Campaign chairman for Fred Thompson? Little League coach from hell? James Bond villain?

What’s next for Karl Rove?

I know this blog has been overly focused on politics lately, but I’m really bothered and I need to vent yet again.

I’m not bothered that the President failed to disclose a serious medical condition to the American people for a year. If that was the worst thing he did as President, he’d be Jed Bartlet.

I’m not bothered when right-wing commentators call for another 9/11 to “save America” from spirited debate over policy issues and return to a more unified time when everyone was crazed with fear and ready to do whatever the President wanted. Fear is what these people do best.

I’m not bothered by a member of the current administration’s Civil Rights Commission pondering a return to Korematsu. It’s not like he was advocating it, after all.

I’m not bothered that the Secretary of Education would rather read Harry Potter than Shakespeare. Shakespeare can be difficult, and I’ve heard good things about the Harry Potter books. Even the Shakespeare Teacher likes to relax with some lighter fare every now and then.

No, gentle readers, the Republicans aren’t bothering me so much anymore. I think by now we all pretty much know what to expect from them.

It’s the Democrats who totally caved on warrantless wiretapping that are bothering me:

Buckling in the face of familiar scare tactics – and looking to go on vacation – Congress caved on domestic surveillance this past weekend. It handed the White House temporary authority to monitor, without warrants, Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail.

Which brings me to Al Gore. In my opinion, Al Gore is the only person in the country who 1) gets it, and 2) has a strong chance of winning the Presidency.

Because of this, he has a moral obligation to run. He has laid out the most serious challenges facing us today and we have listened. But he may be the only person who can be the change he wants to see in the world. He can’t honestly think that giving a Keynote presentation on climate change can compare to actually being the President. So what’s going on? Is he biding his time, allowing all of us to beg him to run, rather than entering the race now and becoming a target? Or is honestly not planning to run?

I’m bothered by the current state of politics in this country. I’m bothered by the abusive Republicans and the enabling Democrats. And you know what? So is he. So I’ll wrap up this post by linking to rundammit.com, because I’m sick and tired of being bothered by this sorry excuse for a government we have failing to run this country.

It’s time, Al. Step up.

In a poll taken over a decade ago, 96% of Canadians said they preferred their health care system to ours.

A more recent poll indicates that 64% of Americans think “the government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes”.

Michael Moore’s film Sicko is the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time.

And millions of Americans have no health insurance at all.

What specifically is it going to take to get Universal Health Care in this country?

I caught the Republican debate this morning.  Bush and Cheney were praised for keeping us safe for the last six years.

Actually, for the past six years, an average of over 500 Americans have died each year on American soil in 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Think about it.

The problem here – well, in addition to all of O’Reilly’s usual problems – is that he seems unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of the difference between an online community forum like Daily Kos and traditional corporate-owned pre-Internet media. Inviting users to participate in an interactive, Web 2.0 medium doesn’t make you automatically agree with everything they post to your site. If it did, there would be very little reason to do it.

O’Reilly even seems unaware of the comments left by people on his own site. Again, it’s possible that he just chooses not to be aware or he pretends not to be aware. But given O’Reilly’s demographic and the hate he peddles, it’s not hard to imagine that O’Reilly has more than a few viewers who would be willing to express views in a public forum that even O’Reilly wouldn’t want to be associated with.

I don’t consider comments on the O’Reilly site as coming from O’Reilly himself. It’s inappropriate for O’Reilly to use the comments on blogs or the postings of Kos diarists to compare progressive blogs to the Nazis and KKK.

The rebuttal to this lunacy was, of course, put best by Stephen Colbert:

Exactly. The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum.

And that basically sums it up. If O’Reilly wants to make the argument that people who instigate hate are responsible for all of the comments and opinions of their followers, he’s free to do so. But then, we’ll all need to have a word with O’Reilly himself.

The Center on Education Policy released a disturbing new study this week, measuring the effects of No Child Left Behind:

The report finds that approximately 62% of school districts increased the amount of time spent in elementary schools on English language arts and or math, while 44% of districts cut time on science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch or recess.

Now, I’m pretty much appalled by all of the cutbacks, but I’ll leave the bulk of it to ScienceTeacher.com, SocialStudiesTeacher.com, and LunchTeacher.com. I’m ShakespeareTeacher.com, so I want to talk about arts education.

(And let’s make no mistake – the extra time being spent on ELA isn’t being spent on literature. It’s being spent on test prep, and more test prep.)

Arts education is absolutely essential for students preparing for the world that we’re currently living in. With the image continuing to gain dominance over the written word, people who can demonstrate artistic ability are highly marketable in today’s economy. From graphic designers to documentary filmmakers, those who can master today’s tools of communication are able to command a wider audience and expand their range of communication. In the connected world, this is real currency.

And even if all of that weren’t true, the arts teach us how to identify problems and solve them with creativity and discipline. Those skills help us in any endeavor.

I came across a website for an artist named Jen Stark, who creates sculptures from construction paper that won’t help anyone pass a reading test any time soon. But they bring beauty into the world, which is worth at least a link from my blog. Take a look at her work, and tell me she didn’t have to develop some pretty sophisticated math skills along the way.

Or take French artist Huber Duprat, who recruited caddis fly larvae, who typically create protective shells out of silk and their surrounding materials, and placed them in an environment of gold flakes and precious gems. The result is a combination of art and science that boggles the mind. Click the picture below to see the video.

Or take a look at the Universcale by Nikon, an application of the mathematics of scale to allow human comprehension of the natural universe, and tell me your appreciation of it isn’t primarily aesthetic.

I wonder what Leonardo DaVinci would have thought about eliminating arts education to teach math. What would Shakespeare have thought about eliminating arts education to teach literacy? What would Descartes say about eliminating science to teach math? What would Hemmingway think of eliminating social studies to teach literacy?

Reading and math are important skills. But even if an educational system were somehow able to acheive 100 percent literacy and numeracy, and nothing else, it would still be a failure.

I had a dream last night. It was the morning after the primaries for the 2008 presidential election, which in my dream were all held on the same day. I had gone to bed early and missed the results, so upon waking I checked online to see who had won.

Surprisingly, the Democratic nomination went to John Edwards, the charismatic Senator from North Carolina who campaigns primarily on the issue of poverty. He hadn’t been my first choice, but I was somewhat pleased to see him win the nomination anyway and I looked forward to the possibility of his winning the presidency.

Even more surprisingly however, the Republican nomination went to Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century American revivalist preacher, known primarily for his fire-and-brimstone sermons.

Turning on the television, I was dismayed to see that the media was entirely focused on the fact that both nominees had the same name. They had an expert on doing a statistical analysis of names of politicians to see what the odds of this happening were. I was frustrated, because I felt like the top story should have been that the Republicans nominated a Bible-thumping Puritan from the eighteenth century. Didn’t that concern anyone?

I went into the office – in my dream I worked in an office – and all of my co-workers in this office-type place were absolutely giddy with the coincidence of the two candidates having the same name. I noted that the Republican Jonathan Edwards was a dangerous religious zealot who would destroy all of the freedoms we currently enjoy, but – of course – nobody paid me any mind.

Even so, I woke up more amused than frustrated. And today, I learned that the debate tonight would feature questions being asked by voters via YouTube. So of course, that’s now the story far more than anything that was said during the debate. Can I dream ’em or what?

Anyway, the Question of the Week was suggested by Lee after reading that the ’92 Vice Presidential Debate was my favorite political debate ever. As always, free to answer the question, or just continue the conversation.

What was your favorite debate ever and why?

This isn’t really a Six Degrees game, but does anyone remember Dan Quayle?

I’ve been thinking about the office of the Vice President and the men who have held it in my lifetime, such as George HW Bush, Al Gore, and Dick Cheney. Whatever you may think of their politics or behavior, these were some serious dudes who brought a lot to the table in experience and gravitas.

Is it really possible, then, that we had a lightweight like Dan Quayle in the VP slot for four years? Was he really a heartbeat away from the presidency? Did we all just imagine it? All I remember is him spelling potato with an E, and feuding with Murphy Brown, who happened to be a fictional character from a sitcom. Was that really our VP?

Hey, come to think of it, why isn’t he running for president? It should be about time for him. If Nixon could have a comeback, anybody could. Besides, Quayle is someone you’d like to have a beer with, and that’s all that really matters. Plus, this time, he’d have Fox News on his side. Wouldn’t it be cool if Al Gore and Dan Quayle were the nominees? They could have a rematch of the 1992 VP debate, my favorite political debate EVER.

I don’t know how many degrees it would take to link Dan Quayle to Sir Francis Bacon, but the two men have a lot in common. Each was a politician. Each was an Aquarius. Bacon said “Knowledge is power.” Quayle said “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” Bacon published The Advancement of Learning. Quayle insisted “We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.” Bacon developed the scientific method. Quayle observed “Mars is essentially in the same orbit… Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

Ah yes, I remember one other thing. At the time, we were all horrified that a hardcore conservative simpleton with no empathy might possibly become the president, embarrass the nation with his constant misstatements, bulldog a right-wing agenda, and lead us to perpetual war. How silly we all were back then.

So, the New York Times says leave Iraq now.

At a time when PollingReport.com shows that President Bush has a 70% disapproval rate on Iraq, when the American Research Group is reporting that 45% of American adults favor the impeachment of President Bush and 54% favor the impeachment of Cheney, and The Onion is reporting that 73% of Americans can’t believe this shit, it seems very easy to be against the war now.

It’s sad that this supposedly liberal paper was so willing to carry the Bush administration’s water in the months leading up to the war. It’s like Colin Powell now saying he tried to talk President Bush out of the war:

The former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Two and a half hours. I didn’t realize the President had that kind of attention span.

Hey, you know what’s a cool word? Ombudsman. Ombudsman is a cool word. Here’s what the ombudsman for the New York Times had to say today:

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq – and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground – and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world.

“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”

See, I told you it was a cool word. I’m going to have to get “ombudsman” into an anagram one of these days.