Category: reason

When the Democratic Party platform committee met last weekend to discuss their party’s principles, not everyone was happy with the draft K–12 education proposal that was presented. The problem, according to some public school activists? The plank was too positive toward privatization.

According to The Washington Post, these activists criticized the party for using the same sort of language as corporate reformers, including offering limited support for school choice and test-based teacher accountability.

Platform committee and party members responded by revising the plank to reflect the concerns of these activists, adding a proposal to let parents opt their children out of standardized tests.

When it comes to academic performance, the party’s position draws heavily from the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the bipartisan bill that replaced No Child Left Behind. While the ESSA does give local and state governments a bit more say in education matters, it also requires them to set high educational standards for their students.

That might sound like a good thing—until you realize the federal government must approve of state accountability measures on student achievement. As Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute has noted, this means there’s little to stop the secretary of education from vetoing accountability plans until a state falls in line with what the administration wants.

When it comes to school choice, the revised plank makes it clear that Democrats are in favor of limiting the types of schools that are available for students. The proposal states that public charter schools should be required to “accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English language learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools.” In practice, this means a charter could be shut down simply because the kids who choose to apply there, or who happen to thrive after enrolling, don’t end up being diverse enough. Moreover, the party is explicitly opposing for-profit charter schools, further eliminating opportunities for parents to move their kids out of a failing local school.

The plank also calls for a national campaign to recruit and retain “high-quality teachers” by ensuring they have the materials needed to succeed in the classroom. How it plans to accomplish this lofty goal, however, is left to the imagination.

To be fair, the proposals aren’t all bad. The committee came out against punishments that unfairly affect minority and disabled students and approved of a passage advocating for reforming discipline procedures. (Reason has written extensively on the problems with zero-tolerance school discipline policies.) Nevertheless, it’s obvious from the revised plank that the Democratic Party plans to continue to drag its feet when it comes to efforts to improve K–12 education through increased teacher accountability and school choice.

Military forces in Turkey have apparently taken over the state broadcaster and announced they had seized control of the country to restore “constitutional democratic human rights,” according to a local journalist’s account.

The prime minister of Turkey Binali Yildirim announced there was an “illegal attempt” at an uprising by “part of the military,” but that it would be “wrong to call it a coup,” saying it would “not be allowed to succeed,” as reports from Turkey mention low-flying jets and gunfire in the capital of Ankara, and the closings of bridges connecting bicontinental Istanbul over the Bosphorus. There may also be a hostage situation at the military headquarters in Ankara. The military has reportedly imposed a curfew and soldiers on the streets are telling residents to go home—it is late evening in Istanbul, which is on Arabia Summer Time (GMT +3).

Recep Erdogan, who has been the president since 2014 and the prime minister from 2003 until then, has faced on-again off-again anti-government protests for years, and has been accused of turning the country into a paranoid, authoritarian one-party state. Turkey has also faced a number of terrorist attacks in the last year, in Istanbul, Ankara, and elsewhere, mostly attributed to the Islamic State (ISIS) which operates in neighboring Iraq and Syria, and an extremist offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

More than a few people have already noticed that Donald Trump’s new campaign logo, the first to reflect his choice of Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate, looks more than a little bit sexually suggestive:

Specifically, the charge is that the T looks kind of like a penis—and that it appears, as Trump might say, to be shlonging the P in Pence, at least symbolically.

At Slate J. Bryan Lowder offers one possible interpretation, writing that the logo “very accurately conveys the attributes Trump wants associated with his political and personal brand—namely, that he has a penis and he uses it to screw people.” I’m no graphic art critic, but the logo does seem to suggest that Trump is dominating Pence, a vice presidential pick that Trump was reportedly scrambling to reconsider as late as midnight last night.

Is that symbolism intentional or inadvertent? There’s no way to say, and the cheap, amateurish quality of the design suggests that it may just have been drawn up quickly, with little thought as to the implications. But it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has alluded to his manhood while on the campaign trail: In a Republican primary debate earlier this year, Trump responded to those who have described his (small) hands as small by saying “He referred to my hands, if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee it.”

I’m not sure there’s too much in the way of penetrating insights to be gleaned from Trump’s choice of logo. But it does strike me that the incident is typical of Trump’s campaign so far. At worst it can be viewed bizarre, vulgar, and wildly inappropriate coming from a presidential candidate. At best it shows the candidate and the campaign to be inept and dysfunctional, unable to exercise basic political judgment, and fundamentally unable to competently execute the most basic elements of a modern political campaign. The logo is further proof, not that we needed any, that when it comes to running for president, neither Trump nor anyone he works with knows dick about dick.

• Turkey’s prime minister says a military coup attempt is underway. 
• Newt Gingrich now admits it would be “impossible” to deport U.S. Muslims.
• Rolling Stones singer (and great-grandfather) Mick Jagger is expecting his 8th child, his first with 29-year-old girlfriend Melanie Hamrick.
• The man who shot the video of Alton Sterling’s shooting by police was arrested for “failure to appear” at a traffic ticket hearing two years ago.
• Bernie Sanders delegate Cornel West endorses Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
• The Ghostbusters reboot opens in wide release today, and is sure to be argued about all weekend.

Special pleading or valuable knowledge about America’s history? Or is that a false choice? Can we acknowledge that legal and cultural conflicts about how to treat gay and lesbian citizens are an important and teachable part of modern American history while still maybe rolling our eyes a little bit at the lobbying to force it into public schools?

On the one hand, public schools are struggling to teach the kinds of things students really need to make their way in the world. On the other hand, these issues are still heavily influencing the platforms for both the Democratic and Republican parties. To not teach about the history of current political movements that have shown lasting presence is itself a form of pandering to a particular mindset.

California has decided it’s going to incorporate gay and lesbian issues into history and sociology education. Legislators already passed a law to mandate more inclusion in education all the way back in 2012. Now they’re figuring out how. Ah, the speed of public education. The Los Angeles Times notes:

LGBT content will be included in some elementary, middle and high school grades. In fourth grade, for example, students would learn about “the emergence of the nation’s first gay rights organizations in the 1950s,” the framework states, as well as struggles in California from the 1970s to the present day to affirm the right of gay people to teach and to get married.

Equality California, an LGBT advocacy group, issued a statement praising the move, saying the new framework more accurately represents figures important to the LGBT movement.

The new guidelines, the group added, now better captures “essential moments in the struggle for equality, and the evolution of communities and identities.” Equality California said a more inclusive curriculum will make LGBT students more comfortable in school.

That at the end from Equality California is where the feeling of special pleading comes in. The goal should be for students of all types to understand history and how it got them to where they are now. That it makes students “more comfortable” shouldn’t be a goal of the education process. It’s a positive outcome—a side effect. In fact, I would argue that truly accurate teaching of gay political history should at some points cause the opposite. It was not “comfortable” living through some of this stuff.

As an unintentionally amusing footnote, the L.A. Times notes that the new framework for adding more subjects to education includes “financial literacy,” in a state school system that is hungrily devouring taxpayer dollars in order to pay for massively growing pension debts. On the fall ballot in November will be a vote to extend a temporary tax increase that was supposed to have fixed state budget issues.

With the country distracted by the terror attack in France, Donald Trump’s choice of Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, and the Republican National Convention starting in three days, Congress pulled a classic summer Friday afternoon news dump, finally releasing the long-classified “28 pages” of a joint congressional inquiry focused on possible Saudi Arabian government support for the 9/11 hijackers. You can read the whole heavily redacted and blurry-scanned document here. 

The “28 pages” constitute a section of an over-800 page report, and are frustratingly filled with speculative clauses, lots of information attributed to “FBI sources,” and unnamed persons with “ties to the Saudi Royal Family.”

But the juiciest piece of verifiable information concerns former Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. (and close confidant of the Bush family) Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who reportedly provided thousands of dollars to Osama Bassnan, a neighbor of two of the hijackers in San Diego, who reportedly boasted to an “FBI asset that he did more…for the hijackers” than another Saudi-connected associate. 

From page 427 of the report:

One at least one occasion Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar’s account. According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar.

The report also states that the FBI considered Bassnan “an extremist and supporter of Usama Bin Ladin, and has been connected to the Eritrean Islamic Jihad and the Blind Shaykh [sic].” In addition, a CIA memo mentions “Bassnan reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi Government officials.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), one of the two senior members of House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, “I hope that the release of these pages, with appropriate redactions necessary to protect our nation’s intelligence sources and methods, will diminish speculation that they contain proof of official Saudi Government or senior Saudi official involvement in the 9/11 attacks,” according to USA Today. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-Ca.) reportedly said in a statement, “It’s important to note that this section does not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the Intelligence Community.”

It may take a closer examination to come to the conclusion that there truly is “no there there,” but Bandar’s name included in the report is significant no matter what why Congress chooses to spin it. Still, it’s no secret that the Saudi government has long supported Wahabbist extremism, has one of the world’s worst human rights records, and continues to wage a devastating proxy war (with U.S. support) in Yemen. They remain a problematic ally, at best.

Don’t call Netflix’s spooky, Spielbergian Stranger Things an avatar of ’80s nostalgia. Rather, it’s a loving homage to the moment early in that decade when newly empowered Baby Boomer directors turned the supernatural and sci-fi from a genre into the mainstream with a series of films in which kids battled forces—space aliens, vengeful ghosts, runaway technology, malevolent government agencies—beyond the dim comprehension of their clueless parents and teachers.

The Goonies, War Games, Stand by Me and Firestarter are all touchstones for Stranger Things. And any doubt about the identity of the show’s intellectual godfather is resolved when one character, trying to explain what they’re up against, asks a cop, “You read any Stephen King?”

An occasional wink like that one aside, Stranger Things is not a campy send-up but a hugely engrossing and enjoyably paranoid suspense thriller. Television critic Glenn Garvin has more.

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The House will consider a package of six criminal justice reform bills in September, House Speaker Paul Ryan said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Friday.

As I reported earlier this week, the timeline for getting criminal justice reform bills through Congress this year is getting increasingly short, with the summer recess about to start, followed by an all-consuming election season.

But Ryan, who has promised to give floor time this year to a package of criminal justice bills advanced by the House Judiciary Committee, said the House is working to get the package finished and ready for votes in September.

When asked by Inskeep if there was a double standard in the current response to opioid overdoses in largely white communities, compared with the draconian drug laws passed to combat crack cocaine in black communities in the ’80s and ’90s, Ryan responded:

No, I think you need to complement this with criminal justice reform. I agree with that, as well. That’s something we’re working on for September. We’ve got four bills on criminal justice reform already out of the Judiciary Committee. We’re looking at getting two more out. Just this week I set up a working group of members from both sides of the aisle to work on community policing ideas, training ideas, but also finishing the job on criminal justice reform so we can get all of those bills out to the floor in September

So, opioid abuse is an epidemic in America. This was a fantastic effort of Republicans and Democrats coming together to solve this problem which, as you say, it’s about treatment, it’s about intervention, it’s about recovery.

In the 1990s, to your first point, I think government, both Republicans and Democrats, overcompensated on our criminal code. And we went too far and there are disparities — crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine — there are clear disparities and more importantly, I think that we’ve learned there are better ways of dealing with some of these problems than locking up somebody for 20 or 30 years. You end up ruining their lives, ruining their families, hurting communities, and then when they try to re-enter into society, they’re destitute.

So I really think there are better methods of dealing with these problems, and I think that is part of criminal justice reform. I think that’s something I put out in the poverty plan that I first authored three years ago. So we intend on bringing these bills up in September.

Ryan’s 2014 anti-poverty plan included an entire chapter on the effects of mass incarceration on the cycle of poverty. His latest version of the plan, released in June, does not mention sentencing reform. A Republican aide said it was not included because it legislative efforts were already underway, and “a lot of people viewed criminal justice as something we could move on this year.”

Even if the package passes the House, it would still have to be reconciled with the Sentencing Reforms and Corrections Act in the Senate, which has yet to be brought to the floor by Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Race and policing preoccupied Americans last week. The two shootings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota rightly sparked outrage and protest across the country. Then came the racially motivated attack that killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. Tensions between police and the African-American community were already high. For example, a June Gallup Poll reported that 67 percent of blacks believe that police treat African Americans less fairly than whites in their community. Is there any evidence of such biased policing? Unfortunately, yes.

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Since first announcing his candidacy last June (and even before then), Donald Trump has had a knack for shooting off his mouth in a way that ends with him on multiple sides of the same issue. It didn’t quite offer voters a blank slate like Obama’s 2008 campaign did, but did let voters project their own preferred political views on the candidate. Based on Trump’s comments critical of the Iraq war and its role in fomenting terrorism in the Middle East, a few non-interventionists believed Trump to be one of them.

Last week, in another in a series of self-inflicted controversies, Donald Trump appeared to praise Saddam Hussein for curbing terrorism in Iraq, calling Iraq in his absence the “Harvard” of terrorism. Yet this morning, he selected Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who served in the House from 2001 to 2013. Not only was Pence one of the 214 House Republicans to vote for the Iraq war in 2002 (only 6 Republicans voted against it), he argued that removing Saddam Hussein was critical to reducing the threat of terrorism. From a January 2002 AP article:

The United States’ war against terrorism will not be complete until Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been removed from power, U.S. Rep. Mike Pence says. 

Even though there is no proof Iraq played a role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there is no doubt the nation was directly involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2nd District Republican said Thursday during an appearance before the Anderson Suburban Rotary Club.

As a result, the longer Hussein remains in power, the longer he will continue to support terrorism targeting the United States and it allies, Pence said.

“Until Hussein is done, the war is not over,” Pence said.

Today, U.S. intervention in Iraq is widely understood to have contributed to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the region, even if some defenders of the war insist on blaming the 2011 U.S. withdrawal not the 2003 invasion. Syria did not require a U.S. intervention to slip into chaos, but the availability of post-Hussein, post-invasion Iraq as a training ground for terrorists made the militants destabilizing Syria a lot more potent.

The Republican ticket now has a bona fide supporter of the Iraq war to match the often contradictory Trump. The Democratic ticket is set to have a supporter of the Iraq war, and other interventions, at the top, and may yet be filled out by another politician who helped make the disastrous Iraq war happen.

It didn’t have to be that way. Bernie Sanders at least voted against the Iraq war in 2002, while Sen. Rand Paul, running for the Republican nomination, insisted to other Republicans that it was hawks in their party who were most responsible for ISIS. Yet some so-called libertarians praised Trump for being more forcefully non-interventionist than Paul for making stronger criticisms of George W. Bush than Paul. Now they get Mike Pence and good old fashioned 21st century Republican interventionism. They should’ve known better.