1. A new report from a Michigan news website last month revealed that charter schools in Detroit are failing to provide a substantially better education than the Detroit public schools, troubled by massive budget cuts and caught in the political firestorm of a right-wing takeover. Indeed, most of the charter schools are worse.
According to the report, "Of 25 charter schools in and around the city, six had higher math or science proficiency scores than Detroit Public Schools' average on the most recent Michigan Merit Exam, The Detroit News reported, and most of the others were doing worse than the district. "More charters chalked up poor results in reading and writing, but they surpassed the Detroit school district in social studies."
Charter schools are more about getting around a unionized teaching workforce than real improvement in education.
2. Michele Bachmann is still selling her brand of whacko. But she isn't just weird, she is dangerous. We all laughed when she told her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa that her campaign embodied the spirit of John Wayne who she said had been born there. Unfortunately for her, her speechwriters failed to fully investigate the fact that the John Wayne who had lived there was serial killer John Wayne Gacy. An appropriate gaffe, I think, given her charge that President Obama's decision to "wind down" the war in Afghanistan is a bad one and that she'd "stay the course."
But Sarah Palinesque flubs aside, Bachmann this week signed a right-wing pact titled "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY." According tot he LA Times, the "vow" is an anti-gay manifesto that also included a racist swipe at African American families. Slavery allowed for better Black families than we see today, the document that Bachmann put her John Hancock to, reads.
Bachmann also told CNBC this week that she hoped higher unemployment would help her campaign, revealing the main congressional GOP strategy: block economic programs offered by Democrats or the President in order to stall the recovery for political gain.
3. A string of states – Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina – have passed SB 1070 style racial profiling anti-immigrant laws. The Obama administration successfully asked a federal court last year to strike down the racial profiling provisions of the Arizona law, so the others are unlikely to stand either.
However, the Alabama law, according to the Civilrights.org, would create an immigration police force and establishes barriers for undocumented immigrants to seek education, rent housing, or earn a living. A coalition of civil rights groups are challenging the law. Alabama lawmakers cited explicitly anti-immigrant (code for racist) reasons for passage. We don't want them in our state, they said.
4. Since the latter part of 2008, the public sector has lost jobs every month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This past month 39,000 public sector workers lost their jobs. Public sector job loss has been a main driver of the high unemployment rate, especially in the past few months as the recovery seems to have stalled.
It is evident that Republican policies to slash budgets on the state level are primarily responsible for this downward trend. Even when the recovery act provided aid to states, right-wing governors used the money for "rainy day" funds rather than job creation.
Recall campaigns in Wisconsin and Michigan, and a voter veto of an anti-union law in Ohio may result in a new upsurge of voters in those states against GOP policies and politicians. Let's see.
5. GOP congressional leaders are being open with their hatred of the working class. After changing the political subject in Washington from jobs to the debt, they are insisting that working families have to be squeezed more in order to cut the deficit.
After Wall Street bankers created scam after scam that caused the financial crisis that taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of billions of dollars to fix and which doubled the deficit overnight, Sen. Orrin Hatch, for example, has the nerve to say that working families haven't suffered enough. On the Senate floor this week, he said this:
I hear how they’re [Democrats] so caring for the poor and so forth. The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility. Now we don’t want the really poor people who are in poverty to pay income taxes. But 51 percent of all households? And that’s going up by the way because of our friend down in the White House and his allies.
The poor also need to share responsibility? It's too much. It has to be stopped.
