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The Autocrats Club In The Middle East

The Article: Gadhafi leaned on Arab allies to stay in power by Maggie Michael at Yahoo.

The Text: Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship likely wouldn’t have survived for more than four decades without the sea of dictators all around, protecting one another and working together to silence dissident voices.

Gadhafi himself saw collapse was inevitable as Arab unity frayed, and he pointed to the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a sign of things to come. “Your turn is next,” he warned fellow leaders in a scathing speech at the 2008 Arab League summit in Damascus.

Back in 2008, Gadhafi’s listeners laughed. Now, besides Gadhafi, longtime autocrats have been swept from power by popular uprisings in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, and Egypt. Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh are also under fierce pressure.

Ties with autocrats stretch back to the early days of Gadhafi’s regime, historians have written. The night Gadhafi — then a junior officer who would later promote himself to colonel — ousted King Idriss, the first planeload of official visitors to land in Tripoli was from Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser sent veteran journalist and top adviser Mohammed Hassanin Haikal to take the measure of his neighbor’s new ruler.

Gadhafi told Haikal he would seek Nasser’s guidance. Haikal promised Egypt’s support.

Only four months after Gadhafi’s coup, two members of his Revolutionary Command Council turned against him. Egyptian intelligence officers tipped off Gadhafi that he faced a coup, according to historians.

Shortly after that, King Idriss’ nephew Abdullah al-Abid al-Senoussi, also known as the Black Prince, led a force of 5,000 mercenaries from Chad and planned to arm tribes loyal to the king to fight against Gadhafi. This time, it was Tunisians who are believed to have tipped off Gadhafi.

In a recent interview, Gadhafi’s former Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, who defected during this year’s rebellion, told the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat that Gadhafi used to pay former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali a monthly salary, and that Tunisian-Libyan cooperation was “at the highest level.”

The exchange of security and intelligence information was the only successful sphere of cooperation among Arab governments, asserted Fathi al-Baja, a Libyan political scientist and top political leader for the Libyan rebels.

“This is the only thing they could do,” he said.

Gadhafi even paid the editors of state-owned newspapers in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere to run “propaganda glorifying him or at the very least to block any channels between the opposition and public opinion,” said Fayez Jibril, a Cairo-based founder of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, Libya’s oldest opposition group.

Gadhafi’s pursuit of his opponents included televised executions of students, professors, clerics and others in public squares and on university campuses. In the worst instance of repression, more than 1,200 prisoners, including many political detainees, were gunned down at the notorious Abu Salim prison in 1996.

Little of that made it into the Arab press at the time.

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Could You Fight Off Serena Williams?

“Dad, do you think — if I had to — I could beat Serena Williams in a fight?”

“No chance. Serena Williams has more testosterone than you do.”

“With those thighs? She’d scissor you to death,” my dad’s girlfriend added.

To be clear: I do not wish to fight Serena Williams. She is a post-racial ambassador for the game who transcended it. An inspiration to daughters, mothers, and grandmothers everywhere. I grew misty-eyed when she countered her sister Venus in the 2002 French Open finals.

But suppose the 27-time Grand Slam titlist was overtaken by a seething fit of rage. Could you fend her off?

On a tennis court, no. Her forehand is the stuff of legend. Serena’s serve clocks up to 129 MPH and fells All-American defensive linemen. Serena’s ground-game would prove formidable. Her aforementioned thunder thighs would suffocate me instantly.

I’m a bro in my mid-twenties. I endured years of rough-and-tumble fights with my brother until my innovation of the head-butt ushered in a Pax Fraternus. I run every-day and bench every other. Nonetheless, Madden is the closest I’ve come to a tackle in the last three months. I lack any martial arts training but for Intro to Karate my Senior year of college (I passed).

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The Rights War On Democracy

The Article: The GOP War on Voting by Ari Berman in Rolling Stone.

The Text: As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud – a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a “top priority” for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting “an enormous and growing problem.” In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses.” According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.

Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere,” joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning,” the report calculated, “than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama’s candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters. In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008 – and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes. In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points. “This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top,” says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank.

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Understanding The Anti-Reason Hysteria Of The Republican Party

Recently, Paul Krugman began a New York Times column on the anti-science and anti-intellectual stance of today’s GOP by quoting Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, wherein he stated that the Republican Party is quickly becoming the “anti-science party.” Most people haven’t heard of Huntsman, Republican pariah-in-residence. And even if they do, they probably won’t listen to him. Why? Because he’s reasonable, and there is simply no room for that trait in the Tea Party movement’s hellish and destructive crusade within the GOP.

As the Tea Party has gained momentum, reason has evaporated into the ether and has been replaced with polarizing rhetoric often with a religious flair. We’ve seen this with Sarah Palin’s spurious “death panel” remarks during the debate over Obamacare, Rick Perry’s prayer-based solution to a Texas drought, and Michele Bachmann’s more recent claims that, no matter how much she tries to palliate them with shrill and off-putting laughter, God has had a substantial role in the recent earthquakes as well as Hurricane Irene. Digging a bit deeper, former President George W. Bush, the Connecticut-coddled kid with a specious Texan drawl, kindled the polarization flame again with his famous 2001 appeal to the US Congress where he stated, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” And then with the nightmare that was the debt ceiling “talks,” we’ve witnessed a party willing to drive its country into the dirt over something more powerful than reason: their beliefs.

In this unfortunate political arena, reason — the pesky little tool that separates us from flea-picking baboons — has no place. What we see unfurling now in the Republican Party and in the remarks of its primary presidential frontrunners is not the result of reason, but rather Christian fundamentalists who pit their God against science and research in a fight they are determined to win. And that, like Krugman said, is terrifying. But it is also something that, for better or worse, is not new in the American story; it is part of our tradition.

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Teaching In New York City

The Article: Confessions of a bad teacher by John Owens at Salon.

The Text: By the time we sang “The Star–Spangled Banner” in 9th grade English, it was too late to save me. So I didn’t even try to keep the kids quiet, and joined the class as they burst into song.

Almon, an A-average boy whose parents had emigrated from the Dominican Republic by way of Milwaukee, was absolutely sure our national anthem includes the lyric “cheese bursting in air.”

Daria, who came from Honduras just a few years ago and was struggling with English, was gamely singing, trying to guess what words would be appropriate for a song about her new country. “Nice!” “Nice! In air!”

Sarah, the daughter of Ghanese immigrants, got every word right and hit every note with church-choir perfection. And from Rikkie, the highly intelligent, perhaps brilliant, boy, whose father is serving six years in an upstate prison, to Cristofer, a skinny kid who fancies himself a Puerto Rican tough (“I didn’t even cry when my father died”), to A’Don, whose mother doesn’t speak English, to Michael, whose father doesn’t speak English, to Macon, who only seems to care about basketball, we sang loud, we sang laughing, we sang whatever words we knew, and we sang for all we were worth.

Considering that there’s no daily Pledge of Allegiance in New York City public schools, and that American flags are almost as scarce, the class did quite well.

“The dawn’s early light” hadn’t echoed off the linoleum floor before an administrator and a school aide were in the doorway ready to quell this “disruption,” as they did with so many of my classes.

But it was this high-spirited, everybody-participates approach that made the 9th Grade Writing Workshop a joy for me. And, I believe, for my students.

Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.

It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.

And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”

In other words, I was a bad teacher.

From Michael Bloomberg to Bill Gates to hedge-fund-enriched charter school backers, the problem with our schools is bad teachers. With salaries sometimes surpassing $100,000, summers off and “job for life” tenure, it’s easy to believe that our schools are facing a bed-bug-caliber infestation of bad teachers.

Amid all of this, I thought I could do some good. I am a middle-aged white guy from the suburbs, but I’m not lazy. I’m not crazy. I’m good with kids, and I love literature.

During a three-decade career as a writer, editor and corporate executive, I traveled to more than 100 countries, met heads of state, and picked up wisdom that I thought was worth sharing. When I left publishing, I was senior vice president/group editorial director at Hachette Filipacchi Media (the bulk of which was recently sold to Hearst Magazines). Now, I was determined to make an impact directly with kids in the classroom, and I set out for the South Bronx.

Little did I know I was entering a system where all teachers are considered bad until proven otherwise. Also, from what I saw, each school’s principal has so much leeway that it’s easy for good management and honest evaluation to be crushed under the weight of Crazy Boss Syndrome. And, in my experience, the much-vaunted “data” and other measurements of student progress and teacher efficacy are far more arbitrary and manipulated than taxpayers and parents have been led to believe.

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