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It turns out that "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" is a passionate defense of our nation's public schools, a national treasure that Ms. Ravitch believes is "intimately connected to our concepts of citizenship and democracy and to the promise of American life." She issues a warning against handing over educational policy decisions to private interests, and criticizes misguided government policies that have done more harm than good. Ideas such as choice, utilizing a "business model" structure, accountability based on standardized tests and others, some favored by the left, others by the right are deemed as less, often much less, than advertised. Ms. Ravitch doesn't oppose charters, but rather feels that the structure itself doesn't mandate success. As in conventional schools, there will be good ones and bad ones. But charters must not be allowed to cream off the best students, or avoid taking the most troubled, as has been alleged here in New York City. Here main point, however, is broader. "It is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing educational policy to be directed, or one might say, captured by private foundations," Ms. Ravitch notes. She suggests that there is "something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public educational policy to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people." However well intended the effort, the results, in her telling, have not been impressive, in some cases doing more harm than good.

According to this CONSERVATIVE and BUSH Assistant Secretary of Education, "No Child Left Behind" is destroying one of the great social "glues" of America - its public school system. Of course, not only Bush and the Republicans are to blame, Democrats went along with NCLB on the "promise" of extra federal funding for implementing it AND supporting American public schools. That was funding that never materialized due to our other great national priority - making corporate cronies rich via the war in Iraq (and hoping to make the oil companies richer there as well, but apparently failing miserably to do so ... so far). NCLB could have been suspended when that happened, but strangely (NOT!) Bush and the Republican controlled Congress conveniently forgot their promise (perhaps because NCLB unfunded was more like no teachers union left un-destroyed!?). More from http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/entertainment/la-ca-diane-ravitch28-2010feb28 on this book - Diane Ravitch, probably this nation's most respected historian of education and long one of our most thoughtful educational conservatives, has changed her mind -- and changed it big time. Ravitch's critical guns are still firing, but now they're aimed at the forces of testing, accountability and educational markets, forces for which she was once a leading proponent and strategist. As President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, embrace charter schools and testing, picking up just where, in her opinion, the George W. Bush administration left off, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" may yet inspire a lot of high-level rethinking. The book, titled to echo Jane Jacobs' 1961 demolition of grandiose urban planning schemes, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," has similarly dark warnings and equally grand ambitions. Ravitch -- the author of "Left Back" and other critiques of liberal school reforms, an assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration and a

qt: Chavez called the foundation of CELAC an achievement 200 years in the making, the realisation of the ambitions of independence hero Simon Bolivar. "'Only unity will make us free,' Chavez said to applause at the opening ceremony. 'This is the path: Unity, unity, unity!'" "Usually all these countries, whenevever they would have met, it would have been the US and Canada. This is the first time they're doing it without these two countries, and their aim is to foster regional integration."

The Spanish government wants a three-man US army tank crew to stand trial for the death of cameraman Jose Couso in Baghdad in 2003. Couso was killed on April 8

There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.

An anonymous cadet at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA ) spoke out against alleged religious discrimination at the school last week, saying that some cadets must pretend to be evangelical Christians in order to maintain standing among their peers and superiors. In an email to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the whistleblower stated that he is part of an "underground group" of about 100 cadets who cannot rely on proper channels to confront evangelical pressure.

"Congressional budget referees say Senate legislation that's now the foundation for President Barack Obama's health care plan would cut the federal deficit by $118 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says the $875 billion, 10-year plan would provide coverage to 31 million people who'd otherwise be uninsured. And it says the cost would be more than offset in savings from changes in Medicare and other programs."

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

Assuming philosophy should be relevant to the way we choose to live our lives, three questions guide this paper. What are some moral foundations for revolution? Do you realize what is happening? Are you willing to do anything about it?

Ken Schultz, a political scientist at Stanford, was inspired by the misleading Wall Street Journal graphic and disappeared Tax Foundation blog post to illustrate just how easy it is to manipulate bar graphs by changing the boundaries of the bins:

This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home - first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest. Last month, protesters disrupted BART service in response to the fatal shooting of Charles Blair Hill by BART police on July 3rd. Thursday's protest failed to materialize, possibly because the disruption of cell phone service made organization and coordination difficult.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is well into its second week of operation, and is now getting more attention from media as well as from people planning similar actions across the country. This is a promising populist mobilization with a clear message against domination by political and economic elites. Against visions of a bleak and stagnant future, the occupiers assert the optimism that a better world can be made in the streets. They have not resigned themselves to an order where the young are presented with a foreseeable future of some combination of debt, economic dependency, and being paid little to endure constant disrespect, an order that tells the old to accept broken promises and be glad to just keep putting in hours until they can't work anymore. The occupiers have not accepted that living in modern society means shutting up about how it functions. In general, the occupiers see themselves as having more to gain than to lose in creating a new political situation - something that few who run the current system will help deliver. They are not eager for violence, and have shown admirable restraint in the face of attack by police. There may be no single clear agenda, but there is a clear message: that people will have a say in their political and economic lives, regardless of what those in charge want. Occupy Wall Street is a kind of protest that Americans are not accustomed to seeing. There was no permit to protest, and it has been able to keep going on through unofficial understandings between protestors and police. It is not run by professional politicians, astroturfers, or front groups with barely-hidden agendas. Though some organizations and political figures have promoted it, Occupy Wall Street is not driven by any political party or protest organization. It is a kind of protest that shows people have power when they are determined to use it. Occupy Wall Street could be characterized as an example of a new type of mass politics, which has been seen in

Gilens examines the extent to which different social groups find their policy preferences reflected in actual government policy and the variation in these patterns across time and policy domains. For example, when Americans with low and high incomes disagree on policy, are policy outcomes more likely to reflect the preferences of affluent Americans? If so, does the advantage of more affluent Americans differ over time (e.g., depending on which party controls the congress and presidency) or across policy domains? Similarly, are Republicans or Democrats in the population more likely to get the policies they prefer when their party is in control of national political institutions? Because his database contains policy preferences broken down by income, education, partisanship, sex, race, region, religion, and union/non-union status, Gilens will be able to address a multitude of questions concerning government responsiveness to public preferences. For this study, Gilens uses data on public preferences and policy outcomes based on 754 national survey questions from 1992 through 1998 and restrict his attention to divergent policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans. Each of these survey questions asks respondents whether they support or oppose some proposed change in U.S. national policy, and he has used historical information sources to determine whether each proposed change occurred or not (within a four-year coding window from the date of the survey question). When Gilens looks separately at respondents with different incomes, he finds that the higher an individual's income, the more likely it is that government policy will reflect his or her preferences. This relationship, however, does not increase in a linear fashion: the difference between poor and middle-income Americans is modest compared with the difference between those with middle and high incomes. In other words, it is not that the poor are especially less likely than middle-income Americans to get

Maula - An appeal by Mir Khalil ur Rehman Foundation for Swat Victims

The current high debt can only be resolved through a properly timed debt default, controlled bankruptcy, and mass restructuring in order to create: 1) an industrial base for post-default recovery2) aggressive drive to court foreign investment It is highly unlikely that American power elites will be able to successfully restructure while preserving large parts of both the political and economic architecture. That is due to 2009 economic foundations being drastically different than in 1870s, 1930s, or 1950s.

Whether you manufacture a product or are in the service sector - a private organization or a government agency - ISO is a fundamental business model. It is the foundation from which to build an enterprise. It focuses attention on organizational processes, your customers (internal and external), competency-based training, and continual improvement. That translates to improved business results.

Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose.1 In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to several important public policy priorities: