opinion
Democrats Spoofed by Tea Party
“challenging People to Shape
a Better Future now”
B ernie F oSter
Founder/Publisher
B oBBie d ore F oSter
executive editor
t ed B ankS
advertising Manager
J errY F oSter
account executive
l iSa l oving
news editor
h elen S ilviS
reporter
d avid k idd
graphic Designer
M onica J. F oSter
Seattle office Coordinator
J ulie k eeFe
S uSan F ried
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I
t is becoming increasingly
clear that President Obama and
Democrats need pressure from
within the party to force them to
stand their ground against the Tea
Party insurrection in Congress. As
was evident in the recent debt ceil-
ing fiasco, conservative House
Republicans have gravitated even
farther to the right because of pres-
sure from the Tea Party move-
ment. Democrats are being towed
along
kicking
and
screaming.
Well, screaming.
That’s why there is an urgent need
to form a Hot Chocolate Party to
force Democrats to start acting
like Democrats.
Democrats control the White
House and the Senate but they
don’t act like the party in control.
And that’s because they rarely
control anything, including their
own party members. The public
agenda is being driven by the Tea
Party, a small sect that has become
so powerful that its members
forced an embarrassed House
Speaker John Boehner to with-
draw his debt ceiling bill from the
floor.
To his credit, Boehner was
smart enough to regroup and give
the Tea Party what it wanted. To
their discredit, President Obama
and Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid agreed to give the Tea Party
zealots nearly everything they
asked for. In the end, that still was-
n’t enough to satisfy them.
How did Democrats lose their
way?
President Obama, the titular
head of the party, has usually
adopted sensible public policy
t he c urrY
r ePort
George E.
Curry
stances on such issues as the pub-
lic option in health care and letting
the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy
expire. In the face of withering
Republican opposition, however,
Obama has usually capitulated.
For example, candidate Obama
campaigned for universal health
This was the beginning of the
end.
Last December, Republicans
pretended to oppose extending
long-term unemployment bene-
fits, a major goal of Democrats.
But the quid pro quo was that
Republicans would go along with
the extension if Obama would
agree to a 2-year extension of all
Bush tax cuts. That was another
time I wanted President Obama to
call the GOP bluff, but apparently
fighting is not in his DNA.
With high unemployment in his
native Ohio, Boehner could not
afford to look into the eyes of job-
less voters back home and tell
them unemployment benefits
Democrats control the White House
and the Senate but they don’t act like
the party in control
care. At the time, the U.S. was the
only industrialized country in the
world that did not provide univer-
sal health care. Many progressives
wanted a single-payer plan similar
to the one in Canada. With such a
powerful health care lobby in
Washington, there was little
chance of achieving that goal. So
they agreed to go along with the
public option, a government health
insurance agency that competes
with private insurance companies.
Thanks to a president eager to
strike a deal with the Party of No,
the public option was removed as
an option before the legislation
was passed and signed into law.
should not be extended. But a deal
was struck giving Obama the
unemployment extension and
allowing Boehner and his GOP
comrades to protect the super rich.
If the Hot Chocolate Party were
in place, it could have insisted that
the Bush tax cuts expire, some-
thing that would have cut the fed-
eral deficit by half. It also could
have curtailed the practice U.S.
companies hiding most of their
assets overseas to keep from pay-
ing corporate taxes and ending the
public subsidizing vacation
homes, private jets and boats for
the upper class.
As bad as past deals were, this
deficit showdown was perhaps the
worst example of Democrats
being impotent.
An angry Barack Obama
acknowledged how bad the deal
was after Boehner walked out of
their deficit reduction talks and
refused to return his telephone
calls.
Listen again to why Obama was
angry: “Essentially, what we had
offered Speaker Boehner was over
a trillion dollars in cuts to discre-
tionary spending, both domestic
and defense,” Obama said in a
July 22 news conference. “We
then offered an additional $650
billion in cuts to entitlement pro-
grams – Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security.”
Here’s the part that proved that
the president was willing to give
up too much: “We were offering a
deal that called for as much discre-
tionary savings as the Gang of Six
[a panel Democratic and
Republican lawmakers]. We were
calling for taxes that were less
than what the Gang of Six had pro-
posed.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid was equally pathetic in trying
to advance his deficit proposal. He
said his bill did not require any
new taxes, something he hoped
would satisfy Republicans. It did-
n’t.
Enough of these wimpy
Democrats. When challenged by
Republicans, they roll over early
and often. Democrats roll over so
easily that they should be renamed
the Roth IRA Party.
Read the rest online at
www.theskanner.com
Zero Tolerance Discipline: a Failing Idea
M
any school children in
America are on summer
break right now, but
here’s a pop quiz about discipline
policies in our nation’s schools
that’s just for grownups:
Would you suspend a student
from school for four months for
sharpening his pencil without per-
mission and giving the teacher a
“threatening” look when asked to
sit down?
Would you expel a student from
school for the rest of a school year
for poking another student with a
ballpoint pen during an exam?
Would you expel a student from
school permanently because her
possession of an antibiotic violat-
ed your school’s zero-tolerance
drug policy?
Would you call the police, hand-
cuff, and then expel a student who
started a snowball fight on school
grounds?
If you answered ‘no’ to any of
these questions because they
sounded too unfair to be the result
of an actual policy, give yourself a
failing grade. All four are real
examples of zero tolerance school
discipline
policies
in
Massachusetts—and there are
thousands of stories like these
throughout that state and across
the country.
Suspended and
expelled students are at greater
risk of dropping out of school and
dropping into the prison pipeline,
and using automatic suspensions
Page 4 The Seattle Skanner august 10, 2011
c hild W atch
Marian Wright
Edelman
and expulsions for minor infrac-
tions often has a major negative
effect on a child’s entire future.
New research analyzing the data
from the 2009 – 2010 school year
truancy. (I’ve never understood
why you suspend or expel children
for not coming to school rather
than finding out why!) Of the
approximately 30,000 “unas-
signed offenses,” two-thirds
received out of school suspension,
resulting in 57,000 lost days of
school. What’s more, because
Massachusetts schools aren’t cur-
rently required to report “unas-
signed offenses” resulting in
exclusions of 10 days or less for
regular education students, the
estimated actual number of disci-
plinary exclusions is likely at least
two to three times the 60,000
Suspended and expelled students are
at greater risk of dropping out of
school and dropping into the prison
pipeline, and using automatic
suspensions and expulsions for minor
infractions often has a major negative
effect on a child’s entire future
in Massachusetts found nearly
60,000 school expulsions and sus-
pensions. Just over half of them
were for “unassigned offenses” –
nonviolent, noncriminal offenses,
which can include behavioral
issues such as swearing, talking
back to a teacher, and
reported.
Jen Vorse Wilka, a student at
Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government, found
these startling statistics when she
studied zero tolerance discipline
policies in Massachusetts as part
of her master’s degree pro-
gram.
Her final report,
“Dismantling the Cradle to Prison
Pipeline:
Analyzing
Zero
Tolerance School Discipline
Policies and Identifying Strategic
Opportunities for Intervention,”
received an award from the
school’s faculty and sheds new
light on the need to address these
harmful policies.
Added together, the tens of thou-
sands of suspensions—many for
minor infractions—have an enor-
mous negative impact. As Wilka
explains, “Children start down the
path to prison in both jarring and
subtle ways. It’s not just the
teenager who ends up behind bars;
it’s also the child who is suspend-
ed for disruptive behavior, misses
a few days of school, and begins to
feel disconnected. The more dis-
connected he becomes, the more
he acts out in class. This cycle
repeats. National research sug-
gests that this child is three times
more likely to drop out of school
by 10th grade than a student who
has never been suspended; and
dropping out triples the likelihood
this child will end up incarcerated
later in life.”
This report bolsters the work
Massachusetts community leaders
and advocates are already doing to
take action against harsh one-size-
fits-all policies and call for more
balanced approaches.
Read the rest online at
www.theskanner.com