Here's wishing everyone a peaceful and happy holiday!! While an occasional post may occur, the nuggets will not be daylee again until the 29th.
The Captive Arab Mind (Roger Cohen) from the New York Times
"What we are dealing with here is the paltry harvest of captive minds. Such minds resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world. While I was in Beirut this month, the conspiratorial world view was in overdrive…"
How America Can Create Jobs (Andy Grove) from Businessweek
Andy Grove was one of the founders of Intel. He makes some very important observations here.
"Thomas L. Friedman 's argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups. Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter. The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S."
Some Now See Obama as the 'Comeback Kid' from the Christian Science Monitor
"For a guy who took a 'shellacking' in the midterm elections six weeks ago, President Obama is doing pretty well during this lame-duck political period. Still, his approval rating keeps dropping."
So Far, A Productive Lame-Duck Session (Chris Good) from the Atlantic
"In the face of an onerous legislative docket and partisan tones emanating from all corners of the political sphere, Congress has actually managed to resolve most of the large, immediate issues that came before it in the last few weeks of 2010. This lame-duck session, it turns out, is what a functioning Congress looks like."
Congress Recognizes a Cultural Shift from Politico
"In a landmark series of votes Saturday, the Senate officially recognized a historic change in American public opinion — that in just 17 years, the ban on openly gay men and women serving in the military went from being seen as a necessary compromise to keep peace between two sides in the culture war to a baffling and unnecessary relic of another era."
How to be President in a Fact-Free America (Gary Younge) from the Nation
"The sad truth is that even when presented with concrete and irrefutable evidence, some people still prefer the reality they want over the one they actually live in. Herein lies one of the central problems of engaging with those on the American right. Cocooned in their own mediated ecosystem, many of them are almost unreachable through debate; the air is so fetid, reasonable discussion cannot breathe. You can't win an argument without facts, and we live in a moment when whether you're talking about climate change or WMD, facts seem to matter less and less."
While I agree with Younge's critique of the right, I think he misses the importance of non-ideological pragmatic voters in the center who WILL determine who's in the White House after 2012.
The "Don't Ask" Repeal Vote (Michael Tomasky) from the Guardian [of the UK]
"…a moment like Saturday's has a thousand fathers. … A thousand fathers; and one president. No, Barack Obama didn't do this with the stroke of a pen, as he could have. But he and Robert Gates settled on a strategy that brought many career military people around and that worked."
Pope Says Sex Scandal Has Hit Unimaginable Dimension from the New York Times
"Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday that the continuing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church had reached a “degree we could not have imagined” this year, and that the Church must reflect on its failures, help the victims, and prevent abusers from becoming priests."
This actually sounds like someone finally getting into reality about the scale and scope of the problem he and the church face right now. But he needs to bring his response (and responsiveness) to a whole new level if he is ever to deal with the problem effectively.
Why Is Charles Krauthammer Scared of Obama? (Jacob Heilbrunn) from the National Interest
"Judging by this column, Charles Krauthammer is terrified of President Obama. Where some see a president who has capitulated to his ideological foes, Krauthammer, by contrast, detects a nefarious Obama whose cunning has set a trap for the GOP on tax and spending policy."
John Boehner's Tea Party Nightmare (Benjamin Sarlin) from the Daily Beast
"The incoming House speaker rode a Tea Party wave into the majority, but a debt-limit vote as early as next month could cost him their backing. Benjamin Sarlin on the battle that can’t come soon enough for Democrats."
Haley Barbour's Racist Civil Rights Era Revisionism (Joan McCarter) from Daily Kos
"Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a strategy for beating Sarah Palin to the teabaggers' support in the 2012 primaries. Digby calls it his "Southern Strategy," consisting of a the dogwhistle message that "racism in America was always overblown with the implication being that those who complain about it have always been whiners." That includes telling The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson that the White Supremacist Citizens' Council was actually a force for good in the Civil Rights fight."
Normally I don't link to Daily Kos's run-of-the-mill complaining about the GOP -- but this summary of how Barbour is positioning himself is quite revealing and suggests, I suspect, a larger trend within the Republican Party as it happily sheds any vestige of moderation or pragmatism. Soon they'll be planning screenings of "Birth of a Nation" at the Republican National Convention and calling it great history!
Whitman Paid a High Price for Latino Distrust of GOP from the Los Angeles Times
"A former strategist says the candidate lost so conclusively because her party continues to alienate the state's fastest-growing voter group."
A Course Correction: UMass Tackles Challenge of Crowded Classes, Smaller Faculty from the Boston Globe
A big excerpt is warranted here. What they're describing here forecasts what will be coming to many state universities very soon.
"Overbooked classes are among the academic hurdles many undergraduates face at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — a campus struggling to break into the top ranks of public universities after losing nearly a fifth of its tenured and tenure-track professors in the past two decades. Classes at the flagship campus can be so large that some students sit on the floor in lecture halls, leaning against their backpacks, the walls, or the legs of fellow classmates. Nine percent of all classes have more than 100 students — compared with a national average of 2 percent, according to a College Board analysis of public universities. Faculty lament that they have little choice but to evaluate students in oversize classes by multiple-choice exams and use computers to grade homework Some professors have made attendance at lectures optional, offering as an alternative prerecorded lessons over the Internet, which allows the university to serve many more students than would fit into an auditorium. Some students have even received letters from their departmental advisers suggesting that they take classes at other colleges to improve their odds of graduating in four years. … State funding makes up 25 percent of UMass Amherst’s revenues today, down from 40 percent in 2000. And Holub expects that the state’s budget difficulties will lead to more than $18 million in cuts next year."
Read that last line again. To reiterate: coming to a state university near you. I look at this as the problem that has been slowly destroying our k-12 public schools for 20+ years is now moving up to our public colleges and universities. We want the best -- but GOD FORBID that we should raise taxes to actually pay for good educations for our children. Better to just cut those wasteful education budgets. Young people will just have to deal.
MOVIE NUGGET!!
Time Capsule of a Decade: Top Ten Films (Leonard Maltin) from the Huffington Post
"Having scanned my own ten-best lists since 2000, I have chosen ten movies that represent a panoply of significant (and varied) achievements: these pictures spoke to audiences when they were new and still resonate today. "
Leonard is THE MAN when it comes to movie reviews!
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