Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
Sorry for the late notice, but right now (6pm) there’s a panel discussion ongoing about the lawsuit Demand Progress is helping fund in opposition to the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act which seem to permit the military to detain citizens indefinitely without charge or trial.
I’m on the panel along with several others who are more interesting, including Pentagon Papers whistle blower (and plaintiff in the lawsuit) Daniel Ellsberg. You can listen live here.
Yay! Another win for the Internet. The cyber-security bill just failed to receive enough support in the Senate to proceed to a final vote.
The legislation was a mess for privacy, though it was getting better because of the hard work of activists and a core group of pro-privacy senators — you can click here to say thanks to them.
To be fair, the opposition was a mix of pro-Internet senators and right-wing Repubs who didn’t like the regulation of ‘critical infrastructure’ (utilities and such) and people who thought that there was too much privacy protection.
So this definitely doesn’t mean that we have a clear majority of senators who support privacy/Internet freedom. But a win’s a win! And here’s a press release:
DEMAND PROGRESS HAILS DEMISE OF CYBER-SECURITY LEGISLATION, URGES INTERNET USERS TO THANK SENATORS WHO STOOD UP FOR PRIVACYContacts: David Segal, (401) 499-5991 and david@demandprogress.orgDavid Moon (202) 427-7966 and moon@demandprogress.orgWashington, DC: Million-member activist group Demand Progress hailed the demise of the Senate cyber-security bill today. In recent months, members of the civil liberties and Internet freedom organization had sent more than 500,000 emails to the Senate urging lawmakers to stand up for Internet freedom and privacy as they debated cyber-security bills.“There’s a newly empowered base of Internet activists across the United States, and alongside us stands a newly-strengthened corps of pro-privacy senators whom we look forward to working with to fight any future attacks on the Internet,” said Demand Progress executive director David Segal. ”We’re grateful for their hard work to protect our privacy as the cyber-security bill was debated, and ask rank-and-file Internet users to thank them and encourage them to work with us down the road — we’ll surely need their help again.”Internet users can sign a thank-you note to Senators Al Franken (MN), Ron Wyden (OR), Bernie Sanders (VT) and others by visiting:Even prior to the bill’s demise, grassroots activism has helped compel modifications to the legislation which made it far preferable to earlier drafts and to the House cyber-security bill (CISPA) which passed earlier this year. These changes included affirming that control of cyber-security data will remain in the hands of civilian agencies, that said data’s only allowable uses will be for cyber-security purposes or to prevent imminent threats, and others. But privacy activists remained concerned about potential for the legislation to allow companies to monitor their users’ data.Demand Progress is an activism organization with more than one million members which works to promote civil rights, civil liberties, and democratic government reforms.
Looking for ways to attract businesses? Improve education. Want to reduce crime? Improve education. Open opportunities? Education.
The key to improving our state is reinvigorating our public schools—especially schools that serve urban or lower-income communities.
Businesses say they want educated workers. Executives and employees want to send their children to good schools.
According to the Rhode Island State Constitution,
The diffusion of knowledge, as well as of virtue among the people, being essential to the preservation of their rights and liberties, it shall be the duty of the general assembly to promote public schools and public libraries, and to adopt all means which it may deem necessary and proper to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education and public library services.
—RI Constitution, Article XII
A dozen years ago, during the brief time I was a stay-at-home dad, all the conversation on the playground was about schools. What are you going to do? Keep them in Preschool another year? Send them to private school? Everybody thought I was crazy for enrolling my kids in the Providence public school system. Back then, so many young families were moving to the suburbs to find better schools for their kids.
I love the possibility and promise of public education. We, the people, will provide knowledge and wisdom to our children. Public education is both a civic duty and a civic adventure.
Public schools can be a powerful tool for long-term social and economic change. Public schools can give individuals the tools and skills to survive and grow and learn.
I believe that the goal of any education is to teach people how to learn, and encourage them to go beyond where they are likely to stop.
And my children have, for the most part, thrived. My kids have worked hard, and they’ve been lucky.
Despite Ted Kennedy’s best intentions, the No Child Left Behind law was a disaster. It effectively broke the schools, funneling money from teaching into the private sector in the form of testing, books, and tutoring. The bill required “progress” and defunding schools that were failing. Everybody’s job was on the line always. Suddenly everything that wasn’t academic was cut. No sports. Less music. Less art. Less recess.
Just more and more testing. Test test test test test.
The “Race to the Top” has somewhat mitigated the problem, but especially here in Rhode Island, we seem to be continuing with the test-test-test mentality.
Over the years that my children have been in the Providence public schools, I’ve seen the debilitating and endeadening results of the test-test-test method of evaluation. High stakes testing is still being used to evaluate the funding of schools and the performance of teachers.
My take on the results is biased and anecdotal, but very real for me.
I am a still “believer” in the possibilities of public schools, but all the (again anecdotal) evidence I’ve gathered points to the elimination of high stakes testing as the focus for funding and teacher evaluation.
As someone who spends a lot of time in schools, I have nothing but admiration for the women and men who spend their days educating our children. They spend long days being up in front of a room with two dozen or more rowdy youngsters.
Why can’t we just give teachers a curriculum (or even more powerfully, allow teachers themselves to develop a curriculum) and tell them, “Spend the rest of your career getting better at teaching these things?” Instead, the Federal laws change, the State laws change, the superintendents change, the curriculum changes, the testing changes, and the rules change.
One thing I do know, no matter what rubric or standards or measurements we use, all children will not learn at the same rate. Schools are not and can not be factories or assembly lines for knowledge.
The best experience my daughter had last year was when a graduate student from Brown University came into her classroom and led a poetry class. My daughter writes some of the most beautiful poetry with some of the worst spelling mistakes I’ve ever seen. I am truly thankful that this teacher didn’t correct her spelling—it would have crushed her creativity. Instead, she can fix the spelling herself, as she needs to. Or just enjoy the process of creating.
Yes, I believe that spelling is an important skill. But you also need to have something to say and be able to say it well.
The best a teacher can do is to help each individual student learn as much as they can learn, and encourage them to learn more.
This is a work in progress. I want to hear from you.
I just received a second copy of a questionnaire from RI-CAN. In the email, they wrote:
The attached survey is due back tomorrow, August 3rd. Note that unreturned surveys will be marked “refused.”
—RI-CAN
This was in my reply to them:
I found the either-or choices that you offered in this survey to be both limiting and manipulative. These are complex issues, and are you in/out votes reduce the process. Additionally, the threat that if this questionnaire was not returned it would be marked as “refused” is unworthy of the political process. The NRA also promised that if I didn’t return their survey they would mark me as “possibly hostile to Second Ammendment rights.”
I realize that you support charter schools. I support children.
—Mark Binder
Chick-fil-A, perhaps the only fast food chain whose politics are more disgusting than its food, presents an interesting example of how people perceive political hot potatoes differently.
Those on the left focus on the bigoted views of the Christian fundamentalist owners who don’t believe in marriage equality. And those on the right tend to zero in on the punishment being threatened by elected officials for the business’ intolerance toward same sex couples.
It’s a fast ball down the middle for anyone interested in presenting a complicated social issue as being more nuanced than simply good or bad, right or wrong.
But that’s not the tack the Providence Journal took when its editorial board decided to tackle the issue. The Projo rightly called out pols who would punish Chic-fil-A for its bigoted views. Unfortunately it wrongly neglected to mention anything about Chick-fil-A’s bigoted views.
Here at RI Future, where we vehemently support marriage equality and often purposely focus ire at those who don’t, we did a better job at showing both sides of this issue! Something is seriously amiss with the marketplace of ideas when a left wing blog presents both sides better than the statewide daily newspaper. (In the Projo’s defense, the paper did run at least one AP story on the issue. Forgive me for not linking to it, but they’ve made it pretty hard to find).
If you’re interested, here’s a much better perspective on the issue.
Homer Simpson, in his infinite wisdom, once famously declared alcohol “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” The same might be said of anonymous comments on blogs: the potential solution to, but often instead the cause of, all of digital journalism’s issues.
Both alcohol and anonymous comments are superfluous to a healthy diet, but can add a lot of texture and value to a meal or a post. Unfortunately, they also run the gamut from delicious to destructive. I’m prone to indulge in them both until their evils outweigh their benefits.
Such, I think, has become the case with RI Future’s most prolific commenter who goes by the moniker Right To Work. His contributions have long been mean-spirited, misleading and uninformed, but yesterday when they became potentially libelous (ED NOTE: after much debate, this commenter and I agreed that I would retract the statement about the comment being potentially libelous) he crossed a line that shouldn’t be tolerated – especially given how frequently we needed to remind him that he had again run afoul of our house rules.
But silencing someone, for whatever reason, is no small action. If you’re in the business of disseminating information, like RI Future is, it deserves both careful consideration as well as a diligent disclosure as to why.
First off, I should remind everyone that no one has a First Amendment right to speak wherever they wanted. If we did, I would sue the New York Times for not running my stuff on its front page. RTW has plenty of places he can spew his hate, so I’m not at all worried about violating his rights.
On the contrary, it’s him violating the rights of others I’m worried about.
In his incessant and constant attempts to smear the left on RI Future, he likened local teachers’ unions officials to murderous mobsters. A statement not nearly as libelous as it is ridiculous but not at all a risk worth given it meets both thresholds. I’ve personally warned RTW on several occasions to attack ideas rather than people. Like you’d expect of a four-year-old, he would counter that others were guilty as well. (And here I was thinking that a component of conservative values was personal responsibility. Guess not as far as RTW is concerned.)
Furthermore, the Spokesman-Review in Tacoma, Wash. is being sued for defending the anonymity of an equally ridiculous and potentially-libelous comment that appeared in their comment section, reports NPR. It’s worth noting that if RTW thinks I would protect his anonymity he is putting more stock in my journalistic principles than he claims to in his comments.
That alone is reason enough to delete his account. But, sadly, there are other reasons.
RTW is the definitive internet troll. He comes to RI Future for no other reason than to besmirch our work and bemoan our ideas. Even the screen name he chose is a none-too-tacit fuck you to our product’s politics. His comments are often off-topic and off-color. They range from simple vitriol to misleading to patently false to debate damaging.
Which is too bad, because he seems to be one of the few conservatives willing to frequent our comments section. Open debate is definitely a progressive value, and I for one believe that the comments section of RI Future often boasts the best and most nuanced political debate in the local marketplace of ideas. Here’s hoping RI Future’s comments section can begin to attract a more intellectually honest foil (I’m looking at you, Jason Becker and Dawson Hodgson) and fewer like RTW.
Woonsocket’s diabolical DINO duo of Jon Brien and Lisa Baldelli-Hunt can claim all they want that their decision to block a city-saving supplemental tax bill wasn’t aimed in part at injuring organized labor, but both have drawn local firefighters as opponents in the upcoming election. My early-season prediction: Brien will win reelection and Baldelli-Hunt won’t. She made a lot of powerful enemies during the last legislative session…
Banks should not blight communities in order to boost their profits, and Providence – to its credit – is looking at ways to legislatively prevent them from doing so. “Called the vacant property registration ordinance, it would require out-of-state banks and all owners of vacant properties to register their properties and name a local agent who is responsible for internal and external maintenance and security,” reports the Projo.
More innovative government being practiced in Providence: Mayor Taveras is launching a neighborhood competition to see which one can recycle the most … the competition, he says, will raise revenue AND clean up the environment.
Good work by Ted Nesi to pick up on the diss Wall Street Journal editor David Wessel and NPR delved out to legendary Rhode Island journalist Jack White … the situation reminds me that history is written by the winners: would the error have gone unnoticed if the victim was Jim Taricani, who works for WJAR, a TV station without its own blogger?
So Mitt Romney likes individual mandates for Massachusetts AND Israel … seems the only times he doesn’t like them is when they benefit all Americans, which is an interesting way to run for president we think…
Anybody want to buy a lighthouse in Wickford?
There’s a push for cyber-security legislation in Congress this week and we have a chance to pressure our lawmakers to make sure that the legislation respects privacy rights and internet freedom. The House has already passed a bill, called CISPA, which had truly dreadful privacy implications: It would have trumped all existing online privacy protections, and allowed corporations to share your info with each other and the government — including the NSA and the military at large — with impunity.
The Senate version, as first presented, was almost as bad. But Senators Franken, Wyden, Sanders, backed by grassroots activists, did a great job of negotiating several pro-privacy changes and are pushing for more from the floor. ACLU discusses here, EFF here. We expect a battle led by surveillance proponents to strip most of those provisions.
Even if they’re maintained, the changes have made the bill better, but they haven’t made it good. The key amendment that’s going to be offered is sponsored by Al Franken and Rand Paul, and would strike language which allows companies to active monitor certain of customers’ communications.
This thing is a mess, and could actually still lose on the floor (or not achieve cloture). There’ll be no-votes on the final bill from 3 camps: privacy advocates who think the bill is bad, even with the amendments; the shills for the military industrial complex; and people who are voting with the Chamber of Commerce, as per their concerns about regulation of companies that run ‘critical infrastructure’ — utilities and that sort of thing.
Members of my group, Demand Progress, have generated more than 500,000 constituent contacts to the Senate so far. It remains unclear where Rhode Island’s delegation stands on the privacy amendments, so please join us: email your senators by clicking here. And you can . We can certainly win and protect the privacy provisions — and can maybe even beat this bill back all together.
