Dear Commons Community,

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, House Majority Leader John Boehner commented on his colleagues in the United States Congress.  To quote:

“We got 435 members. It’s just a slice of America, it really is. We got some of the smartest people in the country who serve here, and some of the dumbest. We got some of the best people you’d ever meet, and some of the raunchiest. We’ve got ’em all.”

Regarding President Obama:

As for the president, “he and I get along fine. But boy do we have big differences.”

Mr. Boehner turns to the debt ceiling struggle of six months ago: “We had a little rough spot last summer. I would argue he moved the goal posts, and blew up negotiations about the debt deal.”

Congress needs “to show . . . that in spite of our differences we can find common ground to do the work of the American people. But I’ll just say this. There’s nobody who tried harder last year with the president to do the right thing. There’s nobody who walked further out on a limb than I did to try to get him to do the right thing. And one of my greatest disappointments was not getting an agreement.”

He is talking the talk.  I hope he can walk the walk.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Tom Friedman has an interesting column today entitled, Pass the Books.  Hold the Oil.   He refers to “a study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump…?”

The results indicate:

“that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)”

So hold the oil, and pass the books, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores.    Schleicher concluded:

“knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”

A lot to think about!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Sarah Palin dismissed the HBO film “Game Change” — airing publicly for the first time on Saturday night — as unimportant.

In an email to ABC News, Palin said her “family has the right priorities and knows what really matters,” according to the Chicago Tribune.  Both Palin and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have said they won’t watch the made-for-tv movie that takes a look inside the behind-the-scenes drama of the 2008 campaign. McCain said “it’ll be a cold day in Gila Bend, Arizona” when he views the film.

“Game Change” director Jay Roach said the film humanizes the GOP duo. In a recent interview with CNN, Roach said he wished the two would watch the movie.

“I wish they’d see the film because it has a very evenhanded tone to it, in trying to get the story right and allow anybody with any prejudices against the main characters to go past the media iconography and see them as human beings,” Roach said. “They are human beings who are trying to do what they think is right. They have strengths and they have weaknesses.”

I watch the film last night and thought it was an even portrayal and not a “hit job” on Sarah Palin. I also thought that John McCain came off rather well.  Movie critics have been mostly positive.   I thought Julianne Moore (Palin), Ed Harris (McCain) and Woody Harrelson (Steve Schmidt) played the lead characters very well.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If you are not doing anything special tonight (Saturday, March 10, 2012) and you are at all interested in the 2008 presidential election, you might want to consider Game Change, a made for TV movie on HBO (9:00pm Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time).    It is based on a best-selling book of the same title by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

A New York Times review states:

“Game Change is an engaging HBO docudrama …told through the eyes of the advisers who developed the losing strategy of Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. In this iteration Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson), the senior adviser, is the war hero, and Senator McCain (Ed Harris) comes off as a crusty old soldier who follows orders but can’t help grousing.

There are some cracks in Julianne Moore’s portrayal of Governor Palin: she leaves out the sexy sassiness.  But considering the challenge — not to mention the incomparable Tina Fey parody — Ms. Moore plays the candidate with surprising finesse. This is a sharp-edged but not unsympathetic portrait of a flawed heroine, colored more in pity than in admiration. Ms. Palin’s detractors will consider it generous, and her advocates have already dismissed it as a liberal smear job…

Senator McCain, though convincingly played by Mr. Harris, is a secondary character, decent and sympathetic to his running mate’s plight but preoccupied with his own problems. Ms. Palin dominates as a disarming egotist whose presumption is balanced by charisma and animal cunning — and in this film, as in life, she has the last smirk.

At the end of “Game Change” top aides watch Senator McCain deliver his concession speech with Governor Palin at his side. “Still think she’s fit for office?” Mr. Schmidt mutters bitterly to Mr. Davis.

“Who cares?” Mr. Davis replies. “In 48 hours no one will even remember who she is.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an interesting article on the nature of the repayment of federal bailout (aka TARP) money by the banks and financial services industry. There has been a lot of grumbling about the government bailing out banks during the financial crisis especially among the Republican presidential candidates.  We could at least take some comfort in the idea that the government has turned a profit on this bailout.  The only problem is, that profit comes from other taxpayer money — money that was meant to spur banks to develop communities and help small businesses. Instead they’ve used it to develop and help themselves.

The article explains:

“All told, including dividend, interest and other payments, U.S. banks have repaid the government $211.5 billion under the Capital Purchase Program (CPP), the first phase of the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), according to a report Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog. That’s more than the $204.9 billion the banks initially got under TARP.

$211.5 billion minus $204.9 billion equals profit, right?

But 48 percent of the banks that have repaid the CPP used money they’d gotten from other federal programs, according to the GAO report. Those programs include the Community Development Capital Initiative — another TARP program — and the Small Business Lending Fund, a program designed to encourage lending to small businesses. Both of those programs have more favorable borrowing terms for the banks than the original CPP…

It may be unfair to quibble with the Treasury Department’s claim that the government is making money on TARP. After all, the bailout was not meant to be a get-rich-quick scheme. It was meant to stop the financial sector from collapsing into a giant black hole that was going to suck the global economy inside of it.

But it is worth remembering that the banking sector is where it is today thanks to the good graces of American taxpayers, who are still on the hook if these banks can’t pay back the money they’ve borrowed to stay afloat.”

OR if they continue to use other federal grant programs to pay back their original loans. This is akin to a Ponzi scheme?

It is time for Occupy Wall Street to start up again!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher… has been conducted annually since 1984.  The survey explores how teachers, parents and schools are working together to promote student learning and healthy development in the context of reduced budgets, reallocation of resources, and continued attention to improving teaching and learning. The latest survey was conducted in November 2011 and the results were released yesterday.

Among the major findings from this latest survey:

“teachers are less satisfied with their careers and that in the past two years there has been a significant decline in teachers’ satisfaction with their profession. In one of the most dramatic findings of the report, teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher measured job satisfaction two years ago, now reaching the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey series in more than two decades…

This decline in teacher satisfaction is coupled with large increases in the number of teachers who indicate that they are likely to leave teaching for another occupation and in the number who do not feel their jobs are secure.”

The MetLife Report is required reading for anyone interested in the state of American education.  And congratulations to all the federal, state and local education policymakers who have contributed to this demoralization.

Tony

http://www.metlife.com/assets/cao/contributions/foundation/american-teacher/MetLife-Teacher-Survey-2011.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=l2RMnmjQynM

Dear Commons Community,

Over the next few days we will hear a lot about solar flares as they reach Earth and possibly disrupt communications.  Here is a five-minute video on solar flares from NASA with some really neat images.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday Apple announced a new iPad with a high-definition screen, faster wireless connection and several other refinements.

The new iPad is scheduled to go on sale March 16 for a starting price of $499, unchanged from the last generation of iPads. The product has a screen that provides a comparable level of clarity to the iPhone’s “retina display,” with higher-resolution than conventional high-definition televisions, according to Apple executives.

And in a sign that Apple intends to more seriously protect its market share in the tablet market, the company said it would continue to sell its second generation iPad, dropping the price to $399 from $499.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Charles Murray, controversial author (Bell Curve,  Coming Apart) who is affiliated with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times entitled, Narrowing the New Class Divide.  He provides four suggestions for narrowing the gap between the rich and working classes as follows:

“For one thing, we should get rid of unpaid internships. The children of the new upper class hardly ever get real jobs during summer vacation. Instead, they get internships at places like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (where I work) or a senator’s office. It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children…

We can also drop the SAT in college admissions decisions. The test has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs. Instead, elite colleges should require achievement tests in specific subjects for which students can prepare the old-fashioned way, by hitting the books.

Another step would replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action. This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber.

Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.”

Dr. Murray has a penchant for the provocative.  The New York Times has given him the space to do so here.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Super Tuesday has come and gone and nothing has really changed in the Republican primary for president.  Yesterday’s results can be considered a tie.  Mitt Romney won in a number of states such Ohio (narrowly), Massachusetts, and Alaska;  Ron Santorum won in Tennessee and Oklahoma;  and Newt Gingrich won in Georgia.  So basically the primary goes on.

Mitt Romney is still the front-runner but it seems clear that he is unable at least at this time to receive the support of the majority of Republicans who vote in primaries and caucuses for his candidacy.

The Huffington Post has an interactive map showing all the results.

Tony