Abe Sauer at the Awl offers Saul Alinsky's Lesser Known Rules for Radicals, including
Never wear black with brown.
You can never go wrong blaming the media. Don't worry about alienating them. They are deranged cannibals and will always come back for more.
If it's your first demonstration, you must toss back the tear gas.
I would add
"Hey hey, ho ho, (object of protest) has got to go" has, itself, got to go
Others?
Reader "Holly" writes:
Did you know Hillary's senior thesis was on Alinsky, and she has prevented it from being released ever since she came to prominence?
Well, that furtive Mrs. Clinton is no match for my Google-Fu! I found a .pdf image file of her thesis and a text-based .pdf file of her thesis generated using optical-character recognition software.
Some industrious soul ought to use that OCR version to generate a plain-text file to make sure that the secret thesis gets maximum exposure.
UPDATE -- Someone did. Reader Garry Jaffe did the yeoman's work, so here is the thesis in a downloadable Word document
David Sirota calls rubbish on the popular claim that America “has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need" and that's why so many companies have moved their plants overseas:
China’s super-low wages and nonexistent labor, environmental and human rights protections are shown over and over again to be the driving force behind American corporate offshoring, and yet the conclusion is nonetheless that the problem for America is our education system.
As for the equally feeble claim that it's all about the supply chain dynamics -- that companies re-locate manufacturing overseas because that puts their facilities close to factories that make the parts they need...
That is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. ....There’s no empirical, data-based reason to believe that improving our schools would reverse the trend of America losing high-tech jobs to slave-labor nations like China. Without a change in tax and tariff-free trade policies that economically incentivize companies like Apple to keep moving production to cheap labor havens overseas, the only “education” that will bring those jobs back is the kind that indoctrinates high-tech American workers to compete with Chinese workers by accepting the horrific labor conditions those Chinese workers experience.
In light of recent news that Illinois courtrooms will begin allowing in cameras on a limited, experimental basis, reader Lois writes: " I'd be interested in knowing how you and your readers feel about it."
I'm enthusiastic. I believe the principle of an open legal system demands access to the proceedings that is as wide as technologically and financially feasible.
Protect the identity of jurors and certain witnesses, of course, and preserve the calm of the courtroom. But yes.
You?
On (Sunday's) "Chris Matthews Show," panelist Kathleen Parker claimed that Mitt Romney has “give[n] away “42 percent of his income, compared to Obama, who gave away 1 percent to charity.”...but if you do the exact same math on the Obamas’ tax return for 2010, you find that the Obamas paid out 46.25 percent of their income.....Media Matters
From Death of bipartisanship has killed the Washington deal by John F. Harris and Jonathan Allen in Politico:
The striking fact about Washington at the start of 2012 is how many people, in public and private, say they have concluded that the capital is no longer a city of splittable differences....This conclusion represents a painful falling to earth. Obama’s 2008 message was built on the idea that Washington governance had become irrational — distorted by the mad dash of politicians for publicity and momentary tactical advantage — and that his brand of cool rationality could bridge divides and restore order
The idea that your side gives a little, our side gives a little, we meet in the middle with a deal we can all live with is gone, the authors contend. In its place is a stubborn, relentless gamesmanship in which the next election, just around the corner, will provide our side with just that much more leverage to get that much more of what we want, so we'd be fools to cave in to dreaded compromise now.
The correct response to Washington gridlock, by this reckoning, is not private deal-making but a public clash over core beliefs. Most Republicans don’t believe in raising taxes and would rather fight than split the difference. Most Democrats don’t believe benefits like Medicare should be cut or turned over to the states and are more than ready to take the argument to voters.
The article quotes Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel:
What the markets want, and what the world wants, is decisive action. That comes with single-party governance.
Yet voters do tend to reward the candidate that promises to be more of a uniter than a divider, to recall a false promise from 2000.
The number of people (in Massachusetts) with employer-based (health-insurance) coverage rose to 68 percent of the adult population in 2010 from 64.4 percent four years earlier. This is exactly the opposite of what many business groups are claiming will happen after the national reform goes into effect in 2014..... the state is doing much better than average in terms of affordability. And it leads the nation in terms of access to insured care for its citizens....from Massachusetts Miracle: Romney’s Health Care Reform Plan Works by Merrill Goozner
This could be quite strange if Mitt Romney gets the nomination:
Democrats: The Republican candidate for president had a really good idea and instituted a program he should be proud of.
Republicans: Like hell he did!
Sunday, Carol Marin devoted her Sun-Times column to echoing the call for President Obama to let Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tap in for Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket this fall:
There are still close friends of Obama and Clinton who are quietly arguing a switch needs to be made....
Optics matter.
In a White House dominated by men — chiefs of staff, press spokesmen and advisers — Hillary Clinton pops out like a red dress in a sea of black suits.
Moreover, she deserves another shot at the top slot in 2016.
And the vice presidency is a way to position that.
As one, the insiders say it ain't going to happen. But it looks likely to me that Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee and that he'll name the dynamic young Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as his running mate, meaning Obama may want to make a bold, exciting move of his own.
Earlier:
Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City, a paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research, Will Dobbie and Roland Freyer of Harvard, analyze 35 charter schools looking for what works in the classroom:
Apropos of education, via Salon comes the five biggest lies about "school choice."We find that ...
class size— are not correlated with school effectiveness.
per pupil expenditure
the fraction of teachers with no certification
the fraction of teachers with an advanced degreeIn stark contrast, we show that...
frequent teacher feedback
the use of data to guide instruction
high-dosage tutoring
increased instructional time
high expectations-- explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.
Stuff Liz Lemon says:
("Saul Alinsky" is) foreign sounding, Russian or Polish or something Middle European. That kind of folks could never be trusted anyway. He's probably Jewish, and we know all about how those Jews are. We're all for Israel, but we don't like the Jews...David Alinsky, Saul's son, channeling what he believes to be the inner thoughts of conservative voters who hear Newt Gingrich invoking the name "Saul Alinsky" during speehes. Quoted by Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader.
Newt Minow, that is. The famed Chicagoan and former FCC chair has penned an essay for Politico, "Lower the curtain on debate audience" in which he argues:
Audiences at debates should remain silent while the event is broadcast — so the audience at home can benefit from the undiluted opportunity to see the candidates head on.
I'd go further: Send the audiences home.
Why should there be spectators in the studio for candidate debates? What, aside from a handful of questions, do they add to the exchange of ideas? How, aside from artificially muzzling them, do organizers guard against outbursts by backers of one candidate skewing the perceptions of the home viewing audience about the effectiveness or import of a particular statement?
Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast envisioning what President Obama will say to former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney about health care reform if Romney is the GOP nominee for president:
Governor, if you’re going around bragging about how many Bay Staters your plan ensured, how in the world can you criticize my plan, which will do exactly the same thing? And don’t give us that you-didn’t-raise-taxes line. The only reason you didn’t is that you didn’t have to, because your friend and mine, Ted Kennedy, got the funding wired in Washington...the federal government paid for about half of it ($385 million, largely in Medicaid money).
Meanwhile, this data-point from the Washington Post's WonkBlog:
In Massachusetts, and in the federal health-reform law, the fine for not purchasing insurance tends to be much lower than the cost of purchasing a plan. So it makes sense that you would see a lot of free riders, individuals who don’t purchase coverage, pay the fine and then rely on the emergency room if they fall ill. Santorum claimed that “free-ridership has gone up fivefold in Massachusetts because people are ready to pay a cheaper fine … rather than pay for high-cost insurance.” Here’s one reason we don’t hear much about free-riding in discussions of Massachusetts health reform: It’s barely happening. About 0.6 percent of Bay State adults under 65 paid a fine for not carrying health insurance in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue.
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