Diane's Discoveries

Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly

Here's a well thoughtout description of women competing in the world. Read the whole article by Deborah Tannen, an authority on the subject.

Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly

By Deborah Tannen

This isn't about Hillary. Well, okay, it is.

But it isn't only about her. It's also about every woman who has ever been underestimated, failed to get credit for work she did or been denied opportunities to do work at which she would have excelled.

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential primary victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island last week, Democratic voters continue to evaluate her abilities and her chances of winning in a general election -- and are confronting the double bind that women in authority, including Clinton, face: If they speak in ways expected of leaders, they're seen as too aggressive, but if they speak in ways expected of women, they're seen as less confident and competent than they really are.

Companies invite me to speak about my research on women and men at work because they want to make sure that they accurately assess everyone's abilities when deciding whom to promote. Just so, voters need to understand the double bind when deciding who deserves the ultimate promotion to presidential candidate....

Link: Hillary Clinton, Through a Lens Wrongly - washingtonpost.com.

The Forgotten Man?

My local paper, the Oakland Tribune, carried this editorial today...the title is a little off but it still caught my attention. You will find it worthwhile reading the whole editorial (it's short).

Link: The forgotten lesson of the primaries.

"While everybody else is writing about the results of the New Hampshire primary, I can only follow my contrary nature and write about the forgotten man of American politics.

Because of a self-imposed Christmas truce, I have not written about him for several weeks. So much time has passed, I now find that I can barely remember his name. This strikes me as very good, although admittedly it could be a sign that my mind has closed down out of respect for my recent 60th birthday.

Of course, I could Google the name of the forgotten man using certain unflattering terms, but that would offend the sacred code of the columnist that requires research be limited to a few trips to convivial taverns.

Who is this forgotten man? As much as I remember, he lives in a big house in the nation's capital. It is painted white and has a rose garden. I believe the man who lives there holds the title of Confounder in Chief. He has a lot of power for a forgotten man, but that is why people want to forget him. Unfortunately, he is not yet an invisible man (give it a year or so).

Sure, I could find out the name of the forgotten man, but the truth is that nobody wants his name to be remembered. Everybody is profoundly sick of him. Even rabid radio talk show hosts seem to be pained when they have to speak his name, and speak it they must, presumably because of a pact they made with the devil. It goes to show that just because you are a blowhard doesn't mean you don't get sick of defending the indefensible."...

Read on...

Education Officials Violated Rules

A "No Child Left Behind investigation report is out now; you can read the whole Inspector General"s report in pdf download titled: The Reading First Program’s Grant Application Process, ED-OIG/I13-F0017 September 2006

The following was in today's New York Times: Report Says Education Officials Violated Rules - New York Times.

By SAM DILLON
Published: September 23, 2006

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.

States have received more than $4.8 billion in Reading First grants during the Bush administration, and a recent survey by an independent group, the Center on Education Policy, reported that many state officials consider the initiative to be highly effective in raising reading achievement. But the report describes a tangled process in which some states had to apply for grants as many as six times before receiving approval, with department officials scheming to stack panels with experts tied to favored publishers. In one e-mail message cited in the report, from which the inspector general deleted some vulgarities, the director of Reading First, Chris Doherty, urged staff members to make clear to one company that it was not favored at the department. “They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” Mr. Doherty wrote. Mr. Doherty recently resigned from the department to “return to the private sector,” Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman said. Officials relayed reporters’ requests for comment to Mr. Doherty, and he declined to be interviewed, an official said. The abuses described in the report occurred during 2002 and 2003, when Rod Paige was education secretary.

John Grimaldi, spokesman for the Chartwell Education Group where Mr. Paige is chairman, said he had not read the report but would seek Mr. Paige’s reaction to it. “Some of the actions taken by department officials and described in the inspector general’s report reflect individual mistakes,” Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. “Although these events occurred before I became secretary of education, I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them.”Officials will review by the end of the year all Reading First applications that the department approved, to determine that they met all applicable requirements, Ms. McLane said.The report recounts how during the formation of a review panel in 2002 a journalist asked the department whether federal officials were trying to stack the panel so that some reading programs would not be treated fairly. The report cited the Reading First director’s response to the department employee who relayed the journalist’s question: “Stack the panel? ... I have never heard of such a thing ....” the director replied. “The response,” the report concluded, “suggests that he may indeed have intended to ‘stack’ the expert review panel.”

The report mentions Reid Lyon, the former chief of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, who was a research adviser to President Bush and an architect of Reading First. He exerted immense influence at the department when Mr. Paige was there. In 2002, Dr. Lyon told the Reading First director and other department officials that a woman whom the department had already selected to be on a review panel had been “actively working to undermine” a reading initiative he favored, the report said. “Chances are that other reviewers can trump any bias on her part,” Dr. Lyon told the officials. “We can’t uninvite her,” a senior adviser to Mr. Paige wrote in response, the report said. “Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.” The incident demonstrated “the intention of the former senior adviser to the secretary to control another panelist,” the report said. In an interview yesterday, Dr. Lyon said that in the 2002 incident he sought to neutralize bias. “If we detected bias, we had to make sure that the review panel was put together so that that bias would be neutralized,” he said. Dr. Lyon left the national institutes in August 2005 and is now an executive vice president for Higher Ed Holdings, a company based in Dallas that is working to found a college of education. “Oh man, I’m mortified,” Dr. Lyon said of the report. “To see the facts that were presented today was very disappointing, because it’s an outstanding program.” The investigation was opened last year after the inspector general received accusations of mismanagement and other abuses at the department from publishers of several reading programs, including Robert E. Slavin, a director of a research center at the Johns Hopkins University who is chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit foundation that produces reading materials.

Audit finds No Child program corruption

So many of you have said that the NCLB program has many problems; a reporter from Associated Press, and one from the New York Times agree with you when reporting about the recent Inspector General's report just out.

Inside Bay Area - Audit finds No Child program corruption.

Review targets director in willful mismanagement of billion-dollar program By Ben Feller, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views, and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money. In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released Friday by the department's inspector general.

"They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them
in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags," the program director wrote, the report said.

That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency. Doherty declined to comment.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pledged to swiftly adopt all the audit's recommendations. She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant her agency has approved.
"When something undermines the credibility of this department, or the standing of any program, I'm going to spring into action," Spellings told The Associated Press.

First aims to help young children read through scientifically proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found the effort is helping schools raise achievement. But from the start, the program has been dogged by accusations of impropriety, leading to several ongoing audits. The new report from the Office of Inspector General — an independent arm of the Education Department — calls into question the program's credibility.

The ranking Democrat on the House education committee was furious.
"They should fire everyone who was involved in this," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. "This was not an accident, this was not an oversight. This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process."

For the complete article: insidebayarea

It's warm today!

Today is unseasonably warm...mid 70s in February! Even for Northern California that's unusual. In fact this whole winter has been warmer than usual with just a few days of frost on rooftops. The NY Times sent me this to read and I know you will also be interested. It's worth your time to read the whole article.

Link: Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him - New York Times.

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Changing the Subject?

On July 24th Frank Rich, a columnist for the NY Times wrote a thorough and very enlightening editorial which I just discovered from an email I received from the NY Times. I'm glad I read the article and recommend that you read it also. Following is just a tidbit of the complete editorial; the complete article is at: Eight Days in July - New York Times.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

It Just Gets Worse

Just a few paragraphs from an editorial in the New York Times by Bob Herbert:It Just Gets Worse - New York Times.

Last week's terror bombings in London should be seen as a reminder not just that Mr. Bush's war was a hideous diversion of focus and resources from the essential battle against terror, but that it has actually increased the danger of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

The C.I.A. warned the administration in a classified report in May that Iraq - since the American invasion in 2003 - had become a training ground in which novice terrorists were schooled in assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other terror techniques. The report said Iraq could prove to be more effective than Afghanistan in the early days of Al Qaeda as a place to train terrorists who could then disperse to other parts of the world, including the United States.

Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. analyst who served as deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office, said on National Public Radio last week: "You now in Iraq have a recruiting ground in which jihadists, people who previously were not willing to go out and embrace the vision of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, are now aligning themselves with elements that have declared allegiance to him. And in the course of that, they're learning how to build bombs. They're learning how to conduct military operations."

O'Connor as Chief Justice?

Wow! Wouldn't this be great! Read the whole article at:Specter Suggests a Chief Justice: O'Connor - New York Times.

Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, suggested on Sunday that President Bush could name Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is retiring from the Supreme Court, to the position of chief justice if it opens up.

"I think it would be very tempting if the president said to Justice O'Connor, 'You could help the country now,' " Mr. Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and a pivotal player in any confirmation hearings, said in an interview on the CBS program "Face the Nation." "She has received so much adulation that a confirmation proceeding would be more like a coronation, and she might be willing to stay on for a year or so."

And now the great Watergate cover-up of 2005

Comparing Nixon's Watergate to Bush's Administration...You may have missed the recent editorial by Frank Rich in the New York Times...following is an excerpt.

...The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon...

Source: Don't Follow the Money - New York Times.

Losing Our Country

Sad but true...excerpt of an editorial by Paul Krugman. Read the complete article: Losing Our Country - New York Times.

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security...

...The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists. Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.