OLBERMANN (3/11/09): And the shocker from Star magazine: Sarah Palin`s daughter splits from her fiancee. She is now officially an unwed mother!Of course, Keith-O offers a rationale for wallowing in the lowest form of reportage:
OLBERMANN: They used them in the campaign. But now Sarah Palin’s daughter and the future son-in-law are splitsville...
OLBERMANN: Let’s switch to Governor Palin. By the time she revs up her 2012 presidential campaign, do you think she will have learned her lesson, and stop trying to apply the proverbial public band-aid to a messy little family issue? If the daughter is preggers, just let her stay off-stage, right?
OLBERMANN: ...All of it would be nobody’s business if the governor had not tried so hard to insist on publicizing domestic bliss.So let's get this straight. Those cutaway shots of Bristol Palin listening to her mother's speech at the Republican National Convention give Keith Olbermann lifelong sanction to engage in this sort of vile "journalism." Of course, if Bristol had been treated as a dirty little secret, the Dems would have pounced on Palin for treating her own daughter as an embarrassment.
I would have contempt for any broadcaster who used such flimsy excuses to hound the family of a Democratic politician. Why should I tolerate Olbermann's behavior simply because the target is a Republican?
Meanwhile, as reader Susan noted in a comment to a previous post, the D.U.mmies are bending over backwards (here and here) to excuse Obama's embrace of "merit pay" for public school teachers, an idea first mooted by Ronald Reagan. "Merit pay" has been tried in Colorado and it did not work. Nevertheless, the Obots insist that the all-powerful Lightbringer will do it right.
How do they know? Because the Lightbringer is always right.
"That was a good thing you did, Mr. President! That was a very good thing!" Keep mouthing that mantra, my Obot friends -- otherwise, the Lightbringer may transform you into a jack-in-the-box or even send you (shudder!) into the cornfield.
8 comments:
If you delve further into Bob's article, you read about KO's tabloid-style teasers: how Newt Gingrich supports "teen prostitution"...then you find out that he doesn't.
Prior to two years ago, being a Dem meant you didn't lie about people with different poltics, and you didn't go snorkeling in the slime pool.
Sergei Rostov
Re: Obama's support of merit pay.
As a former teacher I do not want to hear anything about merit pay for teachers, let alone implement it, while idiots who broke the bank over at AIG get bonuses.
I support merit pay for teachers.
We need to give them more money because they merit a raise.
Since I have worked for over 30 years in an alleged merit pay teaching environment, I can state with some good and just cause that the best teachers rarely get the raises because that is determined by their GODDAMN BOSSES who are often more interested in who will mow their fucking lawns, do their taxes, load their frigging cows, and exchange body fluids in no-tell motels. Yes, I have seen merit pay awarded for all the above. I can think of only a few cases in which merit pay actually ended up in the hands of the meritorious. Nowdays, most administrators of such systems say it is too difficult to figure who gets the teaching merit pay so they simply divide the money among all the employeees, including themselves and such educational luminaries as the grounds keepers.
p.s. Joe if you choose to publish them, please suppress my identity. I don't want my bosses backtracking me. Oh, ok I'll post as Anon.
p.p.s. Sorry for the swearing; I usually really avoid that but this topic gets me hot and aggravated.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't all of the initiatives the Woods Foundation pursued in regards to education not produce even a minor improvement in student performances?
I haven't read up on this in a while, but as I recall, all of the stuff that Ayres and Obama worked on together went nowhere of value.
Lori, (this is Anon)-- that is my recollection, too. I have a cliche about teaching improvement that I think is true-- if you want to make better teachers, make better people. All the systems of rewarding and punishing performance are irrelevant when it comes that one teacher who lights up the students with a desire to learn-- decades later those students will be functioning better in society than those whose heads are simply crammed full of facts. Besides, all the merit pay systems require an incredible number of resources to administer-- can we waste those dollars on, at best, marginal improvements?
There is a research report on the results of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that was written by Mark A. Smylie and Stacey A. Wenzel that can be accessed here:
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED482425&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED482425
What is interesting about this report is that it was authored by Smylie who is a professor at the U of I at Chicago and Wenzel who was a research associate there. This is the same university where Ayres teaches. According to a summary of this report posted at CNS (not exactly a neutral source), the "(r)esults suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistical differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in the rate of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy and social competence”.
http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/Content/article.aspx?RsrcID=37516
Obama's support of charter schools is another thing that greatly disturbs me. As a commenter stated at another site, charter schools are to public education what private accounts are to Social Security and yet Obama probably will get his way because of his political "faith healer" image.
old dem
Merit pay and charter schools are the steps to privatizing public education. Funding comes from the Walton family, Bill Gates, and the usual suspects that smell a big pile of money with an inconvenient union in the way.
The books are cooked on their so called good results.
Where does all the lottery money go? Anyone know? It's meant for education. In New York City the schools sure don't look like lottery winners. Teachers pay for some supplies out of their own pockets! They aren't very well paid here.
And rarely will you find anyone in administration who would make an honest merit pay evaluation. Just as disgusting an idea as teaching to the test.
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