Are you a moron if you like George Bush?

[Guru-In-Vegas]

Yeah, nevermind the Pentagon Papers, his corrupt cabinet members, his increasing of military spending at the expense of education and healthcare, his own personal tax fraud, and the oil crisis that resulted in part from our involvement in the Israeli war with Syria.

For a second there I thought you were talking about Bush.  Seriously though, those approval ratings are misleading.  Let me take a wild guess: the 92% total approval rating was right after 9/11?  Not very telling of their differences. 

But if you really wanted to, you could say Bush has had similar situations and then some.  Warrant-less wiretapping, failed social security reform, Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Gonzales, the Iraq war, RIDICULOUS DEBT, 9/11, Osama Bin-Laden, FEMA, Blackwater, Halliburton...and this comes from just sitting here for 10 minutes as I quickly type this.

Point is that when you consider anything the best or worst its all a matter of opinion.  At least you backed up yours, Cyan.

[bsmooth]

^ Yep...everyone is stupid.  Resigning over one scandal most certainly trumps all the shit going on today.   

The people who were actually old enough to vote and understand what all was happening still believe so.

[Dave Gray]

I heard a political analyst talking about Nixon the other day and why the public outcry was so severe.  It was because it was an issue that people understand.  Watergate was a burglary.  The common man understood what that was, and why it clearly a bad thing.

Whereas other things, like Whitewater are more difficult to grasp the situation.

[run_to_win]

What made Carter worse than Bush?

Are you serious?  

I don't care who has gotten blow jobs or spied on others.

That pretty much explains it.  We don't have the same values.  We each have different actions that we view as important.

[run_to_win]

Medical and Insurance co$ts are killing American Business, Gas Prices are INSANE..........and what do they give us? Hillary and Obama!?  They are making it VERY hard to vote their way. Very hard. 

If you believe that the government should control the medical, insurance and gasoline industries then shouldn't you vote for Clinton or Obama? 

[Fau Teixeira]

Department of Energy and the Department of Education

these are in fact BAD things .. and not GOOD things

[run_to_win]

I always find it amusing when someone that wasn't alive during a president's time in office ranks that president. 

Jimmy Carter wasn't a great president but, like most presidents, there are good things that came out of his time in office.  Namely the Department of Energy and the Department of Education (created by the Carter Administration).

The Department of Education is a good thing?  In theory maybe.  What has improved since 1980?

Education Lessons We Left Behind

By George F. Will
Thursday, April 24, 2008

If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.

Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.

But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.

In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.

Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.

A nation at risk? Now more than ever.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=opinionsbox1

[Dave Gray]

Good post, Maine (the long one).

A president can only fight the battles in which he's presented with (or those that he creates.)

I certainly cannot compare Carter to Millard Filmore.  However, I think that historians can.  From what I've read and heard from that community, that many believe that Bush will be seen unfavorably as time goes on.

[run_to_win]

In theory and operated properly they actually would have been very good.

Theory vs reality.  How the world should work vs how it actually works.  It's the quintessential liberal vs conservative argument. 

[Dave Gray]

Theory vs reality.  How the world should work vs how it actually works.  It's the quintessential liberal vs conservative argument. 

That's not a fair assessment at all.  Both sides suffer from this.

For example -- drug use.  In theory, a war on drugs might work, but in reality, it doesn't, and it's a huge waste of resources.  Loosening drug laws is a liberal concept.

There are examples that work the other way, too, where liberals have the better theory, but conservatives are based in reality.  To imply that liberals operate on theory and conservatives operate in reality just isn't true.

[run_to_win]

...many believe that Bush will be seen unfavorably as time goes on.

Many also fear that he'll actually bring the seeds of stability to the Middle East  - something that was near the top of both Clinton and Carter's agendas - and be seen favorably as a result.