October 2014 archive

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Trevor Timm: The most important national-security secrets case you’ve never heard of

Your phone records, your credit-card bills, your internet trail – the government has the power to summon it all on-demand, without telling you. Until now

The most consequential civil liberties case in years is being argued before three judges in California on Wednesday, and it has little to do with the NSA but everything to do with taking away your privacy in the name of vague and unsubstantiated “national security” claims.

The landmark case revolves around National Security Letters (NSLs), the pernicious tool for surveillance-on-demand that the FBI has used with reckless abandon since 9/11 – almost completely hidden from public view, even though they’re used to view the public’s private information. To wit, NSLs allow the FBI to demand all sorts of your stuff from internet, telephone, banking and credit-card companies without any prior sign-off from a judge or their unwitting customers. Worse, companies are served a gag order, making it illegal for them not only to tell you which of your info is being pulled – but to tell the public they’ve received such a request at all.

Which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is in court on Wednesday, why Twitter is now suing the US government, and the reason that anyone who cares about his or her privacy should be just as aware of the three letters “NSL” as everyone has no doubt already become with the acronym NSA.

Timothy Egan: Why Do We Re-elect Them?

When you buy a new car, you dodge the sketchy salesman, read up on consumer ratings, get a feel for the ride. When you get married, you think about growing old with a person, love beyond lust, do a life gut check. And when you elect a federal lawmaker next month, you go against everything you believe in to reward the worst Congress ever.

How else to explain the confit of conventional wisdom showing that voters are poised to give Republicans control of the Senate, and increase their hold on the House, even though a majority of Americans oppose nearly everything the G.O.P. stands for?

The message is: We hate you for your inaction, your partisanship, your nut-job conspiracy theories; now do more of the same. Democracy – nobody ever said it made sense. Of course, November’s election will be a protest vote against the man who isn’t on the ballot, a way to make a lame duck president even lamer in his final two years.

The Plot Against Public Education

By BOB HERBERT, Politico

October 06, 2014

When a multibillionaire gets an idea, just about everybody leans in to listen. And when that idea has to do with matters of important public policy and the billionaire is willing to back it up with hard cash, public officials tend to reach for the money with one hand and their marching orders with the other. Gates backed his small-schools initiative with enormous amounts of cash. So, without a great deal of thought, one school district after another signed on to the notion that large public high schools should be broken up and new, smaller schools should be created.

This was an inherently messy process. The smaller schools-proponents sometimes called them academies-would often be shoehorned into the premises of the larger schools, so you’d end up with two, three or more schools competing for space and resources in one building. That caused all sorts of headaches: Which schools would get to use the science labs, or the gyms? How would the cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the brawls among students from rival schools?

…

That was Bill Gates’s grand idea. From 2000 to 2009, he spent $2 billion and disrupted 8 percent of the nation’s public high schools before acknowledging that his experiment was a flop. The size of a high school proved to have little or no effect on the achievement of its students. At the same time, fewer students made it more difficult to field athletic teams. Extracurricular activities withered. And the number of electives offered dwindled.

Gates said it himself in the fall of 2008, “Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.”

…

But Gates was by no means finished. He and his foundation quickly turned to the task of trying to fix the nation’s teachers.

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Although he and his foundation were committed to the idea of putting a great teacher into every classroom, Gates acknowledged that there was not much of a road map for doing that. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know.”

This hit-or-miss attitude-let’s try this, let’s try that-has been a hallmark of school reform efforts in recent years. The experiments trotted out by the big-money crowd have been all over the map. But if there is one broad approach (in addition to the importance of testing) that the corporate-style reformers and privatization advocates have united around, it’s the efficacy of charter schools. Charter schools were supposed to prove beyond a doubt that poverty didn’t matter, that all you had to do was free up schools from the rigidities of the traditional public system and the kids would flourish, no matter how poor they were or how chaotic their home environments.

Corporate leaders, hedge fund managers and foundations with fabulous sums of money at their disposal lined up in support of charter schools, and politicians were quick to follow. They argued that charters would not only boost test scores and close achievement gaps but also make headway on the vexing problem of racial isolation in schools.

None of it was true. Charters never came close to living up to the hype. After several years of experimentation and the expenditure of billions of dollars, charter schools and their teachers proved, on the whole, to be no more effective than traditional schools. In many cases, the charters produced worse outcomes. And the levels of racial segregation and isolation in charter schools were often scandalous. While originally conceived a way for teachers to seek new ways to reach the kids who were having the most difficult time, the charter school system instead ended up leaving behind the most disadvantaged youngsters.

Shockingly Widespread Standardized Test Cheating in Schools in 39 States

By Elizabeth Hines, Alternet

October 6, 2014

This week in Atlanta, the trial of a dozen former educators and administrators charged with conspiring to manipulate test scores in Atlanta’s public schools got underway in Fulton County Superior Court. Characterized by the prosecuting district attorney, Fani Willis, as “a widespread, cleverly disguised conspiracy to illegally inflate test scores and create a false impression of academic success for many students in the Atlanta Public Schools system,” the case could earn its defendants as many as 35 years behind bars, should they be found guilty of the charges against them.

The Atlanta case has gained national attention in large part because of the scope of the cheating documented and the number of educators implicated (initially, more than 180 educators at 44 schools were involved, according to the Atlantic). But is Atlanta the singular case of a school system gone awry in a sea of otherwise compliant districts? Or is the systemic cheating alleged in this case shockingly prevalent in America’s schools – far beyond what most of us can imagine?

According to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), it’s time to prepare to be shocked. The organization has recently compiled data indicating that the scandal in Atlanta is “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to cheating on standardized tests in our nation’s schools. Specifically, FairTest has found documented cases of cheating, and in some cases, systematic manipulation of scores, in 39 states and the District of Columbia, over the last five years alone. The organization has also identified more than 60 methods administrators and teachers have used to alter student scores on these tests, from urging low-scorers to be absent the day of the test, to shouting out and otherwise indicating correct answers during testing.

The great charter school rip-off: Finally, the truth catches up to education “reform” phonies

by Jeff Bryant, Salon

Thursday, Oct 2, 2014 05:25 PM EST

Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”

A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance.

But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.

In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.

But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their families, and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing – rather than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about “what works” – is putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.

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Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors -just in Pennsylvania - include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.

What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.

Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation.

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Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”

Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.

In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”

This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.

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These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.

For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.”

…

Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, arguing against any regulation on charters. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.

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There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal.

Reading, Writing, Ransacking

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

October 7, 2014

These are tough times for education “reformers,” those well-meaning, usually wealthy dilettantes who are only making their comfortable living working “for the kids.” Michelle Rhee, their warrior queen, has been exposed as an intellectual three-card monte dealer, and has been forced to hand over her sword and buckler to Campbell Brown, a forgettable former CNN anchor Muppet whose dedication to democracy and “transparency” is, well, eccentric at best, as she crusades against teacher tenure so that local school boards — like the one presently embarrassing itself in Colorado — can make sure no inconvenient thinking manages to leach into the subject population being experimented upon by the people who pay Brown her salary. Whoever they are. The charter school movement increasingly looks like a Trojan Horse for the corporate education complex — demanding a complete lack of accountability and ending up, in many cases, as the pedagogical equivalent of a Texas fertilizer plant. This barely concealed strain of authoritarianism — the lack of accountability, the delicately eliminationist rhetoric aimed at public school teachers, the shadowy donors whom people like Brown decline to reveal, the kleptocratic reliance on corporate money — is more than sufficiently similar to the way corporations generally have looted the commonwealth to make you wonder if public education isn’t headed the way of the country’s manufacturing base.

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In a closed-door session that lasted 17 minutes and that included a single public comment, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission — more about them later — unilaterally blew up the contract under which the Philadelphia teachers union had been operating. In addition to socking the city’s teachers for their own health care, the commission also cut off the benefits being paid to retired teachers, most of them elderly, and all of them having worked for years to earn these benefits that yesterday vanished without even the pretense of debate. If this reminds you  of what happened to the pensions of firemen in New Jersey, and public workers in Wisconsin, and manufacturing grunts almost everywhere in the private sector, you are unusually sharp this morning and do not need that second cup of coffee.

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The politics of the move are as simple as they are grotesque. Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett has the approval rating of malaria right now and, if nothing changes, he’s on his way to a historic drubbing in November. Picking this fight may be Corbett’s last chance. However, he has picked the fight right in the middle of an ongoing scandal regarding the state’s system of charter schools which, because of the same lack of transparency that surrounds Campbell Brown’s financial angels and that surrounded the meeting in Philadelphia yesterday, has become a target-rich environment for the accountability-free grifters of the “reform” movement.

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(T)he charter school movement has come to (this) in Philadelphia — a “flip this school” real-estate scheme. Lovely. And that’s not even to get into the scandal around the state’s “Cyber Charter,” an Internet-based school the founder of which is currently on trial for funneling millions of dollars away from the school and into his pockets,  with which he allegedly bought himself a plane, and condos for his mother and girlfriend.

…

They all have so very much to answer for, the people who have decided to enrich themselves by bashing public school teachers and, in doing so, putting the entire philosophy of public education, one of the lasting contributions to society of the American political commonwealth, at serious risk. No wonder they operate secretly, and in the shadows, and beyond the reach of public accountability. They are burglarizing the future for their own profit.

My emphasis- ek hornbeck

Big Banks Face Another Round of U.S. Charges

By Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

October 6, 2014 9:30 pm

With evidence mounting that a number of foreign and American banks colluded to alter the price of foreign currencies, the largest and least regulated financial market, prosecutors are aiming to file charges against at least one bank by the end of the year, according to interviews with lawyers briefed on the matter. Ultimately, several banks are expected to plead guilty.

Interviews with more than a dozen lawyers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations open a window onto previously undisclosed aspects of an investigation that is unnerving Wall Street and the defense bar. While cases stemming from the financial crisis were aimed at institutions, prosecutors are planning to eventually indict individual bank employees over currency manipulation, using their instant messages as incriminating evidence.

The charges will most likely focus on traders and their bosses rather than chief executives. As a result, critics of the Justice Department might view the cases as little more than an exercise in public relations, a final push to shape the legacy of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who was blamed for a lack of criminal cases against Wall Street executives.

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The public lust for charges is at odds with the view on Wall Street, where bankers and lawyers report fatigue with what seems like unrelenting investigations. With each inquiry, the fines have multiplied, stretching to nearly $17 billion for Bank of America.

And the scrutiny could drag on for years. The Justice Department, lawyers said, has widened its focus to include a criminal investigation into banks that set an important benchmark for interest rate derivatives, a previously unreported development that coincides with international regulators’ proposing overhauls to the rate-setting process.

The flurry of activity strikes at the heart of Wall Street’s role in setting benchmarks across the globe. The investigations suggest that banks, seeking to benefit their own trades, have compromised the sanctity of rates like Libor and the “4 p.m. London fix” for currencies, which investors use to value their positions.

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At their core, the investigations into Libor and currency trading center on suspicions that banks manipulated the benchmarks for their own gain. In Libor, a measure of how much banks charge one another for loans, several banks submitted false rates to benefit their trading positions.

The foreign exchange inquiry has pointed to a more complex scheme to fix currency prices and game the market. Authorities suspect that banks, using information gleaned from their clients, collaborated to flood the market with orders just seconds before the so-called 4 p.m. fix, which serves as the benchmark for foreign exchange rates. The aim in part, authorities suspect, was to drive up the price of, say, euros before selling them to clients at an inflated price.

Traders at competing banks met in private chat rooms. Some traders became so cozy that they earned the nickname “the cartel” and “the bandits club.”

Science and Tech

Last week I was surfing my Tech sites when I ran across an article celebrating the demise of Windows 7 OEM pre-installation packages which HP and Dell (among others) buy in bulk and re-sell at a reasonable price to roll-your-own and custom builders.

The author’s expressed hope was that this would finally force consumers to adopt the “clearly superior in every way” Windows 8 OS and help out “poor beleaguered” Microsoft who shouldn’t be forced to support antiquated and obsolete systems,

Well, you know me.  There were no replies yet and I wanted to show my appreciation of the writer’s effort, so I posted what I considered a rather mild response

Windows 8 (and 8.1 for that matter) is a failure on par with Vista, not because it’s inherently unstable the way Vista is, but because it’s useless in a business environment which is Microsoft’s meat and potatoes and they should never forget it.

Why should I waste a month or two to train all my users a new interface?  Why should I switch to expensive touch screens that get greasy and smeary instantly, often require reconfiguring office space, fail incessantly, and are expensive to purchase and replace?

Windows 9 may have a chance if they find a easy way to configure for a simple (but fully featured) NT style desktop where workers see their document drafts and templates and the approved productivity applications that they require frequently and a Start Menu for those less used…

And that’s it!

Some applications benefit from touch screens (Point of Sale), some do not (document creation and processing, arguably spreadsheets).  Tablets and phones are field toy substitutes useful for enterprise communication and navigation (phone) and client presentations (tablets).  Otherwise they are huge black holes of productivity where your employees play games and update their personal social media (phones), and watch streaming video (tablets).

I will admit the Surface has the right idea with a real, though inferior, keyboard.

If Microsoft does not address those concerns I will continue to purchase Windows 7 as long as I can find an available copy and when I do switch my enterprise to a different Operating System it will be to Linux which provides my IT department with the necessary tools for easy installation, upgrade, maintenance, and control; and my workers with a consistent interface that requires minimal training to be productive.

Business computers need to be easy to use, not a colossal waste of time (which is money) and money (which is also money).

Alas, once a troll always a troll.  To their credit the dialog was more polite (if less creative) than I have been trained to expect from my involvement with political sites.  I wasn’t called a no-good Naderite more materially responsible for the demise of the Republic than corporately corrupt, moronically myopic, lesser evil legislators, but the attacks seemed faint-hearted and lacking in the glittering venom that the shills, toadies, and bullies bring.  Oh, for a foe worthy of my rapier wit.

And of course 2 days later Microsoft announces Windows 10 which validates my every criticism.  I’m sure they will apologize profusely.

Windows 10 is ‘Windows for the masses’

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, ZDNet

October 7, 2014 — 12:48 GMT (05:48 PDT)

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m convinced that the purpose of this Technical Preview is to convince all those Windows 7 enterprise users that Windows 10 puts behind it all that Windows 8 nonsense. Windows 8 put far too much focus on features that businesses saw at best as irrelevant because most of their PCs don’t have touch, and at worse expensive because it meant lots of costly retraining, downtime, and inefficiencies.

Mission accomplished. Windows 10 proves that Microsoft is brave enough to admit that the Windows 8 experiment was a failure and that it’s now time to get back to the serious business of building a platform that people want, not one that they are told they need.

Now I’m certain that there are going to be people who are distressed by Microsoft’s decision to resurrect the Start Menu and put it and the Windows Desktop back in the limelight. I don’t blame them. They’ve put a lot of effort into morphing their workflows to fit in around Windows 8, and then changed that again once to accommodate changes bought about by Windows 8.1. Some even went as far as evangelizing the changes, claiming that they represented the future, and that everyone is just going to have to get used to it.

Yeah, about that…

The important thing to appreciate about Windows 10 is that Microsoft isn’t building an operating system specifically for you or me. Microsoft is building it to cater for the billion or so people out there using PCs that aren’t touch-enabled. These are the people who have invested billions and billions of worker-days in creating effective workflows that utilize the Windows paradigms they have come to know (and perhaps love), and for Microsoft to come along and make drastic fundamental changes to this is a risky maneuver.

Windows 10 is a clear signal to all the uneasy enterprise customers that those crazy days are over. Windows 10 isn’t for those people who want to live on the cutting edge. Windows 10 is Windows for the masses.

Windows 8 was undoubtedly a brave move. I think Microsoft thought that if it made Windows a touch-first platform, it would revive flagging PC sales by fostering new PC form factors. But it didn’t work. Partly because people are getting out of the habit of buying new PCs every few years, partly because Windows 8 user interface was an incoherent muddle, and partly because Microsoft and the OEMs didn’t do a good job of communicating the benefits of the new platform.

And now it’s equally brave that Microsoft is moving on.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science Oriented Video!

• Understanding the internet troll – Tech Weekly podcast, The Guardian
• Under the blood moon: total lunar eclipse caught over China – video, The Guardian

Science News and Blogs

• Microsoft unveils Windows 10: ten things to know, The Guardian
• Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art, BBC
• 35,000 year-old Indonesian cave paintings suggest art came out of Africa, The Guardian
• Giant Blast of X-Rays Traced to Dead Star, National Geographic
• When sea levels rise, high tides will spill into communities far more often, study says, Washington Post
• Super-microscope earns trio Nobel chemistry prize, AFP
• American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights, The New York Times
• Nobel Prize in Medicine Is Awarded to Three Who Discovered Brain’s ‘Inner GPS’, The New York Times
• Our Understanding of Giraffes Does Not Measure Up, The New York Times
• Meet the man who killed Pluto, Al Jazeera
• Galaxy’s guardians make the case: upgrade Pluto back to planet-size!, The Guardian
• Moral Panics Of 1878: NY Times Warns People About The Evils Of Thomas Edison’s Aerophone, TechDirt
• When It Comes to Sleep, Timing Is Everything, The New York Times
• Major study of teenage sleep patterns aims to assess impact on learning, The Guardian
• Facebook Developing App That Allows Anonymity, The New York Times
• Sharper Image From 4K TVs Is a Gimmick Worth Having, The New York Times
• A Gulf in Ocean Knowledge, The New York Times
• ‘Siri, stop distracting me’: controlling smartphones while driving is dangerous, study finds, The Guardian
• Cancer tumours destroyed by berry found in Queensland rainforest, The Guardian
• Um or er: which do you, um, use more in, er, conversation?, The Guardian
• In the Age of Extinction, which species can we least afford to lose?, The Guardian
• Violence of volcanoes is helping scientists monitor Earth’s sensitive side, The Guardian
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor review – a glorious knockout punch , The Guardian
• If we want more women in tech, we need to sweat the small stuff, The Guardian

The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 9 is the 282nd day of the year (283rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 83 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1967, socialist revolutionary and guerilla leader Che Guevara, age 39, is killed by the Bolivian army. The U.S.-military-backed Bolivian forces captured Guevara on October 8 while battling his band of guerillas in Bolivia and assassinated him the following day. His hands were cut off as proof of death and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1997, Guevara’s remains were found and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, military theorist, and major figure of the Cuban Revolution. Since his death, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global insignia within popular culture.

As a medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was transformed by the endemic poverty he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region’s ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara’s radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raul and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and travelled to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled “Guerrillero Heroico”, was declared “the most famous photograph in the world.”

O Canada

Smoke ’em if you got ’em

The real news and this week’s guests below.

Well, my dear friends, the sewing project with the kid did not happen. Instead, what happened was this: I got sick. And not just any sick, gut-wrenchingly, pain approaching childbirth levels sick. It was not pretty.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Zoë Carpenter: The Battle Over Abortion Access Is Nearing the Supreme Court

Clinics in Texas that were recently forced to stop providing abortions because of sweeping new regulations have filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that the rules put an “undue burden” on women’s rights. [..]

In her decision allowing enforcement of the Texas law to go forward, George W. Bush appointee Jennifer Elrod made a point of mentioning that lower courts had issued conflicting decision on the numerous clinic regulations, something that the Supreme Court considers when deciding whether a case warrants their attention. Highlighting disagreement among circuit courts, writes Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgess, amounts to “a blood-red howler to the Supreme Court telling them to “TAKE THIS CASE!”

If it does, the rights of American women will be in the hands of one man.

Katrina vanden Heeuvel: Eric Schneiderman Is Still Seeking Justice for the Financial Crisis

After six years in office, departing Attorney General Eric Holder will leave behind a strong legacy of defending civil rights. As the first black American to lead the Justice Department, Holder fought to stop voter suppression, to change unfair sentencing policies, and-by refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act-to end discrimination against LGBT couples. Holder’s resignation announcement last month, understandably, has prompted a wave of speculation about who will replace him. That’s an important conversation, but we should be paying equal attention to the states, where attorneys general are elected and have significant influence over the application of the law.

For instance, while progressives were rightly disappointed by Holder’s failure to punish Wall Street for financial crimes leading up to the economic crisis, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been almost single-handedly fighting an uphill battle to hold the banks accountable. Now running for reelection, Schneiderman has devoted much of the past four years to delivering some measure of justice to millions of Americans, in New York and across the country, who suffered as a result of Wall Street’s destructive behavior.

Today I have 2 articles for your perusal.

First up is an interview with Noam Chomsky. It covers a variety of issues and is long but well worth the read:

Chomsky: U.S. Spawned a Fundamentalist Frankenstein in the Mideast

For decades now, Noam Chomsky has been widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive (linguist, philosopher, social and political critic) and the leading US dissident since the Vietnam War. Chomsky has published over 100 books and thousands of articles and essays, and is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees by some of the world’s greatest academic institutions. His latest book, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, has just been published by Haymarket Books. On the occasion of the release of his last book, Chomsky gave an exclusive and wide-ranging interview to C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout, parts of which will also appear in The Sunday Eleftherotypia, a major national Greek newspaper.

Jump!

I like to suggest to all the open carry nutjobs out there in the land of the free and the home of the brave that it’s way past time for them to take their ak-47’s over to Washington and shoot the gummint, eh?

After all that’s what they’re for, right? Nutjobs, I mean.

Why they haven’t taken back the country yet is beyond me. lol. snort.