Poor President Obama. He's being attacked by a bunch of well funded opportunists who'd love to get him fired. They say he's ineffective, he's lacking rigor, he can't be trusted and the country is falling behind the rest of the world under his failing leadership. And as long as Obama's in their way they can't give the country back to their wealthy friends to make more wealth for themselves at the expense of people whose wealth has "no there there" to borrow a phrase. Yes friends bitter irony that it may be, the most likely people left in 'Merica to feel the POTUS' pain about now are the same public school teachers whose votes he courted sending Joe Biden to Chicago both ears stuffed with cotton to drown out the "Stop Race to the Top" chants. Joe smiled and nodded and didn't say anything too outrageous. Some dopes from the nefarious DNC umbrella group calling itself NEA waved little flags, grinning in doltish wonder clad in their snappy free t shirts emblazoned with the deliciously oxymoronic epigram "Educators for Obama." They posed with Joe Biden before he returned to the beltway and assured his boss that all was well in the hometown and the dumbass union teachers were in line. When the votes were all counted in November Barack Obama smiled and said Kiss My Diverse Ass, I'm the Reformer in Chief now. A brief footnote : if you are in possession of now or have ever owned any legible article printed with "Educators for Obama" please resign at your first possible opportunity as you are far too stupid to be left alone with children.
A poll on Monday said more than 50% of Republicans want Obama impeached for the "Bungle in Benghazi." That's funny because corporate backed "ed reformers" want to see teachers fired too for reasons about as ethereal and illogical as those Obama's foes are using. So far they've convened 3 committees on Benghazi. The findings all seem to show the same things and none of it is really much more than a movie of the week script. Kind of the same way the magic bullet to public education "charter schools" only do better than public schools in one out of three cases. Why don't people want to talk about that? Well President Obama is being accused of redacting the talking points given to his spokesperson when she was trotted out to explain the Benghazi attack. Some estimates say these talking points went through 12 revisions. Obama's explanation is that the information was revised as it became updated and more was learned about the attack. The story was fluid. His detractors say he wanted the words Al Qaeda expunged because bin Laden was dead and nobody needed to hear that Al Qaeda still had the capability to hit American assets even if they were in a dangerous place like Libya. Maybe it's a little of both and very likely some political considerations were in play less than 60 days before an election. But Impeachment? Over that? Really? It's almost as crazy as the strategy the "reformers" and their billionaire friends are trying to use to get rid of teachers. They want to use high stakes test scores created by Pearson among others. Pearson hasn't been able to fulfill its contract with New York State in the first 2 of a five year $35 million deal. Last year an entire section had to be thrown out as the questions made no sense and the reading passage was said by the author to be pure nonsense and nothing that kids should ever have been tested on. They also had some questions with multiple correct answers and some with no correct answers. They asked questions of kids from the wrong grade levels which they did again this year too. Pearson also miscorrected a Gifted and Talented test in New York City that told many parents of G&T kids sorry but your kid is neither. The errors only came to light when parents got to see the tests and found the mistakes. Pearson made the state sign a contract this year promising no nosy parents or students or God forbid teachers would get to see this year's standardized Math and ELA exams. The state went along with it. Public education mind you but the state and a private corporation have an exclusive deal that keeps parents, teachers and students from seeing the tests or the results. Oh yeah, and the state wants to use the results of these tests to determine if a teacher is "ineffective" or not. Get rated "ineffective with the help of these tests for two years and the state will have you terminated.
As our betrayer in Chief said just the other day of his own dire situation, faced with well funded idealogues whose noise machine of pandemonium drowns out a reasoned response at every turn : "the whole thing defies logic." You got that right Mr. President. It absolutely defies logic. And in the end I guess it doesn't really matter who's buying the rope for the lynch mob whether it's Rupert Murdoch, Karl Rove or Shelly Adelson or in our case Bill and Melinda Gates of Hell, The Dead Janitor Insurance Carrying Waltons or Pretty Penny Pritzker the grand dame of Chicago ed reform who'd decided to be Secretary of Commerce instead of letting Rahmbo funnel her some more education money to build another Hyatt Hotel. The game is the same once they have you up the tree. So shove over Mr. President you've got some pretty good company there on your executive branch, I just wonder how long it's going to hold all of us.
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