This morning, I finally got around to reading Reed Richardson’s newest column, If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet the (1%) Press. And I realized something: my sidebar had an error. You see, Richardson writes a column most weeks, and it is posted on Altercation, Eric Alterman’s blog at The Nation. I’m not quite sure why that is. I think Richardson may have been an intern at the nation under Alterman or they are friends or both. Regardless, at the end of Alterman’s commentary is the obligatory, “Now here’s Reed” (or something very similar), followed by Richardson’s column.

I’ve been reading Alterman for years. He is one of those writers who I’ve read so much that I don’t even think about him; much of his view of American media have simply become a part of my thinking. As a result, over the past couple of years, I’ve come to look forward more to reading Richardson than Alterman. But that’s especially true recently when all the older master does are his Alter-reviews.

Eric Alterman has fine taste is music and narrative art and he is well worth reading. For example, he prefers Shaw to Shakespeare and Mozart to Beethoven. My kind of guy! But some time ago, I began thinking that Alter-reviews were written each week to remind me that Eric Alterman has a better life than I do! So I tend to forgo his insights about plays and concerts I will never attend.

But even though I was going over to Altercation each week primarily to read (!) Richardson, my sidebar referred to “Eric Alterman.” So this morning I changed the link to “Altercation.” I figured that that was a good compromise because (1) that is its name and (2) Alterman still writes for it—even if the politics are sporadic these days.

The real question is why I even have to do this. Would it really be such a big deal for The Nation to provide Richardson with his own blog? He has, after all, written at least one cover story for the magazine, The GOP-Fox Circus Act. Not that I’m saying The Nation should just do things for my ease. They did, after all, add the #nowheresreed anchor name to <i>Altercation</i> at my urging. (Such is the juice I have with the liberal media establishment!) How could I ask for more?

As for this week’s column, it’s about how Meet the Press is pushing David Gregory out, only to be replaced by David Gregory, I mean, Chuck Todd. I make it a point never to watch the Sunday political shows unless I can watch Mary Matalin get upset when Paul Krugman brings up “science” and other distasteful things like “facts.” Otherwise, Richardson nailed the reason why these shows have always sucked and will always suck:

There was never any hope that NBC was going to replace Gregory with Glenn Greenwald. As it was, the network (as MSNBC) fired Phil Donahue back during the Iraq War because they were afraid to have even one voice to push back against the administration. So of course the mainstream media are going to be the fearful lapdogs of the power elite.

This the main reason we need people like Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson. And it may seem that Richardson gets more attention under the Alterman umbrella. But I think it is time to decouple the two. Or at least to start the process with cross-posting. Plus, I could really use another “Weekly” link.

The North Carolina News Observer reported that the state school voucher program was found to be unconstitutional by Judge Robert Hobgood. It’s rare to see such a powerful decision. It is clear what the law was meant to do: gut the public education system. This is always what conservative education “reform” is about.

According to the article, of those requesting vouchers, the majority were for religious schools. “Also, private schools do not have to give state exams or meet public school regulations.” So in addition to harming the public schools, the law was also a gift to the Christian conservatives who are afraid that their children might be taught real science or real history. I’m sure even Jonathan Chait would see the mendacity behind this kind of reform.

According to qnotes, “Hobgood also ruled that the new scholarship program pushed public money to schools that can discriminate in admissions and are not required to maintain curriculum or teacher certification standards.” This goes along with the hypocrisy that Digby noted among conservative education reformers. They are obsessed with the effectiveness of unionized teachers, but they don’t give a thought to just how horrible parent teachers or, in this case, religious educators might be.

Note that this isn’t just about conservative education reform. This says something very important about the education reform movement generally. Like a lot of liberals and moderates, those in the education reform movement take their cues from the conservatives. Now they wouldn’t be in favor of anything as egregious as this North Carolina law. But their focus on “ineffective teachers” and destroying due process employment rights for teachers (“tenure”), is not a focus they came to all by themselves. The big money and the conservative base was pushing it and the liberals went right along with it.

What I see happening is that in the end, teachers unions will be neutered. Teachers will have much less independence and job security. But at best children won’t get any better an education. So a huge effort on the part of liberals will not accomplish their goals, but will accomplish the goals of disingenuous conservatives. It seems to me that there is another educational problem in this country that is getting in the way of improving the education of our children: liberals are being educated by conservatives. I’m sure smart conservatives are tickled that so many liberals are helping them do their dirty work. But this wouldn’t be the first time that large segments of the Democratic Party acted as useful fools for the Republicans.

Back in December, Patrick Howley wrote an article in The Daily Caller, Liberals Want to Stop Men From Checking Out Women. It’s a very short article intended to offend, and it did. It’s also plain dumb. Just as conservatives have some mythical idea of “America” that doesn’t exist, hasn’t existed, and can’t exist, they have some weird idea of what “progressives” are.

Normally, I would not even bring him up. But last night, I came upon a 40 minute interview he did with Sam Seder on The Majority Report. I was just looking for something to listen to for a few minutes while I did some cleaning. But I was drawn in and I ended up listening to the whole thing. It was hypnotizing. It didn’t become better over time. It was just the same thing over and over again.

At first, I felt sorry for Howley. He sounded about as bad as I would if Rush Limbaugh invited me to debate on the show. The guy clearly has no experience in live media. He sounded nervous and, frankly, like a teenager. Seder was extremely nice to him until almost the very end. It wasn’t necessary to counter him. Seder just clarified what he was saying. And that was more than enough.

Howley is a very typical libertarian. By that I mean that he’s fairly smart (subgenius) but he has never thought outside the bounds of the Ayn Rand essays he’s read. The best example of this was his take on sexual harassment. Basically: he doesn’t think it exists. His opinion is that if your boss is hitting on you, you can just get another job. The boss will be punished by the market because he won’t get the best employees. This is the kind of theoretical notion of freedom that makes libertarianism so toxic. And coming from a conservative affirmative action case like Howley, it’s disgusting. What does he know about the economic problems of the working class? Being 25 years old and working his whole life in conservative media, I can safely answer: nothing.

But what was most striking was how mad this young man was about the things that he had decided that “progressives” were going to do to him. Soon, they were going to make it illegal to ogle women. How did he know that? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! How would such a law work? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! How would you define ogling? Because that’s what progressives are always doing! Really: it was hypnotizing.

His real complaint, although he won’t admit to this is that people complain about things he writes. He calls this “suppressing his free speech.” This is a common tactic of conservatives: when people don’t like what they say, conservatives claim liberals are trying to suppress them. What’s really going on is that liberals are having a debate and the conservatives generally do poorly. When Rush Limbaugh is one of the great thinkers of your movement, you are in trouble. Regardless, last year I attacked Howley in an article, Humor Attempt Turns Racist. Many other people attacked him too. But the article he wrote is still online. He was not fired, much less arrested. His free speech was not suppressed.

But this is his idea of freedom: he should be immune to any criticisms. But some woman who works at McDonald’s should have to put up with sexual harassment because she’s “free” to find another job. This is Rob Portman logic. You may remember that Portman had always been against same sex marriage. But then his gay son came out to him. And suddenly Portman was for same sex marriage. That was because it suddenly affected him. He didn’t like the idea of his son being discriminated against. It was fine as long as it was only other people’s sons.

It’s the same thing with Patrick Howley. (In general, it is the same thing with all conservatives, most especially libertarians.) He wants to maximize his freedom, which he assumes is freedom in a general sense. He can’t even understand what life is like for a woman whose best job prospect will only ever be a job at McDonald’s. I imagine Howley in a Marie Antoinette haze, “The poor are struggling with their jobs at fast food restaurants? Then let them work at The Daily Caller!” Meanwhile, Howley is out there fighting those “progressives” who are planning to do terrible things to “freedom.” Because that’s what progressives are always doing!

I hate it when a commentator does his job so well that he leaves me with nothing to add. That was the case yesterday with Kevin Drum, Chart of the Day: Welfare Reform and the Great Recession. What I think I can do, however, is make his point a bit more clear. The issue here is how “block granting” is destroying welfare in this country and how conservatives want to use them to destroy most other programs that help the poor and middle classes.

You should remember that Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” And he followed through with that promise but in an abbreviated way: he simply ended welfare, although it wasn’t particularly clear at that time. He got a whole lot of plaudits for this “reform” because the welfare rolls really did go down. But that had nothing to do with the law; it was all due to the smoking hot economy. Of course people got off welfare: there were jobs available!

Once the economy tanked in 2000, people lost their jobs and slid back into poverty. But now the main welfare programs did not respond as you can see in the following graph from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):

There are various reasons that welfare isn’t available for people when they want it. For example, there are now limits to the amount of time any person can get certain kinds of welfare. But the biggest problem here is that Clinton’s welfare “reform” turned federal welfare into block grants to the states. As as I’ve talked about many times around here: when the federal government provides money for programs it doesn’t administer, there is little incentive to maintain the funding. And that’s just what happened. According to CBPP:

And this is why conservatives love “block granting.” It has nothing to do with the oft-claimed conservative principle that local governments are more responsive to their people. As you see from the CBPP quote, most states do only the bare minimum to get the federal dollars. So the real reason that conservatives like block grants is that they are a politically viable way to destroy programs they don’t like.

Of course, there are ways to make block grants actually work. Here’s Kevin Drum on what we aren’t going to see coming from Paul “Poverty Slayer” Ryan:

No they won’t! Don’t buy the conservative propaganda about block grants.

Whenever Jonathan Chait writes about the education reform movement, he should be required to put a statement at the start of it. It should be something like this: “My wife works in the education reform movement.[1] As a result of this, I have absolutely no objectivity. Unlike most of what I write about, I have no sense whatsoever for nuance. I just hate the teachers unions and what little I will say about them will represent the most extreme factions. So it is really for the best if you don’t even read what follows because I have nothing interesting to add to any discussion on the issue of education reform.” But instead, he pretends as though he were objective and interesting. Meanwhile, his readers get intellectual whiplash from one article to the next as he moves from liberal to conservative and back again.

His article today was a particularly egregious example of this, Obamans, Selling Out, and the Proxy Fight for the Democratic Party’s Future. His complaint in the article is that supporters of teachers unions attack Obama surrogates[2] rather than Obama and this is wrong because… Really, I don’t know why. He says that they don’t attack Obama himself because the President is popular inside the unions. So the union leadership is trying to protect its members in the best way that it can. And this is wrong because… Again, I don’t know.

The whole purpose of the article seems to be to allow him to write, “The splits within the Democratic Party over whether public services should be designed for the benefit of providers or consumers tend to come out at the municipal level.” Ouch! In case you missed it, Chait is saying that teachers unions are a constituency just like the the school kids. And who you gonna support, huh?! Those greedy teachers or those poor kids? Except, there’s another constituency that Chait doesn’t mention: the people employed in the education reform movement. He must know about it, because his wife works in it. It’s a constituency too.

But in the Jonathan Chait world of black and white education reform, people working for “reform” are only looking out for the kids—unlike those dirty teachers unions that would reduce the school day to 25 minutes if they could. It’s just ridiculous. My problem with the education reform movement is that it seems focused on one thing: teachers unions. It doesn’t spend its time trying to combat the very worst thing about our educational system: inequality based upon the widespread use of local property taxes to fund public education.

When it comes to the people who are always ranting about the budget deficit, Chait has no problem seeing that they aren’t interested in what they claim to be. He sees clearly that these people have ulterior motivations like cutting aid to the poor. But when it comes to education reform, Chait couldn’t be more naive. It seems to not even occur to him that some, maybe even most (Look at who funds the movement!), are not quite so pure. And that’s why his writing about education reform is useless.

[1] According to her Twitter account she is, “Director of Performance Management and Human Resources, Center City Public Charter Schools.”

[2] One of those surrogates is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which hardly seems to apply. Would he make the same claim if liberals complained about Obama’s Defense Secretary (which we did)?

Update (22 August 2014 10:06 pm)

I want to make clear that this is not about the education reform movement not adopting my favorite issue. I’ve been attacked on this before. People will say that there is no political will to deal with the issue that I am most concerned about and ask if we shouldn’t at least do whatever it is that we can. There are a couple of issues here. One is that education funding inequality is not just any other issue. It is like taxes in the budget deficit debate. If someone isn’t willing to deal with this issue, it shows that they aren’t serious. At best it shows they only want to nibble around the edges of the problem. Another issue is: why is it politically viable to go after teachers unions and to push testing, testing, and more testing? I think a lot of it is that the people who are willing to give millions of dollars for education reform are mostly interested in something else. I’m all for things that work. But at one time, charter schools were what would save us. In fact, to many people, they still are. But it’s turned out that other than moving a lot of teachers out of unions, the charter schools haven’t done that much good. On average, they are about as good as public schools. I think I have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the motivations of the education reform movement. And so does Jonathan Chait.