GOP is going nuclear on “battlefield of ideas”

cpacCPAC—the political convention that is to conservatives what ComicCon is to nerds—did not sort out the Republican field for 2016, but it did reveal something much scarier. Unlike most years when Republicans insist they should fight for ideals they never define, this time conservatives sketched out a frighteningly radical agenda. Taking CPAC speakers at their word, the next Republican generation will make us pine for the comparatively bi-partisan moderation and restraint that characterized the George W. Bush administration.

The surest way to whip the overwhelmingly older, male, and white CPAC conventioneers into a frenzy was to play up the notion that the problem is that Republicans have been too cooperative, too compromising.

“If you want to lose elections, stand for nothing. When you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, ignoring how polls punished his party when he “stood for principle” and shut down the government.

“We’ve got to start talking about what we’re for, not what we’re against,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“It’s time for a rebellion on the battlefield of ideas,” said Rick Perry. The Texas Governor loves guns so much he jogs with a loaded handgun, but if a “battlefield of ideas” exists then Perry’s an unarmed pacifist.

It is easy to mock a political convention that invited Donald Trump to speak, much less attend, but his stale anti-immigration harangue was no worse than most. Cruz advocated “repealing every single word of ObamaCare” and abolishing the IRS. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio mocked the United Nations and backed the same aggressive unilateralism that we are still cleaning up after in Iraq. Adorably, Perry came out as pro-postal service: “Deliver the mail, do it on time and, heck, do it on Saturdays.” Heck, indeed!.

It was their new ideas that should scare the bejesus out of Americans. Rep. Paul Ryan is recognized as the pre-eminent conservative thought leader, but that’s like being heaviest blade of grass. At CPAC, he dressed austerity in compassion’s clothes, saying, “What they are offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that.” Yes, but we don’t feed souls by starving bellies, and Paul’s budget cuts food stamps by $125 million.

Public school teachers came in for some abuse at CPAC from Christie and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who said, “Wouldn’t it be special . . . if we actually hired, fired, compensated our teachers based on how well teachers are doing rather than simply how long the teachers had been breathing in the classroom?”

Behind this contempt for teachers is a drive toward using standardized testing scores to measure the effectiveness of teachers, something education historian Diane Ravitch has called “junk science.” But labeling public schools as failing and teachers as ineffective for reasons beyond their control will open the door to radical and unconstitutional change.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott described this as a parental utopia that would effectively privatize America’s public schools and force taxpayers to subsidize religious indoctrination. Parents “should be free to choose home schooling, public schools, charter schools, parochial schools,” said Scott. “Because when the parents have the choice, the kids have a chance.”

To be fair, it wasn’t all dumb and dumber. Sen. Rand Paul, whose curly hair looks like it covers a skull containing an actual working brain, took a real risk by joining with Attorney General Eric Holder to push for ending mandatory minimum sentences. Allowing federal judges to exercise discretion with non-violent drug offenders could return some needed sanity to our criminal justice system. And maybe this once, Paul will be the Republican who survives working with Obama.

The big winner of CPAC was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whom Perry and Christie praised in their speeches. Because he’s facing re-election at home, Walker skipped CPAC, sparing him the unflattering exposure of being measured against the lesser lights onstage at CPAC. With apologies to Perry, maybe the only way to win a battle of wits with Republicans is never to fight in the first place.

On March 10, 2014, Cagle Cartoons syndicated this column. 

Filed under: Columns, education, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, CPAC, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz

The GOP primary was a wave election

The multiple dispatches from our nation’s capitol reporting the waning of the Tea Party in Texas were premature, in error, and an embarrassment to journalism. Yes, John Cornyn and Pete Sessions survived challenges from the right, but the Tea Party had a great election further down the ballot. As I said last night on Fox 7, the Texas Republican Primary was a wave election for Republicans, and that wave broke to the right.

For more intelligent analysis, I direct you to Texas Monthly‘s Paul Burka, Erica Grieder, and Brian Sweany, the latter two of whom owned election night.

Screen Shot 2014-03-06 at 8.50.53 AM

Filed under: As Seen on TV

“Divergent” depicts testing dystopia

The next big teen franchise is about to explode over movie screens nationwide on Mar. 21, except this time the kids aren’t scared of werewolves, zombies, dark wizards, or sparkly vampires. The villain in Divergent is something they can’t run away from and they can’t kill: standardized testing. Kids these days live in a world in which their futures are determined by high-stakes testing, making Divergent a dystopia they can believe in.

Because of its resourceful and tough female protagonist, Divergent will draw comparisons to The Hunger Games franchise. But the popular Jennifer Lawrence movies are all about income inequality and poverty whereas the new film, based on the 2012 bestseller by Veronica Roth, questions whether our children can still determine their own futures.

The central feature of Divergent is that children are given aptitude tests that sort them by virtues, sometimes separating them from their families. These sorting tests are nothing new in popular young adult fiction. Harry Potter had the Sorting Hat that grouped students based on their innate traits. The Hunger Games held a lottery to single out a boy and a girl for ritualized murder. And in the Percy Jackson novels, only genetics—not skill, talents, or knowledge—could get a child into Camp Half Blood.

But Divergent, intentionally or not, puts high-stakes testing at the center of the educational dystopia it portrays. As in present-day reality, testing takes time away from classroom instruction and occurs on a single day. The Divergent tests measure aptitude, not comprehension, and serve mainly to sort students according to immutable traits into one of five factions “to determine who we are and where we belong.” In schools, we use standardized tests to figure out whether someone is “college or career ready.”

To Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, Divergent speaks to the No Child Left Behind generation that has, he says, a “growing consciousness” of the “varying degrees of alienation from school in which testing is a key part.”

“Indirectly, they are a way impersonal forces control their lives and make their lives, in their perceptions, … more boring,” said Neill. “Testing is part of that. Clearly the evidence is that students are unhappy with the testing regime and how that is playing out in schools, the drill and kill.”

The evidence Neill is thinking of is the rising tide of student-led strikes against testing. In California and Illinois, hundreds of students have walked out of tests. In Massachusetts, students protested by ignoring the essay prompt and writing their own essays explaining why they opposed the tests, a risky move when passing the test is a graduation requirement.

About half the student body at the New Vista High School in Boulder, Colorado came up with a new twist when students there wore white shirts, jeans and badges bearing their student identification numbers to protest the Colorado Students Assessment Program, chanting, “standardized tests produce standardized students.”

In 2013, more than 50 students in Providence, Rhode Island inadvertently came up with the most apt demonstration against standardized testing when they held their “zombie protest.” Made up as the undead, they staggered during downtown rush hour traffic while chanting “no education, no life.” But zombies are so last year.

“There’s a lot of growing protest in the misuse of standardized testing,” said Neill. “A movie like that could capture that energy and advance that energy.”

My sons, who face a pressure about standardized testing that is completely foreign to my generation, are already on my case to pre-order tickets for opening night. They are big fans of the novels and are eager to see this world on the silver screen, but in truth, they’ve already seen it every year in their school at test time.

Filed under: Columns

“Education Spring” is right around the corner

slave shipIn the state where high-stakes testing began, a few hundred teachers, academics, and activists came together last weekend to hasten what one leader called an “Education Spring.” The Network for Public Education gathered in Austin to plan the resistance to the status quo of high-stakes testing and an encroaching corporate privatization movement. This first-of-its-kind convention might finally provide an effective opposition to the corporate reform movement that wants to run education like a business.

“With groups like this one and so many others, all of which are active in so many ways, in so many parts of the country, we are standing on the threshold of the Education Spring,” said John Kuhn, a Texas superintendent known for his fiery speeches. “We’re here to shake up the educational world, and our movement is only growing. This is our spring.”

Central to the group’s discontent is the primacy of high-stakes testing, an innovation pushed in Dallas in the early ‘90s by Sandy Kress, then a politically active lawyer friendly with the business community. With Kress’ help, using standardized test scores as the primary measure of school accountability became Texas law under Ann Richards, and when George W. Bush became president, Kress helped him sell No Child Left Behind to skeptical Democrats.

Now Kress lobbies for testing giant Pearson, and Barak Obama’s Race to the Top has made high-stakes standardized testing “the purpose of education, rather than a measure of education,” said Diane Ravitch, a leading critic of overtesting, in her keynote address to the convention.

In Austin, the Network for Public Education called on Congress to investigate the “over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12 public schools.” Far be it from me to suggest Congress hold another show trial, but this one might end in a hanging. It would be worth it to see Kress put under oath to explain why states spend an estimated $1.7 billion a year on standardized tests that a National Research Council study shows have failed to increase student achievement.

The first buds of Education Spring are cropping up all over. In Orlando, a dying 11-year-old boy was forced to take the state exam. In 2013, Florida also required a 9-year-old born with an incomplete brain to take the test. Why? Because, wrote Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart, “It would be a moral outrage to deny that opportunity to any child based on any reason including special needs.”

But Americans increasingly don’t need a study to tell them that high-stakes testing is not just unaffordable and absurd, but unworkable. Obama’s rollout of his Common Core national curriculum has made the debut of the Affordable Care Act look like D-Day. Once one of its biggest backers, the nation’s largest teachers union has pronounced Common Core “botched” and pulled its support.

The real problem facing Common Core isn’t in Washington but in the 45 states and the District of Columbia (OK, that is Washington) that have adopted the new national standards. In red states, critics see a federal takeover of local public schools, a provincial and politically motivated position that is nevertheless not without merit, as federal law forbids Washington from dictating curricula to the states.

In blue states, parents and teachers complain that their children are ill prepared for the higher standards, guaranteeing failure in the name of rigor. Education Sec. Arne Duncan has responded oddly, telling “white, suburban moms” that their kids aren’t “as brilliant as they thought they were.” I’m not making that up.

Meanwhile, a new anti-testing uprising is beginning in Chicago where Duncan used to run public schools. Teachers at two public schools have voted to boycott the state-mandated tests, and parents at more than 50 area schools have served notice that they are refusing to let their children take the tests, or “opting out.” The school district has threatened teachers with disciplinary action if they support the boycott or encourage parents to join it.

Like this winter, it seems like the era of high-stakes testing will never end. But thanks to a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens who gathered in Austin, Education Spring might be right around the corner.

On March 5, 2014, Cagle Cartoons syndicated this column. 

Filed under: Columns, education, Arne Duncan, Common Core, Diane Ravitch, John Kuhn, Network for Public Education, Sandy Kress

How long will we be talking about Ted Nugent?

Today on WFAA’s Inside Texas Politics, I was asked if we’ll still be talking about Ted Nugent in November. I hope not, but as long as Greg Abbott refuses to investigate Nugent for committing sex crimes with juveniles in Texas (for which there is no statute of limitations), we’re not done yet.

Filed under: As Seen on TV

Is Abbott the new Claytie?

Screen Shot 2014-03-03 at 7.54.32 AMRepublicans have called Wendy Davis a gold digger who abandoned her daughters and tweeted that she’s “too stupid to be governor”—and all she dropped in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll was six whole points. We should be writing her political obituary, but Davis still has a better shot to win the Governor’s Mansion than Ann Richards did against Clayton Williams in 1990. The reason is that Davis has got something going for her that Tony Sanchez, Chris Bell, and Bill White didn’t: Greg Abbott.

Abbott labors under the delusion that Texas is one big tea party rally. He seems genuinely bumfuzzled when challenged by reality, such as when he beat a retreat on CNN when asked about campaigning with Ted Nugent. At this point in the campaign, Abbott is demonstrating the ideological fervor of Rick Perry, the incuriousness of George W. Bush, and the sensitivity of Williams.

Admittedly, Davis is not running a perfect campaign. On some days, she isn’t even running a good one. But for all her problems, Abbott’s campaign seems eager to remind voters about Davis’ meta-message: Don’t mess with Texas women. Wendy Davis is no Ann Richards—as unfair a standard as could be applied to Davis these days, and that’s saying a lot—but increasingly Abbott is reminding observers of ol’ Claytie.

When Abbott bragged to a Tea Party meeting in April 2013 that “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home,” we mistook it as locker-room banter. An attorney general could not be that partisan, that blinkered, or that shallow, right?

Perhaps Abbott’s political reflexes have been dulled through overuse as attorney general. Abbott has sued the Obama administration 27 times, winning four and costing you $2.8 million. The galling absurdity of his record isn’t that he’s running on it but that he can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t vote for him because of it.

He raised so much money and lined his political ducks in such a long row that no one in the political class stopped to ask whether we should be worried whether he and not Davis was ready for prime time. It is time to stop giving Abbott unearned credit and make him earn this.

We should have known he wasn’t ready when he refused to condemn blogger Erick Erickson for tarring Davis as “Abortion Barbie.” We really should have known when he responded to the infamous “Retard Barbie” tweet with “thanks for your support.” And we absolutely should have known when Abbott refused to apologize and merely tweeted that he didn’t “endorse anyone’s offensive language.” Well, golly.

The Nugent fracas was not the first time he messed up his own story. When he laid out his border security plan, he offended South Texas when he said, “Public corruption does mimic Third-World practices.” Then he insulted our intelligence when he claimed that he wasn’t referring to any specific part of Texas even though it was in the context of talking about the border. And then he insulted reason by asking, “Does corruption occur across all of Texas? Absolutely.”

To hear him tell it, corruption has become rampant all over Texas during his three terms as attorney general. Going back to Abbott’s version of his job description for just a second, perhaps it would have been wise for our attorney general to fight a little corruption between suing Obama and going home.

That past was prelude to his invitation to Nugent to campaign with him, an event that got screwed up when Nugent accepted the invitation. The irony is that Abbott will have no better opportunity for a “Sister Soljah moment” to criticize the objectionable excesses of his own party than he did at the Nugent event. It should not take an excess of moral courage to condemn someone who quoted the Nazis to slur the President and who became the legal guardian of a 17-year-old girl because she was too young to marry him. But it’s really hard to point fingers when you’re the one who invited Sister Soljah in the first place.

This assumes Abbott knew right from wrong, all evidence to the contrary. Wendy Davis has overcome a lot in her life. If she can ever get her campaign in fighting shape, she might be able to beat an increasingly vulnerable, if not ham-handed, Republican frontrunner.

On Mar. 2, 2014, The Austin American-Statesman published this column on its website. The following day, it appeared in the newspaper. 

Filed under: Columns, Clayton Williams, Greg Abbott, Ted Nugent, Wendy Davis

Did Greg Abbott sell out the Tenth Amendment?

poker cartoonEarly last month, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott contradicted his core values by doing something that just didn’t make sense unless you’re one of those cynics who believes money corrupts politics. Abbott, a fan of states’ rights and a foe of casinos, did a favor for Sheldon Adelson that appears to help casinos at the expense of the Tenth Amendment. In return, Abbott got almost $100,000 in political cash. Not everyone loses at the casinos.

All this started back in 1961 with the Wire Act that banned interstate gambling. After Al Gore invented the Internet, the Justice Department interpreted the law as banning online poker until 2011, when it said the Wire Act only applied to online sports betting. And when the Justice Department changed its mind, Sheldon Adelson, the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands casino, lost his mind.

People playing poker online meant fewer poker players in his casinos. Thanks to the 2011 DOJ ruling, Nevada and Delaware were able to sign an interstate online poker pact, and other states reportedly expressed interest in joining. Adelson needed Congress to shut down this states’ rights online poker uprising, so he asked state attorneys general to help by signing a letter, prompting a counter-offensive by the Poker Players Alliance.

Only 15 AGs signed the letter dated Feb. 4, 2014 that warned Congress how the new Wire Act interpretation “opens the door to the spread of Internet gambling.” So far, Congress has done nothing with the letter, but then again Congress has done nothing on pretty much anything else for that matter. The only remarkable thing about the letter—which warned Congress that the states were exercising their rights—was the fact that Abbott signed it.

Abbott loves the Tenth Amendment more than my niece loves One Direction. He brags about the 29 lawsuits he filed against the federal government “to protect Texas’ sovereignty.” He calls James Madison a “visionary” for imagining the “signals of alarm that would be raised … if a centrally empowered federal government intrudes too far into the liberties guaranteed to individuals under the Constitution and the powers delegated to the states.” And yes, this is really the way he talks.

The website for his gubernatorial campaign doesn’t have anything about education, but it’s got a whole section about the Tenth Amendment that begins, “Texas’ greatest freedom enumerated in our Constitution is the Tenth Amendment.” We can all agree that it’s more important than the Third Amendment banning soldiers from sleeping on your couch during peacetime, but this is Texas. Abbott thinks states’ rights are more important than guns. He’s obsessed.

Why a states’ rights fanboy would offer this slice of Texas sovereignty up on a silver platter—or in this case, on a fairly meaningless letter—to Congress might have an answer in, of all places, money.

Here’s the money trail: In 2011-12, the Las Vegas Sands gave the Republican State Leadership Committee (the campaign organization for down-ballot state candidates) $150,000. In that same election cycle, the RSLC gave Abbott $91,377, the second-most they gave to any candidate. The odd thing is that Abbott wasn’t even on the ballot in 2012.

Of course, it’s possible that Adelson was not incentivizing Abbott. It’s possible that Abbott hates the idea of Texans playing poker on the Internet more than he loves the Tenth Amendment. It’s possible that Adelson’s contributions to the RSLC and the RSLC’s contributions to Abbott are entirely coincidental. It’s possible the RSLC thought the best use of almost $100,000 was not to help candidates facing elections but to give it to Abbott for no particular reason. Anything is possible, even in politics where no one ever got lost following the money.

What’s more likely is that Abbott decided that compromising his most deeply held conviction was worth the price, especially with an expensive gubernatorial campaign coming up. The only risk was that he would have to explain it later, in which case he could say he was shocked, shocked that there was corruption in this casino. Either way, he comes away a winner, which is better than most people do in Vegas.

Filed under: Columns, Greg Abbott, online poker, poker, Sheldon Adelson, Wire Act

Defining deviancy all the way down the Texas ballot

140387_600Hide your wallets and shield the children, because they’re voting down in Texas. Texas Republicans will be testing the strength of the Tea Party as they pick their first post-Perry slate of statewide candidates since the 1980s. But Texas Democrats might end up missing Rick Perry, as there is a decent shot that Republicans will nominate not their best-qualified, most-electable candidates but an entire clown car full of crazypants.

Let’s start at the top of the ticket, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, rated the second-most conservative senator in 2012, was apparently not conservative enough to escape a primary challenge. Into that breach leapt Steve Stockman, the congressman who once Tweeted, “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.” This race should have been great fun, but Stockman has campaigned mostly by hiding from public view and skipping votes in congress. Going into the candidate protection program is working. One poll shows Stockman could force Cornyn into a runoff.

Below Greg Abbott on the ballot is a quartet of candidates for lieutenant governor, the most reasonable of whom advocates changing the 14th Amendment to prevent anchor babies from attaining citizenship. All of the Republicans seeking this office oppose abortion exceptions for rape and incest and supported keeping a dead woman on life support because she was pregnant. Even on this stage, state Sen. Dan Patrick, who faces good odds to advance to the next round, stands out for calling undocumented immigrants an “illegal invasion.” What’s smart in a Texas Republican primary can be politically fatal in a state that’s 40% Hispanic.

We lower ourselves in more ways than one when we go down the ballot to the Algonquin Round Table known as the primary to succeed Abbott as attorney general. The candidates make a point of agreeing that their main job is to continue legally fruitless and patently political lawsuits against the Obama administration. They differ only in emphasis: The frontrunner touts his support for school prayer, damn the constitution. Another claims the allegiance of Ted Cruz. And the last, Barry Smitherman, is on the air with an ad that looks more like a declaration of war against Mexico to protect Texans “from cartels and crimes like human trafficking.”

In almost any other state, Smitherman would occupy an unelectable outpost in the political boondocks. But this is Texas, where his sort of yee-haw radicalism is mainstreamed. Already elected to a different statewide office, Smitherman has spent this campaign claiming that most aborted fetuses “would have voted Republican,” that Texas has “made great progress in becoming an independent nation, an ‘island nation’ if you will,” and that the United Nations Small Arms Treaty endangers 2nd Amendment rights in Texas. He has raised millions of dollars and is polling in the double digits. Pray for us, America.

Smitherman, Patrick, and Stockman are hardly exceptions. Elsewhere on the Republican primary ballot you’ll find a 9/11 Truther, the legislator who mandated that doctors perform sonograms on women seeking abortions to give them the shocking news of their pregnancy, and another state lawmaker who is running to protect, he says, “the gift of oil and gas God has given us.” And if they win their primaries, these walking affronts to logic and reason would be favorites to rule over the second-biggest state in the union. Some days I think Lincoln should have let the Confederacy go.

The nuthouse radicalism these candidates espouse has a significant constituency among the Texas Republican voters, 35% of whom support secession. Highlighting the lunatic fringe does not legitimize them. The voters who support them in statistically significant numbers do. To treat these credible candidates as outliers undersells the danger. Texas Republicans have redefined normal so far to the right as to make Genghis Khan look like a squishy moderate.

Rick Perry earned a few attaboys when he condemned Ted Nugent for calling Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” a phrase the Nazis used to justify the mass-murder of Jews. Texas Republicans have defined deviancy so far down that criticizing a phrase Joseph Goebbels coined comes across as refreshing candor. When the votes come in on March 4, we’ll see just how far down that is.

Filed under: Columns

Opposition research: “More mundane than you’d expect”

So one guy running for lieutenant governor hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on another guy running for lieutenant governor. Standard operating procedure for politics, right? Not so much. Usually they don’t hire a private investigator but someone like me, an opposition researcher.

Yesterday I talked with Ben Philpott of KUT about a dark art that “sounds a lot more mundane then you’d expect,” he said.

One thing I want to clarify: After we do all the online research, then the real research starts: courthouses, legislative libraries, archives, etc. The more you know…

Filed under: Audio, media

Can anything stop Hillary?

Let’s start with a tangent: Getting to debate Dan Neil on Fox 7 means we all get to talk football before the cameras roll. Neil was a two-time All-American lineman at the University of Texas at Austin and won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos. I am a lifelong Seahawks fan, and since this was the first time we got to debate since the Super Bowl, I was looking forward to ribbing him. He is so nice that he immediately congratulated me on how my team played even though I had as much to do with the Seahawks success as your dead cat did, or does.

That brought up a discussion about how hard it must be to lose a Super Bowl, to which Dan smiled at me and said, “I wouldn’t know.” It was suggested by a Fox 7 employee that professional football players don’t care because they’re getting paid so much money. I disagreed, saying that winning the Super Bowl seems like the only thing they care about. Dan, resplendent with his two Super Bowl rings, backed me up. At which point I was all:

drunk dancing

But we were not there to debate football on TV. We were there to wonder in amazement whether anyone, or anything, can stop Hillary Clinton now that Chris Christie has jumped off the political bridge. Two months ago, he was tied. Now he’s 10 points down to her, and she’s well over 50% against all comers, according to this CNN poll.

I think Hillary will run, and if she runs I think she’ll win, but if she doesn’t I continue to tout my dark horse Democrat, Naval Secretary Ray Mabus. Here’s the show:

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 6.42.52 AM

Filed under: As Seen on TV