Motley Moose – Archive

   

A look at a group of singers who are little-known … but who were essential to the Motown sound, as we’ll see after the jump …..

Have you ever heard of the 1990s Kansas City desegregation case? If you haven’t, Paul Ciotti of the CATO Institute provides a remarkable summary of this little-known episode:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil-more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

More below.

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t like Glenn Greenwald and haven’t for some time.  The incident that put him on my permanent shit list occurred when I was just a little bird deciding to see what this Twitter thing was all about.

There’s a presence out on those twitter streets that goes by the handle @angryblacklady if you aren’t following her I would suggest you do because I was an open fan of hers before I tried to hop out the twitter nest. I was introduced to her by her political writing which has graced places like The Grio among others, I guess I could hit her bio and find tons of other stuff but I didn’t need anyone’s validation then and just trust me she’s wicked wicked smaht.  

One day I’m enjoying watching ABL dissect Glenn Greenwald live and before the world on the issue of the NDAA one of her arguments happened to be the Patriot Act is far more impactful and scary and is going to bite us first let’s work on that she was right.

I know she was taking him apart because he and his followers decided that the issue of the NDAA was no longer the topic of the day but rather the character of Obama supporters.  I once took philosophy way back in High School (I know huh?  Public school taught philosophy) where we went over all the forms logical fallacy in argument.  Mr. Navarro spoke to me from the dim mists of time and said that’s an Ad Hominem Adept, an attack against the person not the topic means the person has nothing to say.

That’s ok, as I said ABL was destroying him all day, it wasn’t that he engaged in Ad Hominem it’s what the attack was.

Glenn Greenwald said the supporters of Barack Obama would watch Barack Obama rape a nun on the cameras of MSNBC enjoy it and defend the action by saying Obama merely wanted to illustrate the evils of rape.

http://thegrio.com/2012/01/02/…

Scratch the record the police are here the party is over everyone has to go home.  Wait a minute you say a Black lady, an Angry Black Lady who fights for feminist causes like just about no other would enjoy watching a rape, in the face of being destroyed in argument?

No he never apologized mollified or adjusted the tone of the statement it stands just like that right now, so when Greenwald steps to me, I don’t care much about what he has to say, so there I did it, I don’t like him find him to be a man that has no integrity and uses tactics to silence dissent that would horrify the people he accuses of stifling his rights.  

Did I shoot the messenger?  I got nothing else to say about the message?  Let’s do that!

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  

I’m thinking that it might be fun to have a regular place to gossip about what’s happening in each of our natural neighborhoods. It could be a safe place to reveal your inner bug geek, or ask about the odd bird or lizard hanging out in your back yard, or just describe what you saw on a walk you took during the week.

So, with that introduction, here goes:

We’re broke. I get it. We all get it.

The sequestration is horrible. We get that too.

Americans are going to have to sacrifice for the bullheadedness in Washington. We get that too.

We’ve all got to tighten our belts on this, it is going to be painful. We’ve heard you.

Question.

Moooose, Well I had a flash piece the other day of good news in the Obama administration weighing in on Stop and Frisk now I’ve got to share some tripped out what kind of crap news is this from the Zimmerman saga.

http://thinkprogress.org/media…

Previously, Zimmerman Sr. “believed generally racism was a thing of the past.” He says that, personally, he hadn’t encountered much racism, even though his wife is Hispanic. But after his son shot and killed Trayvon Martin, however, Zimmerman learned that racism is “flourishing at the insistence of some in the African American Community.” He then goes on to list various black leaders and organizations that he believes are racist:

Congressional Black Caucus. “[A] pathetic, self-serving group of racists… advancing their purely racist agenda.” He later adds that “all members of Congress should be ashamed of the Congressional Black Caucus, as should be their constituents.” And finally: “They are truly a disgrace to all Americans.”

The NAACP. “[S]imply promotes racism and hatred for their own, primarily finical, interests” and “without prejudice and racial divide, the NAACP would simply cease to exist.”

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “[W]hat I would expect of a racist.”

Trayvon Martin’s funeral director. A “racial activist and former head of the local NAACP.”

Benjamin Crump, Natialie Jackson and Darrly Parks, attorneys for Travyon Martin’s family. “The scheme team.”

The National Basketball Players Association.

Black Chamber of Commerce.

National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers.

National Black United Fund.

United Negro College Fund.

While stopping short of explicitly calling President Obama a racist, Zimmerman Sr. does say that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have “shamelessly” sought to exploit his son’s case “to obtain great advantage in the African-American community.”

I also understand he went on to condemn the Electric Slide and Billy Dee Williams for daring to be the pretty individual he is.

Can I get a WTF ya’ll WTF?

From America’s High School Newspaper:

Federal budget cuts in the U.S are coming too fast and slowing the pace of the U.S. recovery, the International Monetary Fund says in a new assessment of the U.S. economy.

When even the original Austerians think we’re too austere… well… I reckon there’s a problem.

Even more interesting is the advice from Director Lagarde:

In a press briefing Friday on the IMF’s forecast, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said the U.S. should slow down budget cuts now but move faster in shaping a longer-term deficit reduction plan that would take hold when the economy is stronger.

In “TheresMoreVille,” we’ll see who else has been espousing such a strategy…

Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, held an on-the-record conference call yesterday and the White House posted a transcript.

This is what the Administration thinks it knows:

… Today, at the President’s direction, we have pulled together a revision of our intelligence community assessment that we have provided to Congress and we are now updating the public now.  I’ll just draw your attention to a few elements of that assessment in our response.

First of all, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.  Our intelligence community has high confidence given the multiple independent streams of information associated with their reporting.

The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date.  I would note that that casualty data is likely incomplete, but that is what we’ve reviewed through our investigation.

This is clearly a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria that now totals more than 90,000 deaths.  But as we’ve consistently said, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses red lines that have existed in the international community for decades.

I’d also note that we believe that the Assad regime maintains control of chemical weapons within Syria, and we have not seen any reliable reporting or corroborated reporting indicating that the opposition has acquired or used chemical weapons. …