obama has stood up to the teachers' unions. According to the (editorially-conservative) New York Sun (here):
Mr. Obama ... ha[s] aroused a mix of excitement from those who push for extensive change in public schools and skepticism from traditional union members who oppose the so-called reform policies, such as charter schools and plans to tie teacher pay to student test scores....
Mr. Obama ... raised concerns when he endorsed the idea of "merit pay" at a convention last year for the other national teachers union, the National Education Association.
In his address to the NEA this year, he acknowledged that the idea "wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year," but vowed to stand by it, eliciting some boos.
He also stood by the idea in his speech to the AFT convention yesterday, which he made via satellite from San Diego.
"When our educators succeed, I won't just talk about how great they are; I will reward them for it," Mr. Obama said. He listed several cases in which districts could give teachers a salary increase, including if they serve as mentors; if they learn new skills, and if they "consistently excel in the classroom."
Those at the AFT convention said that no boos followed the remarks, though some union members later said they were concerned by them.
"That was the one statement that raised our eyebrows," the president of the AFT's Los Angeles chapter, A.J. Duffy, said yesterday. "Our question is what does that mean, 'who consistently do well in classrooms,' and based upon whose guidelines? Is it a principal, a test score? We're going to continue to have dialogue with him."
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Obama: No vouchers
I guess Sen. Obama's much-remarked "move to the center" has some limits. After suggesting, in February, that he was not necessarily hostile to school choice, he has now made it clear, in a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, that he opposes school vouchers (including the Washington D.C. program, which enjoys bipartisan support, including from the District's mayor). In my view (for what *that* is worth), he should have listened to Jonathan Alter (no right-winger), in this recent Newsweek piece, and taken on the teacher unions. It's time to turn the page.
Alveda King to NAACP: Protect Life!
Bill McGurn's column, here, is worth reading.
"I remember when I was pregnant and considering a third abortion," she says. "I went to Daddy King [her grandfather and Martin Luther King's father]. He told me, 'that's a baby, not a blob of tissue.' Unfortunately, 14 million African-Americans are not here today because of legalized abortion. It's as if a plague swept through America's cities and towns and took one of every four of us."
A new anti-death-penalty organization
A little while back, I blogged about a new anti-death-penalty organization, based in Indiana, called INCase. Here's a news story about the organization, which was started by a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame. I like the organization's "conservative" approach, i.e., urge citizens to reject the death penalty as a wasteful, failed government program. (Disclosure: I'm going to be on the Board.)
Ape rights
There has been much buzz about Spain's decision to grant limited rights to apes, much of it favorable. (Stephen Colbert, it bears noting, was skeptical, insisting the new law better not give apes "the right not to wear a tuxedo and roller skates.") Two pieces appeared in the New York Times, and William Saletan chimes in on Slate. An excerpt:
Secular humanists reject this dogma [that humans have souls but animals do not]. We understand that there's something wonderful and uniquely worthy of respect in the power, richness, and subtlety of the human mind. But to us, the soul doesn't explain these wonders. It describes them. That's one reason why the destruction of human embryos doesn't torment us the way it torments pro-lifers. We don't believe in ensoulment at conception. We believe in the gradual development of mental capacities.
This puts us in an awkward position. We call ourselves egalitarians, yet we deny the equality of conceived humans. We believe that a woman deserves more respect than a fetus. A 26-week fetus deserves more respect than a 12-week fetus. A 12-week fetus deserves more consideration than a zygote. We discriminate according to ability. This is also why ape rights appeals to us. It's not a claim of equality among all animals. It's a claim that apes resemble us in ways that insects don't.
This whole issue raises lots of questions for me: Is a belief in the human soul secularly accessible? Does it need to be to justify the rejection of animal rights? Can we embrace animal rights without embracing the corresponding belief that rights are simply a function of demonstrated mental capacity? Does recognizing the ape's rights make it less likely that we'll recognize the rights of a severely disabled infant (much less fetus)? My own initial reaction is that, while I would support legislation aimed at minimizing the unnecessary suffering of apes (or other animals whose highly developed mental capacities make them especially vulnerable to pain or loneliness), I would prefer that the legislation be framed in terms of humans' stewardship responsibilities, rather than in terms of animals as rights-bearing agents. Thoughts?
Monday, July 14, 2008
Prayer and the Irish Jesuits
Many of you may know of the wonderful website managed by Irish Jesuits. http://www.sacredspace.ie/
Here is the initial reflection for the week (which is followed each day by a series of observations to meditate upon and a reading from the gospel with brief commentary)
Something to think and pray about this week
Something to think and pray about this week
There was a strong vein of anti-clericalism in Jesus to which he was
not afraid to give utterance. He denounced the scribes and Pharisees
who laid heavy burdens on others but did not move a finger to lift them
themselves. He spoke of hypocrites, of blind guides, of teachers who
cleaned the outside of the cup but left the inside filthy, worrying
more about external observance of the law than about the movements in
people's hearts. The clerical establishment was furious, and in the
end, on Calvary, thought itself vindicated.
So we have learned to
combine reverence and love for the Church with a cool appraisal of its
officials. We, the people of God, are the church. As the Spanish
proverb has it. ‘We are the people and wisdom will die with us.' The
clergy, religious, bishops, have their part to play, and we need to
keep them up to scratch. We are not astonished when we find traces of
the seven deadly sins even in those who profess greater piety. All
through the centuries the church has had this job of criticising and
reforming itself. But critics today, like the Jews who surrounded the
adulterous woman, need to heed Jesus' warning, ‘Let the one who is
without sin among you cast the first stone.' (John 8:3-11)
The Bush Administration and War Crimes, Revisited
[from dotCommonweal:]
The not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy…
July 14, 2008, 2:59 pm
Posted by Grant Gallicho
…to legitimate torture. Read Andrew Bacevich’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side.
In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
Our editorial “War Crimes?” just went live on the main site.
[Don't neglect to read the editorial just mentioned.]
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