Happy Hour Roundup: No, DeMint Doesn’t Think Public School Kids Are Destined For Gangs
* There seem to be some questions swirling over whether GOP Senator Jim DeMint agrees with a parent who said that if you send a kid to public school, he or she is more likely to end up in a gang than graduating.
The fracas generated a fair amount of controversy today, so I asked DeMint’s spokesperson, Wesley Denton, whether he agreed with it. He said No:
[H]e was relaying the statement of a local parent who was concerned about her child, and as a parent he was moved by her story. Of course he doesn’t believe that public school students are fated to bad outcomes. All four of his children attended public schools and he’s spent years fighting to improve public schools and will continue to do so.
* Tim Pawlenty says that the GOP has “bottomed out.”
* Matthew Yglesias raises an interesting question about the real meaning of the shake-up at the moderate Democratic Leadership Council: Why are we all forgetting that the Democrats have spent literally years in a bitter intraparty battle over who was right about Iraq?
* Get ready: The Huffington Post reports that Senate hearings on the Employee Free Choice Act are set to kick off on Tuesday. I’m going to say it again: This is the fight to watch. It will be brutal and excruciatingly close, and no one knows what the heck’s going to happen.
* And speaking of Employee Free Choice, the forces arrayed against it are going up on the air.
* A nice catch by Eric Kleefeld: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is letting Senator Jim Bunning know that she’s very much alive, thank you very much.
* More for the “real change” files: Jake Tapper reports that at an event on Monday, President Obama will overturn the ban on Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
* Michael Goldfarb keeps up the pressure on Chas Freeman.
* And a quick housekeeping note: For the near term I won’t be posting on weekends, so consider this a weekend open thread. Crazy week, all. Back first thing Monday morning.
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Good weekend, Greg. I love this blog!
And for the record, while Tim Pawlenty is now a confirmed “master of the obvious,” Jim Demint is just plain crazy.
I think DeMint is shoring up the conservatie credentials for something big… which of course means getting wing-nuttier by the moment. Between this quote about DC schools, which by the by have a 70% graduation rate which is higher than the 56% that South Carolina scores… and his diatribe about college health clinics and birth control… I don’t know if he’s he’s lost his mind or if he’s found his CPAC mojo… it’s so hard to tell the difference between the two.
thanks, Benton! really glad to have you here commenting. good stuff.
…and jen, you have a link to the 56% SC rate by any chance? might be useful later…
TO ALL,
MY NAME IS PATRICIA , I’M AN AFRICAN AMERICAN, WHO IS AFFENDED BY THE LEVEL OF DISREPECT THAT REPUBLICANS and rush the fat *** limbaugh HAS SHOWN OUR PRESIDENT, AND I WANT TO KNOW WHY DOESN’T RUSH THE FAT **** LIMBAUGH DOESN’T LIKE BLACK PEOPLE.
WHY IN THIS DAY AND AGE IS HE A RACIST. I KNOW HIS RACIST GRANDFATHER MUST BE PROUD.
THE LEVEL OF DISRESPECT TO PRESIDENT IS DISGUSTING. THIS MAKES ME SO SICK, AND yet, i would like to know when are the black leaders going to do something about this.
SOME OF US IN BLACK COMMUNITY IS GEARING UP TO TAKE THIS MAN DOWN.
WE DO NOT LIKE WHAT HE’S SAYING AND HAVE SAID ABOUT OUR PRESIDENT OBAMA AND HIS DEAD MOTHER. WHY IS THIS MAN STILL ON THE AIR.
JUST WAIT AND SEE. RUSH LIMBAUGH IS NOT GOING TO KNOW, WHAT HIT HIM.
THE MAN IS TALKING ABOUT BARACK OBAMA’S DEAD MOTHER HOW DISGUSTING IS THAT?
BARACK THE MAGIC NEGRO.
THE REPUBLICANS ARE JUST AS MUCH AS A RACIST AS RUSH. IF I WAS MARRIED TO ANY OF THESE PEOPLE I WOULD BE EMBARRASED. BECAUSE THEY ACT JUST LIKE A BUNCH OF P****YS. SCARED TO SAY ANYTHING AGAINST THIS MAN.
SO WHEN YOU GUYS LAUGH AT THIS FOOL JUST REMEBER, THERE ARE MANY OF US FROM AND IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY, DON’T THINK THIS MESS IS FUNNY.
PEACE OUT
PATRICIA
Greg – Taking off on weekends now, eh? Times must be good at the Post! Anyway, enjoy your time off.
“I asked DeMint’s spokesperson, Wesley Denton, whether he agreed with it. He said No”
Yes, but Wesley Denton is a Republican. That means he’s lying.
Digby makes a good point re the Limbaugh story:
.
“But until Carville and Begala started tooting their own horns, Rush was on the losing end of this among the cognoscenti, which was a good wedge between the villagers and within the Republican party.”
Dan Froomkin at Nieman Watchdog writes on why Chas Freeman is getting targeted so fiercely by (mainly) the neoconservative crowd. Here’s an excerpt:
.
Q. How does America compare to the rest of the world – really?
Freeman’s view: The press has inadvertently aided and abetted a kind of national complacency and smugness that contributes to the kind of hubris that has gotten us into trouble in Iraq, for example.
There are virtually no international comparisons stated in the press. You read that the American health system is causing GM and Ford to go under, and that 45 million Americans are uninsured, but you don’t hear about how the World Health Organization ranks the United States 37th in terms of the quality of health care, just barely ahead of Cuba; or that we spend twice as much as Canadians on health care but they manage to cover everyone and provide a higher quality overall. Our high school students think they’re the best in the world, but in fact they’re at the bottom of the pack internationally…
more here: http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=179
Nice digs over here, Greg. I like the simple line drawing in your header. Just to pick nits — Marcy made the nice catch before lunch with a more direct headline: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/06/justice-ginsburg-to-senator-bunning-screw-you/
I realize my handicap, but I couldn’t find a link to either The Plume Line or Who Runs Gov on washingtonpost.com — not even through a search. I thought beta meant your in the database system. What am I missing?
I’m wayyyy behind on this Chas Freeman story. But it is bloody interestng. The one point I might add to everything else others are addressing is what caught my eye in the passage I quoted above. That is, Freeman’s rather rare grasp of how American exceptionalist mythologies facilitate seriously distorted views of militarist adventures, corporate hegemony, and any number of other ugly aspects to America’s footprint in the world, and how it it inhibits honest and clear-headed internal discourse on America and how it relates to the rest of the world. This is most acutely so with rightwing and conservative groups.
I’ve been involved for a decade now in discussing American politics on boards with a large international representation and it’s not uncommon at all to find Europeans and Canadians quite flabbergasted by this phenomenon.
As I read the bio and notes on Freeman (bloody good job, greg!) I found it completely unsurprising that he had been raised outside of the country. That is not necessary, of course, to achieve an objective sense of America but it can definintely help.
Hey Gary — thx much, appreciate it. I hope you’ll hang here and comment as much as you’d like…
re links from wapo.com, we’re kind of a separate crew from wapo.com, though you can access us through wapo.com’s Fed Page…
re firedoglake, hadn’t seen that, thx for sending it in…
DeMint really doesn’t like public schools, imo. South Carolina republicans are trying very hard to destroy the public schools.
see http://stophowardrichsc.blogspot.com/
“Sen. DeMint might also want to look into another dangerous problem growing in South Carolina’s schools: the rise of racial re-segregation, in part due to the growth of private schools.”
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/03/sen-demint-focus-on-schools-in-south-carolina.html
read the broohaha he created in his 2004 election
“DeMint was taken to task for comments he made that homosexuals and unmarried, pregnant women should not teach in public schools.”
http://www.ontheissues.org/Archive/SC_Senate_Civil_Rights.htm
i just hope that someone good – great – will step up to run against him for the 2010 race and beats him.
This ought to be fun. Gingrich takes on Rush… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/08/gingrich-takes-on-rush-ho_n_172852.html