State of the Union Address

[Kryten]

Remind me when Spain or its allies attacked Germany?

He's talking when the Germans attacked Spain, you idiot.

[Thanas]

I'm not sure why anybody doesn't deserve to feel outraged about the glorification of the military-industrial complex and its products, let alone the people who actually got slaughtered deliberately by those products to terrorize populations into surrender. If a Guernican/Euskaran/Spaniard were offended by you praising the products of Dornier, Heinkel, and Junkers for their quality (please don't take this as an invitation for an idiotic argument about the actual quality of their products), would you then be so sanctimonious?

Remind me when Spain or its allies attacked Germany?

Point flying over your head.

He wasn't specifically saying that bombers were the "best products on earth". He was saying that the American Workforce turned out the best products on Earth. Harkening to a time when "Made in America" stood for quality. His grandmother's job happened to be on a bomber assembly line. If she worked in an Autoplant, or made light bulbs the same comment would have applied. It was far less a glorification of the war industrial complex, and more about his goal of making "Made in America" mean something again.

No, that line is firmly in the context of his speech regarding the role placed in the defeat of fascism.

[Block]

Remind me when Spain or its allies attacked Germany?

He's talking when the Germans attacked Spain, you idiot.

You might want to understand the context of the discussion before you call people idiots. I understand full well what he was trying to say, but its a false analogy since German involvement had nothing to do with Spain or an ally of Spain making an aggressive move against Germany first, unlike US involvement in WW2.

[Block]

I got the same impression as Nephtys last night... maybe it came across differently live than it did in text? tbh though, my tv was just on in the background as I was doing other stuff, so I wasn't paying much attention.

That was my understanding as well, especially in the contaxt of talking about bringing back American manufacturing and using community colleges to create a workforce with specialized skills for high tech manufacturing.

[Kryten]

You might want to understand the context of the discussion before you call people idiots.

This is the context, moron.

I'm not sure why anybody doesn't deserve to feel outraged about the glorification of the military-industrial complex and its products, let alone the people who actually got slaughtered deliberately by those products to terrorize populations into surrender. If a Guernican/Euskaran/Spaniard were offended by you praising the products of Dornier, Heinkel, and Junkers for their quality (please don't take this as an invitation for an idiotic argument about the actual quality of their products), would you then be so sanctimonious?

The glorification of the military, and glib justificationsfor use of bombing against civilians, is the context being used, so a comparison to, say, Guernica would make perfect sense.

[Simon_Jester]

Blockhead aside...

Pardon, but where in there did he say anything about yay dead Germans? He said that he was proud that his grandmother was part of the war effort that helped defeat the Nazis, which he should be.

He did not say that. He said "My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth". Best products on earth. He was not only lauding the defeat of fascism (which I have no problem of), he was openly saying bombers were the best products on earth.

They were certainly among the most complicated and difficult to design products on Earth; there's a reason nobody but the British managed equivalent designs during the war.

"Best" is an ambiguous word, at least in English. It means 'most good,' that much is clear. But we can talk about whether a thing is good in many ways. "A good man," "a good cause," and "a good sword" don't use the same sense of the word "good."

In a good world, bombers (and swords) would never be needed or made. The B-29 was nonetheless "a good bomber," in the sense that a sharp, lethal sword is "a good sword."

But that's a sidetrack. To quote the speech at more length rather than cherry-picking:

Think about the America within our reach: a country that leads the world in educating its people; an America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs; a future where we're in control of our own energy; and our security and prosperity aren't so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we've done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.

My grandfather, a veteran of Patton's Army, got the chance to go to college on the G.I. Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger, that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share: the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

Now, if Obama were talking only about bombers, you can be sure he wouldn't be talking about soldiers coming home from the war and going to college on the GI Bill. He would say "my grandfather fought for Patton" or something.

I think that if we are not disingenuous about this, we see a lot of evidence that Obama is talking about the general industrial boom America had that began with the WWII mobilization, but continued more peacefully through the rest of the mid-century.

[Surlethe]

Funny, I was getting the same impression -- that the US was making the best bombers, not that firebombing cities was awesome.

[Rogue 9]

Why was that man tapped for the response? I could feel consciousness being sapped away by his dullness. Or maybe it's because I've heard every single bit of it before. Dozens of times.

Be glad you only have to deal with him the once. He's my governor; I've had to put up with him for years.

[MKSheppard]

Dresden says: Fuck you. As do I. Celebating the targeted mass slaughter of civilians?

Minor point:

Tokyo says: Fuck You.

She worked at the Boeing Wichita plant putting together B-29s.

[Ahriman238]

I'm pretty sure US bombers hit, and were built to hit, more targets than Dresden. For that matter, my grandparents (on my dad's side, anyways) were chemists working in explosives plants during the war. Sort of. They had a chemistry background, but rather than mixing the explosives personally they were safety inspectors at the bomb plants. Where would that morally fall on, for working in the great War Machine?

I really love the enlightened attitude we have towards education here in the US. We get ignored, unless the budget needs trimming, until election season comes around. Then Education is Our Top Priority! Meaning politicians get speech fodder, and good sound bytes of them passionatly demanding more results. Then they cut our budgets some more because we were bad, even as they raise their standards.

Roughly 40% of the teachers at the school I work in need to apply for private grants to get books and generally keep their classrooms functioning. I'm looking into the grant process myself. And I live in liberal paradise Massachusetts where education is as close to being an actual priority as it ever gets in this country.

[SirNitram]

Why was that man tapped for the response? I could feel consciousness being sapped away by his dullness. Or maybe it's because I've heard every single bit of it before. Dozens of times.

Be glad you only have to deal with him the once. He's my governor; I've had to put up with him for years.

Does he always talk like the world is in Act 1 of a disaster movie?

[ComradeClaus]

Now, if Obama were talking only about bombers, you can be sure he wouldn't be talking about soldiers coming home from the war and going to college on the GI Bill. He would say "my grandfather fought for Patton" or something.

I think that if we are not disingenuous about this, we see a lot of evidence that Obama is talking about the general industrial boom America had that began with the WWII mobilization, but continued more peacefully through the rest of the mid-century.

It would've been better if he just said she was an assembly line worker & left it at that.

Of course, w/ the Cold War & all, it's hard to say that it was more "peaceful" industry.
We did build tens of thousands of combat aircraft from ~1948-1991 as well as tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, plus Eisenhower had the "Military-Industrial Complex" speech in the 50's.

And the entire Space Race was basically driven by military factors.

(of course, we benefited greatly from all the scientists & patents we "liberated" from German ownership, but that's something I'm sure Obama & the Repubs would hate to have mentioned )

And is was a bit much that he started w/ "Yo, I capped Bin Lawlden, the most dangerous man in history & saved democracy & America" The hardest part was not tipping off his protectors in the Pakistani gov't. (Bush was too chummy w/ them) It wasn't like storming Berlin & charging into the Fuhrerbunker & capping Hitler.

[PainRack]

I really love the enlightened attitude we have towards education here in the US. We get ignored, unless the budget needs trimming, until election season comes around. Then Education is Our Top Priority! Meaning politicians get speech fodder, and good sound bytes of them passionatly demanding more results. Then they cut our budgets some more because we were bad, even as they raise their standards.

Roughly 40% of the teachers at the school I work in need to apply for private grants to get books and generally keep their classrooms functioning. I'm looking into the grant process myself. And I live in liberal paradise Massachusetts where education is as close to being an actual priority as it ever gets in this country.

Except that he isn't referring to just cutting teachers loose, but with regards to unions and the need to grade and fire ineffective teachers. This has been in his campaign platform since he was a Senator, what's new about this?

Its not as if he's ignorant of the funding problems plaguing American schools or the poor pay, if the debate is about him not doing anything or enough to address that, sure, but with regards to this? Red herring.


Also Thanas, seriously, wtf? He used the Iraq war as a reference to "what we can do if we worked together". It was clearly a segue to appeal to American unity and the Greatest Generation.

The Greatest Generation is defined by the war against Nazism for better or for worse, so, yeah.......

[Simon_Jester]

Except that he isn't referring to just cutting teachers loose, but with regards to unions and the need to grade and fire ineffective teachers. This has been in his campaign platform since he was a Senator, what's new about this?

The problem, PainRack, is that American schoolteachers agree to put up with the long hours and low salaries in part because they don't have to spend every damn minute worrying they're going to get fired because someone saddled them with a class full of underperformers, or because they're being assigned thirty-five students to juggle and expected to make the class perform at a benchmark designed for classes of twenty-five.

Firing underperformers only works if you do three things.

One is set reasonable standards for what 'underperformance' means, standards that stay consistent from year to year so that people can work out procedures for meeting them every year. Otherwise, they just look for whatever short-term process will inflate the test scores and benchmarks so they can look like they're meeting quota. Remember the problems of Soviet-style quota systems?

The second is to make sure you can tell the difference between 'does the job badly' and 'was assigned to go make bricks without straw.' If you fire people working under bad conditions for not doing as well as people working under good conditions, you will soon find that no one wants to work under bad conditions at all- and any teacher with the talent to do a good job in bad schools will be scrambling to find a way out, to go teach at a good school. Ahriman is skeptical about whether testing regimes will handle this part.

Third, you need to replace the underperformers with people who know what they're doing. Which means not just hiring a huge wave of new employees at random, because like any other job, a teacher needs a few years of experience to get good at the job. You need people with brains and dedication, more brains and dedication than the ones you just fired, or you might as well not have bothered. But if you're paying teachers less than you did when you hired those people, and expecting them to do more with less, where are you going to find a better crop of replacements? How will you keep morale up long enough on the job for those people to stick around and learn the job, rather than quitting in disgust?

Also Thanas, seriously, wtf? He used the Iraq war as a reference to "what we can do if we worked together". It was clearly a segue to appeal to American unity and the Greatest Generation.

The Greatest Generation is defined by the war against Nazism for better or for worse, so, yeah.......

Also by, and this is important, the postwar boom. The people born in the 1910s and '20s, who fought in the 1940s, went on to work in factories and offices to build most of modern America as we know it in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s. A tremendous amount of infrastructure development, economic growth, expansion of all sorts of industry, technology, and education- all part of that.

[Davis 51]

He also just took a shot across the bow of the Republicans by mentioning Cordray and the Consumer protection agency.

Elizabeth Warren should be head of CFPB (and we could all short WRLD) if there were any testicles at all in this administration.

Cordray is more than talented and qualified to lead the CFPB, who Warren herself called an "Exceptional Choice". The GOP spent so much time demonizing and smearing Warren that if he had recess appointed her, they would be able to use it as an attacking point all through 2012. By switching to Cordray, the GOP lost all excuses, and after his appointment, the GOP will scream and hollar, but it will come across as less dignified outrage and more of a temper tantrum. And now we also have a chance of having a Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been going dead heat against Scott Brown, and bears a strong chance of winning if the populist narrative continues to dominate, taking back the Senate Seat of Ted Kennedy.

And he gets to mock the GOP about it in the SotU Address. I'm having a hard time seeing the downside of this. Obama knows how to pick his fights, so tone down the "Hurf Durf Obama Has No Balls!" He still won in the end.

Edit: Added a few sentences to clarify my point.

[Davis 51]

Also, this

WASHINGTON -- High school dropouts, do not fear. The Republican Party will protect you from Barack Obama's efforts to keep you at your desk.

At his third State of the Union Address Tuesday night, the president challenged all states to ban children from dropping out of high school before they turn 18. "Tonight," Obama bellowed, "I am proposing that every state--every state--requires that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18."

Obama wasn't proposing a new federal program, but his use of the bully pulpit to tell local jurisdictions how to run their school districts was enough to make some Republicans, already sensitive to the increasing role of the federal government in education over the past few years, bristle.

"That's none of his business!" said Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee while speaking to reporters after the speech. "He's not a principal! He's not a public school teacher! He's not a governor, he's not a mayor. These are matters for state and local government."

Standing in Statuary Hall outside the House chamber, Lee, a senator whose rise to prominence was propelled by the tea party, went on to say that there was plenty in Obama's speech that made him want to scream, but he held his tongue.

"I did not want to be Joe Wilson!" Lee said. Meanwhile, Joe Wilson, who shouted "You Lie!" during a presidential address in 2009, was standing directly behind him, about three feet away.

Regulations on school attendance varies from state to state. Twenty states currently meet Obama's standards by restricting students from dropping out before they turn 18-years-old. Some states allow students to drop out at 16 with parental permission and others require an agreement from the school to let them go. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 8.1 percent of students nationwide dropped out of high school in 2009.

Other Republicans in the crowded hall, fed up with Obama's calls for a more intrusive federal system, lambasted the president for even making the suggestion.

"What are you gonna do, give them the electric chair?" asked Arizona Republican Trent Franks. "It should be handled on the parental level."

Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia, agreed, saying students should have the right to leave if they want to.

"To require them to stay in high school to age 18, those who have absolutely no intention of getting an education or value an education are disrupting the other kids in class. I think it's just a government misguided run amok quote honestly," Gingrey said.

There was, however, one Republican willing to stand up for Obama's call: High school dropout Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Issa, who left high school when he was 17-years-old to join the Army, took Obama's call to mean that the federal government should look into ways to encourage states to raise their age limits on dropping out, and he's fully behind it.

"I agree with him," Issa said. "The truth is that maintaining students from dropping out until they're 18, and every possible inducement, rather than getting rid of them at the first possible moment because they become a 'pest,' because perhaps they're not performing well. That could make a real difference in the level of education people get. Do I promote it? Yes."

"Leave no child behind?" he said. "That has a familiar ring to me as a Republican."

[Eternal_Freedom]

"I agree with him," Issa said. "The truth is that maintaining students from dropping out until they're 18, and every possible inducement, rather than getting rid of them at the first possible moment because they become a 'pest,' because perhaps they're not performing well. That could make a real difference in the level of education people get. Do I promote it? Yes."

"Leave no child behind?" he said. "That has a familiar ring to me as a Republican."

My joy at finding a Republican who is not a complete moron is outweight by this delightful comment:

"What are you gonna do, give them the electric chair?" asked Arizona Republican Trent Franks.

Sigh.

[ComradeClaus]

We may actually see an increase in suicides for students kept in a stressful environment.

That & possibly more school shootings.

School isn't for everyone, so the Feds shouldn't chain everyone to a desk.

[PainRack]

Except that he isn't referring to just cutting teachers loose, but with regards to unions and the need to grade and fire ineffective teachers. This has been in his campaign platform since he was a Senator, what's new about this?

The problem, PainRack, is that American schoolteachers agree to put up with the long hours and low salaries in part because they don't have to spend every damn minute worrying they're going to get fired because someone saddled them with a class full of underperformers, or because they're being assigned thirty-five students to juggle and expected to make the class perform at a benchmark designed for classes of twenty-five.

Ok...... Maybe I'm an idiot, but it sounds to me in his speech that that IS the bargain Obama is offering.


Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. (Applause.) And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making. (Applause.)



If we refer to his book the Audacity of Hope, he elaborated on this slightly more by saying that good school teachers matter more to grades, that an internal review would be a good model as teachers can tell you who are the good teachers.


Its an offer. We give schools the resources to teach our kids better, to keep teachers on the job by presumably offering better benefits, hours or whatever it takes, but in return, we must have the ability to fire lousy teachers.