September 23, 2012 – RI Future

doherty_points14 — Brendan Doherty pointing – again

Brendan Doherty recently put out a tv spot titled “Gotta Be Kidding Me.” In the ad, Doherty claims that politicians in both parties find it tough to cut wasteful government spending, which he eloquently follows up with “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Those guys don’t know what tough is.” Doherty then talks about fighting crime and says, “After fighting real criminals, these guys in Washington don’t scare me one bit.”

Which “guys” (no gals?) is Doherty referring to? Has it slipped his mind that Republicans control the House? One would hope that he’s not too scared of his fellow Republicans.

But, I agree with Brendan Doherty that we should indeed be scared of the Republicans who have been running the House. Those “guys” want to repeal Obamacare, continue the war against women, end Medicare as we know it, and want to keep giving tax breaks to the rich. That’s exactly why we shouldn’t send Brendan Doherty, another Republican, to Washington.

Brendan Doherty, you’ve gotta be kidding us. You are one of “those guys” that you’re trying to warn us about. You’re in lockstep with the Republican agenda that aims to set our country back.

And by the way, Brendan, according to your own campaign website, government spending is down by $1,000,000,000 since last week and is still going down.

The anti-teachers’ union movie “Won’t Back Down” will soon come to Rhode Island pushing the concept of parent trigger laws, where 51% of parents can close down a public school.

“Won’t Back Down,” Diane Ravitch put it, “is a movie celebrating the ALEC-inspired ‘parent trigger, encouraging the public to think that parents should seize control of their public school, fire the staff, and hand the school over to a charter corporation.”

It stars Viola Davis, a product of the Central Falls schools. Shame on her for pushing propaganda, exaggerations and untruths about life in a public school, especially in the city where Commissioner Gist and Central Fall’s Superintendent Gallo fired the teachers in 2010.

The movie is full of misrepresentations, such as saying several times that the union forbids teachers from staying in the school where they teach after 3 p.m. This is factually untrue. In fact there was a new study done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession that stated teachers work 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week!

I encourage you to read Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post article explaining the survey and the hours teachers put in beyond the regular school day.

Leonie Haimson, a New York parent activist and co founder of Parents Across America, says the movie’s plot regarding parent takeover has no resemblance to reality and that parent trigger has a 100 percent failure rate and has pitted parents against parents. Interesting since Michelle Rhee and her school-reformer friends use techniques to pit teachers against teachers.

As Fall comes upon us tomorrow officially, there will be many movies for you to go and see. Don’t let this propaganda film for corporate profit makers be one of them…Don’t get caught up in the hype. Don’t let your movie money support such a misleading movie. Support your teachers by avoiding this corporate school reform distortion message. Don’t let the corporate rich and school reformers like Rhee, Jindal, Chris Christie, Mayor Bloomberg , Gates, Murdoch & others fool you into believing this anti union movie for that is exactly what it is…..

Day: September 23, 2012

Doherty Must Be Kidding

Truth About Anti-Union Movie ‘Won’t Back Down’