LINE OF THE DAY

    According to Yahoo News while in Europe last week Secretary of Defence William Gates said "I think that the analytical phase [of debating strategic options for Afghanistan] is coming to an end." Gates went on to say "Probably over the next two or three weeks we're going to be considering specific options and teeing them up for a decision by the president."  As Gates et al tee them up for the "golfer-in-chief" are they ready for a hook, a slice or a shank? 

    To assume the boss will hit one straight down the middle is not very likely given the course conditions, the weather and the historic handicap involved here.  One should beware of the metaphors one uses in strategic thinking Mr. Gates.  The idea that US troops can succeed in doing three things - counterinsurgency, anti-terrorism and protect a corrupt government simultaneously is ludicrous by any historical example.  It's time to leave Afghanistan to its own fate and demons. 

Check this column out

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/opinion/28friedman.html?_r=1

A GENUINELY DUMB IDEA

    OPB’s morning talk show “Think Out Loud”  laid another egg.  They interviewed the Mayor of Silverton, Oregon who advocates moving legislators out of Salem and back to their districts to do the people’s business online and via teleconferencing.  The presumed advantage of this idea is to enable the citizenry to have more direct access to their legislators on a regular basis.  Well like many ideas, this one sounds good in theory but would be an unmitigated disaster in practice.  

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/legislating-home/

    Ironically, two callers pointed out the problem.  
    The first caller was a woman from the mayor’s city who complained that getting access to local officials is not easily done despite geographic proximity.  Anyone familiar with local government knows that attendance by the public is often sparse.  City councils, school boards, county commissions and special districts meet at often-inconvenient times for citizens to attend because we are juggling job and family obligations.  Few people have either the time or the interest to be involved.  On top of this local officials have their own self-selected networks they listen to anyway.  
    The other caller who had lots of experience as a corporate manager with teleconferencing all over the USA and world noted that it often takes face-to-face meetings to cut to the chase and clear the air to find a solution.  Governance whether political or corporate requires the time to debate and sort out ideas.  This is most efficiently done face-to-face not via e-mail, the World Wide Web or teleconferencing.  Having participated in teleconferencing one doesn’t pick up the nuances of the discussion and comments are telescoped to fit the time limits.  That does not lead to good decisions.  
    Shifting legislative decision-making beyond Salem and the capitol building is a bad idea for other reasons.  Let me list them:  
    Legislators and their constituents aside from their own self-interests and/or pet issues are not very well informed as any election cycle proves time and again.  The level of political discourse in the US is so diminished that submitting yourself to the cacophony of local opinion is to submit oneself to the lowest common denominator of information.  It’s necessary but not sufficient to do the job a being a well-informed legislator.  And keep in mind being a legislator is not simply being a weathervane of local opinion.  When one votes on budgets, civil rights or on environmental issues – these are not “local” issues per se but state issues sometimes national and global ones.  
    The role of the legislator is a complex task of democratic governance.  One must listen to one’s constituents, yes.  But one also needs the benefit of information only lobbyists and government officials can offer.  They after all represent groups within one’s district as well as in the state.  That information is then filtered through a legislator’s own biases but also one’s party caucus.  Governance requires teamwork – in committee and in caucuses.  Finally, as you have more experience in legislating one develops an institutional memory of why and how things are done.  Sitting in your district does not offer that important piece of the puzzle.  
    Yes, driving to Salem is a logistical obstacle for many.  But in the day and age of cell phones, e-mail along, talk radio plus snail mail our legislators and their staff are just a click or mail box away from the hot breath of their constituents.  Again, most people have only one issue they care about at a time – so if one is motivated enough you can get to Salem or collaborate with others to create advocacy groups which can have a daily presence in Salem.  The idea of the lonely citizen out there not being heard is simply a myth.  Politics requires collective action as people from as diverse points of view as OEA and AOI know!  
    Legislators need the day-to-day benefit of working with each other in committees – where the hard work of the legislature is done.  Trying to replicate what is done in Salem during a normal 6-month session via teleconferencing or online would be a logistical nightmare and a waste of taxpayer money.  Oregon already is muscle bound by the initiative and referendum process – the tool of special interest groups not the ubiquitous people.  Going to some form of having one’s legislators stay home and vote by electronic mail would simply add another nail in the coffin of Oregon politics which is already too polarized and splintered.
    Legislators are confronted with a wide variety of voices demanding a hearing when they are in Salem.  What’s to guarantee they will hear such voices back home in districts which have increasingly been carved up by reapportionment to represent one-dimensional political views?  Do you really want a House member from the “People’s Republic of Portland” to never hear the voices of voters from the burbs or rural Oregon or vise versa?  And having worked in many campaigns candidates are already too prone to be victims of their own ideological or party echo chamber.  With moving decision-making to the local level the echo chamber effect is magnified.  
    As a product of the ‘60s I once advocated for direct democracy along these lines.  That was at a time when the nation was out of sorts over the racial divide and the war in Vietnam.  It seemed time to break the lock of the power elites – at home and in DC.  But I’m no longer a twenty something!  Having been a citizen advocate for over 18 years I have a more chastened view of the political process.  Edmund Burke expressed a more mature view of democratic politics from his experience as a British MP as well as the philosophical father of modern conservatism:  

    "Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole...”

    In the spirit of Halloween – it’s time to put a stake in the heart of this misguided idea
    

THE TIME IS NOW!

    The PBS NewsHour program tonight ran two segments on health care. 
    The first focused on the behind the scenes politics over the "public option" issue.  The second dealt with diseases that afflict the working poor and racial minorities (open link below). The common denominator of both is that as long as the US health care system denies coverage to 50 million people the most vulnerable among us will not only have no health insurance coverage but they will die prematurely and often from undiagnosed illnesses.

http://pbs.vo.llnwd.net/kip0/_pxn=2+_pxI0=A3347+_pxL0=begin+_pxM0=+_pxR0=10799+_pxI1=A3337+_pxL1=begin+_pxM1=+_pxR1=10800+_pxK=17082/newshour/rss/media/2009/10/27/20091027_parasites.mp3

    If the USA was a Third World nation, we might say that's just the way things are.  But the USA is the richest and most powerful nation in the world - so why don’t we unlike our closest allies Canada, Japan and most European nations have national health care? The answer is quite simple.  The medical industrial complex (MIC) of this nation from the Great Depression on has been able to use its political clout to stop anything close to universal coverage.
    That political clout is very evident in corridors of power in DC today.  But most of us don't see it because the lobby power of this MIC isn't a daily reality to us.  But when you see Republican Senator Olympia Snow from Maine and her country cousin Susan Collins also from Main say they will not vote for "any" public option plan in a health reform package - you know the lobbyists from big Pharma, big Insurance and the American Hospital Association are lurking in the shadows.
    I pinpoint Senators Snow and Collins for two simple reasons - they are women and they are Republicans.  They are not alone in the GOP ranks for opposing the "public option" which creates a government run health insurance plan to compete with private plans.  But being women legislators and more liberal Republicans than the norm, one would think their consciences would rise above ego, partisanship to do the right thing.  So much for gender and being “liberal” making a difference!
    I'm not going to get into the minute nuances of dissecting the public option concept.  Let's just say it's the closest thing we'll ever get to something like single-payer.  Public opinion polls now show that a majority of Americans favor some type of public option plan being included in health reform.  It may be an opt in, opt out or trigger public option plan.  This is still to be determined as the legislative process takes its convoluted path to resolution.
    But having watched the debate in Oregon over health care reform this past two sessions the one thing I know from experience is that the medical industrial complex will have its lobbying lackeys ready to pounce to sow seeds of confusion and disarray among the ranks of those who need health care reform - 600,000 Oregonians and 50 million Americans left out in the cold without health insurance.  And these lobbyists are so smart they will convince the victims that a public policy option will be "bad" for you.
    I vividly remember being in Salem last session on a late Friday afternoon when most legislators are gone - headed home to their districts to rest and visit their constituents for the weekend.  But low and behold I found at 3 p.m. in the afternoon a House committee work session on health care reform being chaired by Representative Mitch Greenlick (D, Beaverton).  The room was packed with over 40 lobbyists.  They were not testifying - that's not allowed in a work session.  They were taking notes!
    From off the record conversations following this meeting I gathered many of those lobbyists were not exactly fans of Representative Greenlick.  I have my own reservations about the bill too.  It didn't go far enough because it gave us a shell of reform - the Oregon Health Authority - without the regulatory or funding mechanism to make it real.  It's still a work in progress.  But sometimes a half a loaf is the best you can do.
    What was stunning is that the certifiably smart lobbyists who represent the health care industry in Oregon were opposed to health care reform if it cut into their client's profits. These are people one admires for their understanding of politics.  However, in retrospect I now realize that like their brethren in DC - they are "hired guns" and in this case their clients in Oregon and beyond had bought their services to "stop" reform not to make it happen.
    If President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress keep their eyes on the prize we will get meaningful health care reform by the end of this year - reform that prevents insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions, coverage that is portable and hopefully puts the private sector's feet to the fire by creating some competition from a "public option" plan.  How this all sorts out is too high for my pay grade to fathom.  But President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid can do it.
    But don't expect the GOP, the K-Street lobby or the fanatics of right wing talk radio/TV to help.  As I learned from my brief encounter with the medical industrial complex in Salem - they might be just taking notes but those notes are translated into TV ads, PAC money and client counseling designed to prevent change from happening.  And the easiest thing in our checks and balances system is to “stop” change.
    To steal a phrase from Bill Safire don't let "nattering nabobs of negativism" sow the seeds of fear this time as they did under FDR, Truman, LBJ and Clinton.  Advocates of health care reform are in the "red zone" but victory is not assured.  Don't let the naysayers put up a successful goal line stand.  Run it up their gut, pass it or do an end sweep - whatever it takes.  Win one for us, not for the damn Gipper!  It’s time for YES WE CAN…

    PS:  Check these links out, especially the first one a UTube video from economist Robert Reich.   Then write, e-mail, phone President Obama and your Congressperson, US Senators and friends...  The time is now... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBi8A_HutII

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/19/AR2009101902451.html

http://www.connectforkids.org

IT'S TIME THE PULL THE PLUG!

U.S. official resigns over Afghan war

    Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting

    "...But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletterfile:///Users/donderor/Desktop/ResignationLetter.pdf

    As if one needed it here are more reasons why the US must leave Afghanistan.  We are fighting a war which cannot be won because of conditions on the ground which no addition of US troops will change even if we were prepared to send in 200,000 or more troops.  Vietnam proved that scenario to be misguided. 

    "...More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerrillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemated war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?"

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/10/25/military

    Here's why the election "do-over" in Afghanistan is a lost cause.  American policy makers since the Vietnam era have had a "fetish" on elections being the "summum bonum" of regime legitimacy.  Using elections to create the illusion of democracy in corrupt regimes doesn't work.  Look at Russia! 

    "...There is a tendency on the part of the international community to go into elections too early, and feel that elections are going to create democracy and solve problems but that's not factual. Most of the time, elections just cause more problems. They're conflictive. There are confrontations involved, and if they're done too early you just have to do them over and over and over again..."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/why-the-vote-in-afghanistan-is-a-waste-of-time/article1337644

A CANADIAN VIEW OF "THE RACE TO THE TOP"

    Ward Mowry aka the "Canadian Connection" grew up in Oregon, is a Whitman grad and retired high school history and English teacher - most of it spent in Estevan, Saskatchewan;
"Thoughts on education from the Great White North"
    I believe Canadians are generally happy with their public education systems, given the circumstances. In most provinces we have a two hundred day school year. Oregon has a 180 day school year.  Canadians grumble about taxes but that is to be expected. Some kids are home-schooled, but that is usually for religious reasons.
    About half of our provinces have tax supported separate school systems (usually Roman Catholic, but not always) as well as public systems. In Saskachewan we had a provincial teacher salary scale for the last thirty years or so trying to mitigate the rich vs. poor district problem. The province granted school districts money based upon enrollment.  Locally, some communties were able to provide the schools with gifts of one sort or another.
    NCLB is not an issue, but there has been some benchmarking in English and math. Other than the class time taken to administer such programs, teachers don't seem against this. Seems to me it could be a good indicator of how kids are doing. I am a bit suspicious as to what the results might eventually be used for. We spent the last thirty years getting rid of province wide final exams for Grade Twelve students, allowing professional teachers to create their own final exams following Department of Education guidelines. No argument there.
    Our kids don't generally do well on standardized testing, be it SAT, AP, or whatever-- I believe it is simple a matter of lack of experience with such exams. There is a skill to taking such exams. Many of our kids do their post-secondary schooling in the states and they seem to do just fine, so I suspect our kids are as good as anybody's!
    Like you, we have some very good universities and a number of adequate ones.  But, we don't have much in the way of liberal arts colleges like Whitman or Pacific. Most people here see post secondary education as career training, whether it is university or tech school. Right now there is tremendous demand in the tech schools.
    I never wanted to be out of the classroom away from the kids, so administration work didn't hold much attraction for me. I tend to believe that education, like many organizations, is top heavy with people in administrative offices having endless meetings but who could be more productive in classrooms.
    Educational bureaucrats are always in a search for the holy grail of education reform.  This silver bullet doesn't exist.  Thirty kids in the classroom mean a teacher must triangulate thirty variables.  All the research and statistics don't mean a thing because they don't consider these variables. Get teachers who want to be in the classroom with kids; give them mentors to encourage the development of an individual's teaching style.
    It is good for students to see different ways of doing things.  All styles of teaching have their benefits. Do not hassle teachers with administrator types who haven't worked directly with kids in the classroom for years. Get some of those “admin” types out of the office back into teaching on a regular basis – keeping them in touch with reality.  Paying teachers for taking post-grad classes is irrelevant except for moving one up the salary scale.  Anyone can accumulate course credits.  How does that improve teaching?
    RAD:  Most school districts can’t subsidize teachers to improve their teaching via taking summer courses or attending professional workshops.  While schools of education offer too many methods courses – learning “best practices” is not a waste of time.  Built-in district based paid days off for “professional development” are a joke.  But they don’t have to be.  Getting teachers to collaborate and share experiences is important.  My own pet peeve is that tenure is granted too early – after the 2nd year.  Why not adopt the 6 year model of higher ed?