Deal with the Devil?

This is an interesting story from Afghanistan. I will be very interested to see if this deal with Taliban works out. The fact that the area is peaceful now allows me some optimism, but I doubt that anything will keep the Taliban from sometime soon fighting for power again.

Kristof and Iraq: A Follow-Up

Nicholas Kristof wrote a really good follow-up post to his column about coverage of the Iraq War (yes, Kirstof has a blog). That column has forced me to do a lot of thinking about how I interpreted news from Iraq after the invasion.

My original position was that reporters tend to report more about violence than they do stability and that this gives an overly negative view of the war. Kristof does recognize this, but here is what he says:

But that said, the basic narrative from reporters in Iraq in the last few years has been that security and sectarian violence is worsening, while the basic narrative from the administration has been that things are getter steadily better and that the reporters are exaggerating. To me, it sure looks as if the reporters got it right.

At the time I didn't trust that reporters were being unbiased. What I realize now is that maybe I should have had a little more faith that those covering the situation in Iraq would have reported that there was stability had it existed. Good journalists want to report accurately about the overall situation they are reporting on, and if they are talking about increased violence, I should probably be quicker to believe it.


Note: I replied to a comment on Kristof's post. I couldn't resist.

Have I Ever Been too Pessimistic?

In case you couldn’t tell, I have been thinking about Iraq a lot lately. I am having a lot of trouble reconciling my feelings and how they fit in with any policies I would want to propose. What I think it boils down to is when should we finally give up.

I don’t want to give up on Iraq, but I am finding it harder and harder these days to maintain any hope that there can be a decent outcome. We have done such a bad job at managing the war that it almost feels like there is nothing we can really do now to make up for it. My problem though lies in the guilt I feel. Since we have messed up so badly, I can’t feel comfortable leaving if the country is in shambles. At the same time though, history can clearly show us what happens when we think we can change something we cannot.

I have long disagreed with the comparisons to Vietnam simply because I thought they were more different than they were the same (for an interesting comparison of Iraq and Vietnam, read this NY Times opinion piece). In Vietnam we were fighting against determined nationalist forces. In Iraq we are standing between warring factions – the majority Shiites that realize their strength, the Sunnis who used to be in power and now see a situation where they get left out of sharing oil revenues, and Kurds who are looking for as much autonomy as possible. The better comparison in my mind is to Lebanon. But that comparison doesn’t project a better outcome.

I feel paralyzed because I cannot predict with any certainty what will happen to Iraq if we stay versus if we leave. I have to believe that things will be at least a little better if we stay, but that isn’t always the case. Many analysts predicted Vietnam would fall apart if we left, and it didn’t (Cambodia was a different story). But again, I don’t see this taking shape like Vietnam did. Lebanon was a disaster until the early 1990s. After Reagan pulled the Marines out, we basically let the country sort it out on their own. The peace there is a little tenuous, but it is far better than it was during the civil war. We can’t as easily leave and allow Iraq to go through ten years or so of civil war. We cannot turn our back on them like we did Lebanon because we created this situation.

In the end, I come back to the same conclusion that we need to stay. But at the same time, I don’t see an end to it. My bet is that we will stay a while longer, but end up pulling out in a year or two. But I get depressed thinking about how bad the country might be then and how much worse it will be after we are gone.

What makes me feel even worse is that there is talk of looking to Iran and Syria to help us out. While I don’t think ignoring them is productive, both countries have a history of manipulating weak countries for their own benefit. In Lebanon they have a common goal. But in Iraq, they are working on different sides. Each of the countries in the region have, “a dog in the fight,” but each supports different dogs. I cannot imagine that any country will be willing to do anything but look out for their own interests, no matter what we offer in return.

Basically, when I look into the future regarding Iraq, all I see is uncontrollable bloodshed with almost no reasonable options to stop it. My hope is that I am wrong, but I have lost almost all reasons to be optimistic. I wonder if those who were actually responsible for decision-making feel as guilty as I do.

Enlightenment?

This opinion contribution has some really good commentary on the secularist / modern enlightenment zealots and their war against religion. I may not be a member of the religious right, but I have no patience for the books out there now that are desperately trying to show the world that people who have faith in something other than science are delusional.

It's Not Your Fault

I never expected that Democrats would be doing this, but I guess I should have. Although blaming Iraqis for the state of the country isn’t the right thing to do, it is the politically expedient thing to do. If it is the fault of the Iraqis that the country is falling into a civil war, then Democrats should feel no guilt in pulling American troops out of the country. After all, despite the fact that many Democrat Senators and Congressmen voted in favor of the war, most claim that they didn’t really support it.

The facts are simple though, if you care to look. The administration has made a number of fatal flaws following the invasion that made a successful outcome almost impossible. To name a few; they came in with too few troops, showed contempt for the countries that wouldn’t invade with us which prevented them from wanting to help later on, disbanded the Iraqi army, did nothing to stop the looting or early insurgency, and did not seal the border to prevent foreign fighters. From day one, we did not create a stable situation in Iraq. Sunni insurgents killed Americans and Iraqis alike, and Shiites finally stopped being patient and decided to fight back. I don’t support that decision, but I am not sure that I blame them for it.

The fact is that we are at fault for the crisis in the country. Although I understand that the parliament cannot agree on anything and is largely ineffective, that isn’t why there is a problem. The problem is that violence was never controlled and people got tired of waiting for that to happen.

Here is the bottom line – blaming the Iraqis requires the assumption that they have, or at one point had, the capacity to stop the violence. The problem is that this assumption is very obviously wrong. We were the only ones that could have stopped the violence and improved the lives of Iraqis. But we failed miserably at that and therefore we should feel guilty. Our incompetence has ruined that country. Therefore, we should feel compelled to stay as long as we can to keep the violence as low as we can. If we choose to leave, we need to do some serious self-reflection and take credit for what we have done. Unfortunately, this is something politicians are usually incapable of.

Personality Matters

Until very recently I thought it was ridiculous that so many conservatives hate Hillary Clinton. I thought that if they were rational, they would easily see that she is far more moderate and would be far less dangerous to conservatism than someone like John Kerry, Barak Obama or someone in the mold of Howard Dean. I don’t know why it took me this long, but it finally dawned on me that personality should be important when making political decisions. This is something I recognized when it is in the affirmative, for example when looking at someone like John McCain or Barak Obama. But I never gave it enough credit when it was in the negative. If I am willing to vote for either McCain or Obama, neither of whom are exactly where I am on the political spectrum, then it is perfectly understandable for someone to oppose Hillary.

This doesn’t mean that I oppose Hillary. I think she would make a good president and depending on who she is running against, I would probably vote for her. But I do understand now that some people just don’t think she is a good person.

United Nations: What is it Good For?

Someone told me this weekend that they thought the United Nations is worthless and ineffective. I don’t necessarily disagree, but it made me wonder if he, or even if I, know what we want the United Nations to do. Like any legislative body, it is extremely slow to act and its members often make decisions in their own interests and not necessarily based on morality. But if there was some consensus on what we do want it to do, we could move it in a better direction and help it to become more effective. I think the biggest thing hindering the UN right now is that we don’t know what we really want from it.

Based on what I know, the UN most often defers to a state’s sovereignty. The internal affairs of a state are its own business. This might have been a good policy immediately following World War II (although even that is debatable), but it doesn’t fit now. In my opinion, the biggest problem facing our world is the treatment of groups within states. Genocide continues to be a problem that is ignored despite the commitment of states to take reasonable measures to stop it. There are also far too many people displaced from wars or famine, with governments that are incapable or unwilling to support them. In those situations, we need an international body that is willing to act to protect and defend these people.

The reality is that this change will not happen overnight. It is too easy for member states to turn away from these terrible situations and pretend that they are incapable of doing anything about it. As I read A Problem From Hell, I get depressed at how the world continues to fail in its moral obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves. We are great at showing regret long after the fact, but we never learn the lesson that true self-reflection leads to. The famous saying is, “Never again, again and again.”

We didn’t learn enough from the Holocaust to stop Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosivic, the Hutu’s in Rwanda or even the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed. We have never learned the lesson, and so our regret comes off as extremely hypocritical.

But I don’t want to focus entirely on genocide. Millions die or are displaced from civil wars every year. We should care about this. War torn regions in Africa or Southeast Asia should not be ignored because they are hard problems. President Kennedy once said, “We choose to do this and the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

I have been told during my rants that my position will never get me elected. Let me make something clear. My goal is not to get elected, but to change people’s minds. I want to make people think about their beliefs and understand the moral consequences of their positions. When we ignore major international problems, hundreds of thousands of people die. This should be just as enraging when it is Africans as it would be if it were Americans.

I did start this blog hoping there would be dialogue and debate. I want to know what other people think the United Nation’s role should be. I am calling for an end to what is now complete respect for state sovereignty. To me, this seems like an obvious solution to what ails the UN. To the others who think the UN isn’t useful, feel free to tell me what it should be doing.

For Macie and LEM

Kristof has done it again ($). This time though, it isn’t about genocide. His column is about early reporting of the Iraq War that described the violence and the potential for Civil War. I must be honest that I was also one of the people that ignored the early reports of escalating violence. I was desperate for Iraq to succeed because I wanted to see a relatively stable democracy develop in the Middle East. I hated the argument that Iraq was incapable of being a democracy and thought success here would prove that it could exist anywhere.

I need to give some credit where it is due, mostly to my friends that had said for a long time that this war was a mistake and that this would happen (Macie and LEM to name two). As soon as reports came out that Iraq was wrapped in violence, they brought this to my attention. And when they did, I told them they were ignoring the good reports and I said that things would settle down.

While I do admit that I was hesitant to hear the bad news even as it got worse, I still maintain that there were points when good management of the war could have made this more successful. I think if there had been more troops and we were able to maintain stability early on, we might have avoided the civil war that appears imminent. I must also recognize that part of the reason I cling to that belief is that I am an optimist, and I don’t want to admit that democracies cannot be helped along by foreign involvement. I believe that everyone wants some level of freedom and no one really wants (or needs) an oppressive regime like Saddam’s.

With that said, we do need to learn something from this example. Creating a new democracy is obviously a difficult mission and can end up with us leaving the country worse that when we found it. We must be prepared to use significant troop presence over long periods of time if we are to be successful. Since we are probably not prepared to do this, we should avoid nation-building scenerios like this one in the future.

What I am afraid of though is that this (similar to Mogadishu) becomes proof of why we should not ever get involved in other country’s affairs. Iraq was clearly a mistake, but there are other situations that could use international intervention and will not require long term troop commitment (Darfur, Somalia, Lebanon / Palestine). The Middle East (and Africa) has a violent past and present, but there is good we can do to protect defenseless victims and help the region move forward.

Genocide - Always so Controversial

There have been some interesting, although heated, debates recently about America’s role in stopping genocide. In a column from last week ($), Nicholas Kristof took a reader to task for suggesting that we should deal with domestic problems before fixing problems around the world. Since then, I have had similar arguments with family. The view expressed by the reader is not uncommon.

If someone says that they don’t get involved in that debate because they choose other issues that are more important to them, I can’t really find fault with that. There are so many problems in this world that choosing to fight any of them is worthwhile and noble. We all have to follow our passion.

What I do find fault with though is a similar argument that says we shouldn’t do anything about genocide because we haven’t fixed our own problems. Those two arguments may sound similar, but to me the difference is that the one I just mentioned dismisses any effort to stop genocide, whereas the first one only says that the particular person is more invested in other issues while not disinvested in genocide.

The reason I find the latter argument problematic is because its foundation rests on putting certain human lives above others simply based on nationality – an somewhat arbitrary division. I realize that we cannot intervene right now to prevent every loss of life or stop every repressive government. We have to draw lines somewhere. I happen to think that one of the first places to draw a line is when someone tries to eliminate, “either in whole or in part, a group based on their race, religion, or nationality.” I find the Holocaust appalling for the same reason that I find Pol Pot’s genocide appalling. It has nothing to do with the race of the victim, but that the victims were attacked en masse because of their race (or ethnicity or nationality).

One of the first things people attack when you talk about genocide is the fact that the UN resolution doesn’t include political groups. This part is debatable, but I can see why it exists. It isn’t because anyone tolerates persecution of political dissidents, but is instead based on a belief that there is something inherently destructive to the fabric of humanity when a culture is eliminated. Since some people might not agree that political mass murders should be excluded, I would accept as a compromise that groups should be forced to intervene when there is mass murder of political groups as well.

What usually happens with this argument though is that they think genocide is a bogus term if it doesn’t include political mass murder. Therefore, somehow it becomes acceptable to ignore mass murder based on race, simply because the genocide convention does not include politics.

The bottom line here is that I don’t see any moral difference between killing Rwandan Tutsis, European Jews, non-Muslim Sudanese, or Americans. The difference to me exists in the numbers that are murdered, the motivation behind the murder, and our ability to stop the murders. I am happy, but not satisfied with, condemnation of genocide. Looking back at our history, even that was too much to expect. I look forward to the day when everyone can feel anguished when they become aware of mass murder, and not be able to dismiss it because the victims are not American.

The Year Has Arrived

The funny thing about Ken Rosenthal’s column is that I don’t disagree with his position. I am so angry with McGwire, my boyhood hero, that I don’t know that I want him to get into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. My problem though is with all of the sanctimonious sports writers. They write like they had no idea that they were part of the steroids era, and now pretend like it is over because of some weak testing.

The fact is that I don’t think any of the baseball writers are objective. They beat up Barry Bonds (who deserves it) but as far as I can tell have given Sheffield and others a free ride. Writers bow down to Pujols, refusing to speculate on whether he uses performance enhancing drugs. Far from the investigative journalists that have infested politics, baseball writers only attack people where there is overwhelming evidence, and turn a blind eye to everyone else.

If I want to be fair though, I have to include myself in with my diatribe against sports writers. I was one of the many people who roared with indignation anytime people suggested McGwire was on steroids. I should have known the truth, and so my disgust is somewhat hypocritical. Ken Rosenthal and others have a hard choice to make, but I would find their columns much less ridiculous if they both took responsibility for their role and ignorance, while changing their behavior as we continue to exist in the steroids era.

Not Again

My Congressman is crazy. Reinstituting the draft is a ridiculous idea. Iraq is right or wrong on its merits and that has nothing to do with whether or not there is a draft.

Politics of the New Majority

There are two news stories that have begun to errode the excitement I had over the new Democratic majority. First, Pelosi might try again to put someone more favorable in a strong position. If this fails, I think it might be time to find a new Speaker of the House.

Also, it looks like Obama has finally let me down. And I thought it wasn't going to happen until his 2008 run for the Democratic nomination. Anyone who looks at the situation in Iraq has to see that pulling out American troops will lead to civil war. So why is he calling for troop withdrawals? He is relying on a common Democratic misconception that Iraq has the capacity to defend itself, they just aren't utilizing it right now (note: I borrowed this wording from an article I read - I can't find the link though). I admit that he seems genuine and speaks the truth. But if he can't see what will happen to Iraq, than I seriously doubt his abilities to correctly analyze a situation.

In good news though, I do like how the Demcocrats plan to deal with ethics reform: lots of individual bills, which hopefully means lots of votes. The flip side is that it might also mean very little (if any) change. We'll see.

More on the Cluster Bombs

I posted about this earlier, and I am relieved to see that it isn't going to be completely ignored:

The chief of staff of the Israeli military, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, ordered an inquiry today to determine whether the military followed his orders in its use of large numbers of cluster bombs in Lebanon during the month-long war with Hezbollah there over the summer.

Several human rights groups have criticized Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the fighting, saying they were dropped in or near populated areas.

Cluster bombs are not prohibited in warfare, but much controversy surrounds them. The munitions spray out many small bomblets that explode over a wide area and may strike unintended targets. In addition, some of the bomblets do not explode when they first hit the ground, and effectively become land mines that can be unwittingly detonated by civilians long after the fighting has stopped.

[Edit]

Israel has received cluster munitions from the United States for many years, and also makes its own. The New York Times reported in August that the State Department was investigating whether Israel used cluster bombs in Lebanon in violation of secret agreements with Washington that restrict their use.

It is interesting that we had a secret deal with Israel about their use. Apparently our criticism is secret also.

Tazer at UCLA

If you haven't seen the video of the student being tazered on YouTube, here it is. There isn't a lot to see actually, but you still get the idea that the police abused their authority. Tazers should be used only against people who are out of control and represent a risk to the safety of cops or bystanders. This clearly was neither. From what the LA Times is reporting, the police officer that discharged the tazer has some very contraversial incidents in his past.

Autism

From the NYTimes:

The research emphasis of the act is appropriate, given how little is still known about the causes and the physiology of autism spectrum disorders, as well as the means by which medical treatments can reduce autism’s severity if applied early enough. Basic questions like whether the frequency of childhood vaccines today contributes to autism are still unresolved.

As parents of a child facing these challenges, we applaud those lawmakers and fellow parents who have done so much to promote this and other initiatives. But research is not enough. We as a nation must also begin to focus seriously on treating those children who are already afflicted. At present, we are failing miserably to do so.

This Opinion piece explains briefly how expensive quality intervention can be (more than $50,000 a year for preschool children), but also how the chances for improvement are increased dramatically with it.

Studies now show that 40 percent to 50 percent of toddlers undergoing intensive Applied Behavior Analysis, one of the best-known methods, can be mainstreamed in regular classrooms without personal aides by the time they reach school age. (The figure is close to zero for children not given special care.) Most of the other 50 percent to 60 percent make notable progress too.

What makes this even more of a no-brainer is that it isn't just the humane thing to do, it also seems to be the efficient thing to do. By investing money up front to help improve the lives of these children, you decrease the long term costs associated with their care for the rest of their life. The authors are right, more funding for research is good, but not enough. Here are our options:

Our options range from mandating that insurance companies cover therapies documented to work, to trumpeting the example of places that do provide coverage in the hope others will follow, to expanding autism Medicaid waivers.

Trade Deficit

In case you wanted an objective analysis of the trade deficit and how we need to respond to it, the NYTimes has it.

My Education Policy

A while ago I wrote what was a lengthy piece on my foreign policy – or at least the military side of it. I never did get around to the non-military side, but I do plan to get back to that sometime soon. In this post I will cover education policy. I don't pretend that any of this is original.

Now is an exciting time to debate education policy. There are a lot of exciting options that are being explored and given a chance to prove their worth. Consider that across the country, different governments are exploring charter schools (including single sex charter schools), standardized testing, and the broad issue of administrator / teacher / political accountability. New York City is probably the best test case for all of these issues. Mayor Bloomberg has taken control of the school district (as has the Mayor of Los Angeles). Now, if things don’t improve, the mayor can no longer blame the school district, who would in turn blame the Superintendent, who would then probably blame the mayor. New York City is also filled with charter schools in some of the best and worst neighborhoods. And or course New York is participating in No Child Left Behind and is therefore using standardized testing.

Before I dive into all of those issues though, there are some less controversial ones that get very little attention but are as important if not more so. Let’s start with early education. There has been a lot of talk for a while now about the merits of universal pre-K / Head Start. The problem with Head Start as a universal solution is that it does nothing to deal with the kids who even with preschool fall behind. What is necessary instead is a universal early intervention program. A program of this kind would use diagnostic standardized testing to measure if children in grades K-3 (at least) are at grade level in math and reading at the end of the grade. If not, these children will participate in extended school year (over the summer) and extended school day programs (during the school year) to get them caught up. From the statistics I saw in Montgomery County Maryland, this type of program worked wonders, especially in the lower income areas of the county.

One of the reasons this worked of course was that Montgomery County had the resources to devote to all the children who needed them – although federal funding also played a major part. As a rich suburb of Washington, DC, Montgomery County could spread its resources to cover all areas of the county. It also shows the benefits from a county-wide school district, where resources can be redistributed when necessary. For counties that don’t have any money to spread, state funding should be made to compensate (rural poverty is not often given the attention it deserves, and they should be considered as much as urban areas).

Another not so controversial education policy that doesn’t get enough attention is rigor in high schools. It has become quietly accepted that programs like Advanced Placement (all courses finish with standardized tests, but no one complains about “teaching to the test”) and International Baccalaureate significantly improve high school education and achievement. In what can be called the “Stand and Deliver” philosophy (a great movie staring Edward James Olmos), you get the best results when you challenge students and set high expectations. These courses also prepare students for college while setting the expectation that it is within their reach. Having as many of these courses available as meets the demand of the students should be the focus for every high school, and the federal and state governments should help out where necessary.

I will admit that I have skipped over middle school. As I left Montgomery County, they were in the process of doing for middle school what they did for elementary and high school. I don’t know of a great model yet, but my bet is that it involves a combination of the two approaches; continued availability of extended day and school year programs, as well as rigorous courses.

So that gets us through some uncontroversial but necessary policies. Now I need to dive into the hard stuff. First of all, I feel that the charter school movement has proven that vouchers were a flawed idea. While adding some market pressures is a good idea, vouchers operated under the assumption that good schools cannot exist if funded publicly. Charter schools try to use the same methods as private schools to attract students, while retaining their public funding and open availability. The benefits of charter schools are their flexibility. They can specialize in arts, technology, the humanities, or anything else, and are also free to offer longer school hours and school years when necessary. They can change the curriculum without the bureaucratic hassle typical of school districts. The bottom line is that they can experiment.

This shouldn’t be thought of as a free pass though. In some of the research I have seen, charter schools, while often serving more minorities than the average public school, are not always better than their public school counterparts. The fact is that charter schools still need to be monitored to ensure that they are providing a quality education. In my mind, the best methods for this are accountability and standardized testing.

Let me start with accountability before moving onto the elephant in the room. I believe accountability is a great thing. I am glad that the voters in New York have someone to blame if the schools don’t improve or someone to praise if they do. The fact is that it wasn’t working when everyone could blame everyone else for bad results. It also didn’t help that you had sometimes three groups working on fixing the schools that each might have their own idea of what is best.

On top of that, principals and teachers need to be held accountable. In New York City, Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein started a pilot program where principals signed up for greater control over their budgets and operations while agreeing that if they didn’t perform they could be terminated. This type of policy needs to spread. Granted, new administration will not solve any problem alone (which is a weakness of NCLB, where failing schools are closed down and the students are sent elsewhere – this does nothing to address some of the environmental problems those students might be facing). But it is a step in the right direction and will be positive as part of a broad approach to education.

I also strongly believe that teachers need to be held accountable. I attended public schools all my life and can think of too many bad teachers that no parents wanted their child to get. Unfortunately, every year 25 or more students were unlucky enough to get that teacher. There is no reason that this should be the case. If a teacher is not performing, they should not have a job and children should not be subjected to them. The problem with this is that I don’t know when teacher tenure will ever be eliminated. The teachers’ unions’ lone goal is not to improve education, but to protect teachers, and this truth becomes clearer to me everyday. If you look at the policies they advocate for, they all benefit teachers first and they will never advocate anything that is bad for teachers (my view on teacher’s unions is the same as my views on unions in general – they often work very hard to protect their worst employees). In my mind, it would take a huge amount of public pressure to convince unions to give up tenure, and I hope one day people realize how bad it is to subject their kids to ineffectual teachers.

The last issue, standardized testing goes along with the previous paragraph on teacher accountability. While I don’t think standardized tests should be a major component of teacher reviews (because it encourages teachers to cheat), I also don’t think testing is a bad thing. I firmly believe it is necessary to have a benchmark to compare all kids to, so that we know if they are getting the basic education they deserve. We need to know if they are learning basic math and reading skills, along with language and history / social studies. As importantly, we need to stop the practice of social promotion.

As I see it, there are a couple serious objections to standardized testing. One is the fear of teachers “teaching to the test”. As a student of the Regents exams in New York State, that never concerned me. In the classes where the teacher was very strong, he or she found ways to go above and beyond the state mandated material. The teachers that weren’t strong at least gave us the basics of what the state thought was necessary. Therefore I don’t see this as infringing on some right to creativity for teachers. I am sure it sounds like I am bashing on teachers in this post. The fact is that I have great respect for teachers, and I think the proposals I have outlined will protect the good ones while protecting the children from the bad ones.

The one objection I do find to be compelling has to do with age appropriateness. My brilliant girlfriend has made this point to me a few times and it has definitely stuck with me. While I mentioned at the beginning that there needs to be testing / diagnostics at early ages so that interventions can be made available to students who need them, I do think we need to be conscious of how we do this. At young ages, it might not be good to force children to sit through long tests (I say might only because I don’t know this independently from what my girlfriend has told me). Since this post isn’t about curriculum but is about education policy broadly, the only thing I can say about this is that we need to be conscious of using appropriate tests and measures for children depending on their age.

As I bring this to a close, I realize I have forgotten one final thing – NCLB’s requirement that there be a quality teacher in every classroom. Since I have already posted about this, let me just say that I think the goals of making every teacher go through teacher training are right, the enforcement is sometimes too strict and doesn’t allow for mid-career people to come back to public schools nor does it give credit to private school teachers who have plenty of experience. These requirements should be more flexible.

As I do not have the energy to talk about special education or English Language Learners, I will cover that much more briefly in another post. This one should give people plenty to debate with me about since you now know where I stand.

Election 2006

I will be honest – I didn’t think I cared if the Democrats took back the majority in Congress. I was extremely upset at their inability to articulate (by they, I mean the leadership) any coherent vision. Instead, they spouted off vague but popular remarks about the need to change course without ever going into detail.

I realized today though that I am thrilled at today’s election results. I am still not a huge fan of Pelosi, but I am willing to keep an open mind and see whether she can run the House in a way that is productive for our country. I was also really excited to see how New York State shaped up, although none of that was really a surprise. I didn’t hate Pataki, but it will be nice to have a Democratic governor, and I have a lot of hope for Spitzer. With such a broad mandate, he will likely feel empowered to make some big changes.

More than the overall results, it was the individual elections that really got me excited. Rick Santorum lost his seat in the Senate, which is great despite evidence that he does fight for the poor. And things look positive, although nothing is certain yet, in Virginia. In fact, if the source the Times has is accurate, Allen might not even call for a recount. It is great seeing two obnoxious Senators learn a lesson in humility. We all need it from time to time. Also, I think it will be a nice change for Massachusetts to have a Democrat governor again, and now that I know a little about the governor-elect, I am interested to see how he does.

The Lieberman / Lamont race turned out the way I wanted, although I have to admit that I am less excited about Lieberman now that I know more about his domestic politics. I also have to admit that even though I didn’t think Lamont was a great candidate, it might have been better had Connecticut gotten a new Senator. I realize it sounds like I am playing both sides here. The point I am trying to make is that I think kicking out some old blood is good now and then (but your options for turnover might not be so good), which is another reason this election was so thrilling. The Republicans were getting greedy and were ignoring the policies that got them elected. Because of that, they deserved to go. I also think the Democrats were behaving in a similar way in 1994 and were long overdue to be kicked out. An optimal situation in my mind would be a change in party control of Congress every couple decades (or less if necessary).

All of this was great, but the real treat was the news I got after lunch today – that Donald Rumsfeld had been fired. I never expected this to happen so soon. I thought Bush would hold on to Rummy like grim death. I couldn’t be more happy. Rumsfeld’s decisions have created some of the biggest problems we face today (along with Cheney, of course). We invaded Iraq with too few troops and no plan to provide security after we defeated Saddam’s military. Both of those are on Rumsfeld’s shoulders. When we look back many years from now, I expect everyone will realize how bad we managed Iraq, and who was at fault. Starting very soon, we will be able to set a new course, and hopefully make some progress (although Friedman thinks our only options there are ($)"tolerable" and "awful").

A Political Roundup

I think my nightmare scenerio for the 2008 Presidential election would be John Kerry versus George Allen. Why does a Kerry candidacy scare me so much? Because of this. His first comment was just stupid. But his reaction was even worse. Instead of realizing how absurd his comment was and appologizing for it, he turns it around and asks Bush to appologize for "a Katrina foreign policy." It becomes more clear to me everyday that Kerry has nothing interesting to say except unsubstantive political talking points.

I have long hated politicians who favor popular rhetoric over substantive debate and genuine action. In a recent column, David Brooks shows ($) that a politician can both be guilty of over-the-top language while also being a productive and positive legislator. The best part is that Brooks demonstrates this using Rick Santorum. Apparently, Santorum is a tireless fighter for the poor and an effective legislator; qualities that never make it to light because of his choice to use divisive language. Brooks chooses to blame the press for only covering that one aspect of Santorum. And while I agree that the press often chooses to cover only what is controversial and exciting, I think the blame also rests on Santorum who could choose to soften him image and show this side of himself. Either way, it is an interesting read if you have Times Select. It actually made me hate Santorum a little less.

On Sudan

How are we not in Darfur yet? The actions of the Sudanese government are criminal and yet we have yet to do a thing about it. If Clinton were in office, something tells me he would have launched a strategic missle stirke or two already. Read the latest news and maybe you can tell me why we are turning a blind eye to this government.