Politics

Arizona State Senators Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) and Karen Johnson (R-Mesa) have killed a proposal to create three K-12 schools with an international focus, including teaching a second language starting at the kindergarten level. The proposal, from Rep. Mark Anderson (R-Mesa), would have created one K-12 school in each of Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff, and created international studies programs at seven high schools. Global businesses and universities promised to provide assistance, so the total cost was $2.3 million for the first year of the program. Why’d they kill it? Not because of the cost, but because studying and understanding the rest of the world is evil and un-American. The opposition from some legislators was so strong that the bill was changed to refer to the schools as “American competitiveness project schools” instead of “international schools.” Karen Johnson brought in former Minnesota legislator and Bethany Lutheran College professor Allen Quist to testify against the bill on the grounds that “International Baccalaureate’s links to the United Nations are disturbing and that its sense of right and wrong is ambiguous” and “It teaches students to see the American system of government as one of many, not as the only one that protects universal and God-given rights to property, to bear arms and free speech” (to quote the Arizona Republic’s paraphrase of his remarks). This kind of blinkered provincialism and ignorance hurts U.S. competitiveness–if global businesses can’t find people with the knowledge and experience needed to run their operations from the U.S., they’ll find them elsewhere, like among foreign-born immigrants, or just run their operations from other countries. (Economics and demographics are more powerful than politics, so ultimately this problem will solve itself, and English-only and white-only areas of the U.S. will continue to shrink.) My employer, Global Crossing, just acquired another company in South America, with the result that about a quarter of our employees are now Spanish and Portuguese speakers. This makes multilingual employees extremely valuable. I would have loved to have been taught Spanish as a second language starting in kindergarten. Pearce and Johnson are politicians whose previous idiocy has been commented on at this blog. Both are Senators who have worked with the Church of Scientology on its anti-psychiatry efforts. Pearce is an anti-immigration activist who has shown poor judgment in what email he forwards to his constituents. Johnson is a senator who doesn’t understand the U.S. Constitution, thinking that as a state legislator she has the power to prevent the federal courts from ruling on separation of church and state cases.

Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff’s Deputy Daniel Brock was honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving for his drunk driver arrest record, but now it turns out that many of the people he arrested and testified against were innocent and arrested on the basis of falsified reporting by Brock. From October 2005-October 2006, Brock arrested 313 people for driving under the influence. In one year (not clear from the report if it’s during that same period), he arrested 58 people whose blood-alcohol content was below .08. 43 of those 58, according to an internal affairs investigation, displayed no discernable impairment. In 41 cases, urine samples did not show alcohol over the legal limit. In many cases, videos of sobriety tests showed that Brock made false accusations of losing balance, being unable to correctly recite the alphabet, and slurred speech. Brock also failed to turn on his car’s audio and video recorder 40% of the time, instead choosing to fill out his reports on the basis of memory, sometimes days and even weeks after the arrest. Brock was fired on May 24. (Via The Agitator.) ...

I think this video from former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel puts him well above most of the other presidential candidates.

I just came across an old post of mine on the Internet Infidels’ Discussion Boards: February 22, 2004, 05:24 PMI keep seeing this TV commercial from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The commercial shows a girl standing on a dock on a lake, with a life preserver sitting on it, and another drowning in the water as she looks on. The voiceover says something like “If you had a friend who was drowning, you’d help, wouldn’t you?" Every time I see it I think it’s going to be an argument for the nonexistence of God. The ad is online, though it doesn’t seem to be one of the ones the ONDCP put on YouTube, with subsequent ridicule. The ONDCP ad campaign has been studied by the GAO and found to be ineffective, but the government continues to spend over one hundred million dollars per year on it. ...

Defense contractor BAE is under scrutiny in the British press for paying over a billion pounds through Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, at the rate of 30 million pounds per quarter over the last ten years. This resulted in a British fraud inquiry by its Serious Fraud Office that was stopped last December by attorney general Lord Goldsmith, on grounds that according to the Guardian, “British ‘government complicity’ was in danger of being revealed unless the SFO’s corruption inquiries were stopped.” Tony Blair said that he accepted “full responsibility” for stopping the fraud investigation. The OECD has begun its own investigation. Riggs Bank, which was used to launder money by the Saudis, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the government of Equatorial Guinea, had relationships with the CIA, as did Bandar and Pinochet (through his secret police chief Manuel Contreras, who banked at Riggs). Riggs was investigated by the Treasury Department and the Senate, and admitted failure to report suspicious transactions or take actions to prevent money laundering schemes, for which it paid $25 million in fines levied by Treasury in May 2005. Bandar and BAE claim that there is nothing wrong with their arrangement and that it did not constitute bribes paid to Bandar. The accounts Bandar used belonged to the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense and Aviation, but he spent huge amounts of money on personal expenses such as $17.4 million to build a palace and $400,000 on a luxury car purchase. When Bandar was interviewed by PBS Frontline for a show about terrorism, he made the following statement about corruption in the Saudi government: ...

FCC Kevin Martin has responded to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on “fleeting expletives," which not only went completely against the FCC but suggested that the grounds for the FCC’s authority to regulate indecency on the broadcast airwaves may no longer exist. Here’s part of what he had to say: I completely disagree with the Court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families. I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that “shit” and “fuck” are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience. The court even says the Commission is “divorced from reality.” It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word “fuck” does not invoke a sexual connotation. ...

The Open Government Act, a bill which would require the government to provide justifications for refusal to answer Freedom of Information Act requests, has been blocked in the Senate by an anonymous, secret hold placed by one Senator. This is the same process by which Sen. Ted Stevens placed a secret hold last year on a bill to create a publicly searchable database of earmarks. After the Society for Professional Journalists began a search for the responsible Senator who wants the government to continue to be able to stonewall FOIA requests without justification, he came forward–and it’s Arizona Senator Jon Kyl.

Andrew Sullivan reports on the origin of the term “enhanced interrogation techniques," as well as justification for their use that directly parallels those of the Bush administration.

Someone should tell John McCain that pandering to the religious right and dropping f-bombs don’t really go together.