Lobenthal.com

One of the most beautiful days of the year.  And on an all-about-me high, I saw it pure and simple as a tribute to my birthday.

Sarah Jaffe at alternet.org calls out:

“Five So-Called Liberal Pundits Who Are Attacking Teachers”  

As we know from my earlier link to her takedown of Paul Ryan groupies among the news media, Jaffe’s really got it down to a science: exposing the fraud and hypocricy among editorialists and reporters alike.

From Reuters via the Huffington Post:

“Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market”

And Emanuel stands up gassing away about what’s good for the kids.

He may have studied ballet, but brazen as it is, his artifice is sorely lacking in quality: like Paul Ryan,  he can’t even lie with conviction.

Ben Joravsky of Chicago Reader (via Reader Supported News) supplies a lot sounder explanation for Rahm Emanuel’s savagery toward the Chicago Teachers Union than most of the editorials I’ve seen:

“My theory is that he knew next to nothing about the schools when he got elected. And what he did know was shaped by campaign rhetoric, which was itself largely based on his efforts to impress out-of-town pundits, who had themselves bought into the conventional wisdom that just about everything wrong with schools today can be blamed on bad teachers and the unions who protect them.”

It’s really something to ponder: the fact that Democratic elected officials (as we in New York know from our own Governor) are now on the forefront of the campaign to break the public unions.  

And the Democrats wonder why their base didn’t show up in 2010?

which is one reason why the “mainstream” commercial media so often chooses not to share them with us.

But The Nation reports  that:

“Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has never taught a day in a Chicago public school. The Chicago Board of Education president is a banker, and one of its members is the powerful billionaire Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker.”

You’re strolling NYC, enjoying the beautiful weather—yesterday was that increasingly rare September occurrence in NYC: a warm day that still felt like autumn approaching.

And if on your strolls you see a distinguished looking journal featuring on its cover a  fetching photo of New York City Ballet’s Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild. . . You know what you need to do.  Pick it up and purchase it.  And then read it.

It could only be the Summer 2012 issue of Ballet Review.

And speaking of NYCB, don’t miss my interview with Ib Andersen.

in the Times about the way the Bush administration paid no attention to the 2001 memos warning them of Bin Laden’s intentions where our country was concerned.  . . up to and including the one little memo that Condoleeza Rice denied had any significance whatsoever when she testified before the 9/11 Commission.

And that woman had the nerve to lecture us on foreign policy in Tampa last month!!!!

I was pleased to encounter as I walked down Broadway today toward Union Square a procession of teachers marching uptown in support of their striking Chicago brethren.  

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is among the Democratic politicians who are now pushing the same scam as the Republicans.  Public institutions are torpedoed, defunded and undermined; then the public is then told by the politicians responsible for the sabotage that there is something intrinsically inferior about institutions that are public, and that they must be replaced by corporate-controlled private entites.

Emanuel has guaranteed that poor neighborhoods in Chicago receive less school funding than wealthier ones, while radically expanding the infiltration of charter schools throughout the city.   He is continuing to scapegoat teachers who must do the hard work of educating students in a straitened environment, trying to paint their union as the big bad woolf, as Jeb Bush tried to do at the Republican convention.  

Does the US really need a more rigidly standardized, test-dominated, education system?  Is this how critical and creative thinking is fostered?

And is this really what the Democratic party wants to encourage?   How long can this party continue to foster people like Emannuel and retain its own principles and identity?

In his convention address, he took out his customary heart to nuclear power.  You know, Fukushima and all.  Gregg Levine at firedoglake.com comments.

No matter how conservative the Democrat, the “mainstream” commercial media always is eager to tell him or her to go farther to the right.  FAIR deconstructs Newsweek’s latest gaffe.