Which version of bin Laden's death do you believe?

Given Seymour Hersh's new account of bin Laden's death, that makes at THREE least superficially plausible stories of how he died.

• Hersh's walk-in for reward leads to unopposed execution raid
  http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden



• The Obama administration ZERO DARK THIRTY narrative

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/zerodarkthirty/


• Former Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto's story that Osama has been dead since 2001

https://vimeo.com/23308085

Obama missed a great opportunity to kill the War on Terror if Hersh story true

If Sy Hersh's story is true, bin Laden wasn't "protected" by guards; the guards were there to keep him from escaping.

Since we negotiated with Pakistan for the right to get him, we could just as easily have taken him alive.

One photo of him in jail cell would have broken the spell of the War on Terror, the way the first photo of the Unabomber or Peruvian Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman caged like an animal did for both of those shadowy terrors did.

Additionally, a live bin Laden could have been interrogated about which states funded and helped him with the 9/11 attacks and the like.

Instead, Obama chose the path that would cause the least ripples in the War on Terror:

Kill him.

Claim victory.

No photos.

SALON: Education “reform’s” big lie: The real reason right has declared war on our public schools

The profound corruption and failure of corporate-driven K-12 education reform is getting more and more attention in the media.

Even grassroots CONSERVATIVES chafe at the Common Core scam that is more about standardizing curriculum so vendors don't have make different textbooks for different states (and so Pearson can profit from selling materials and tests based on it).

I would like to send my kid to public schools, but my wife is a public school teacher who sees first hand the overcrowded classrooms, the narrowing of the curriculum to a cult-like focus on "the test, the results of which are used to punish teachers and schools rather than give them the resources they need to succeed. Because she sees that, my wife absolutely refuses to send our child to public school, and I have to agree.

So we spend money we could be using to buy a house or save for our child's education to send her to a private school.

This is insane. Congress and our Democratic president have so deformed our public schools that they can't do their job.

If the Democratic Party doesn't change course and admit this policy is a colossal failure, they could well see an American Syriza rise up on their left, and do to them when the Republicans did to the Whigs 150 years ago.

Has any Democrat promised or tried to take public ed policy away from 1%?

My wife and I are both educators, and she is a K-12 teacher, so we know pretty intimately the policies the 1% are forcing on our public schools: narrowed curriculum to fit the test (and the 1% sell the texts, software, and tests), then using those test results as an excuse to close schools, and replace them with scam charter schools that they also profit from.

All the while the 1% are demanding nothing of the sort from the schools they send their children to.

Most public school teachers want to do a good job but their hands are tied by top-down curriculum, and politicians who bitch about schools but won't mandate smaller classes or more social services, which might require them to raise taxes on their 1% patrons.

Obama is clearly behind this policy, and I haven't read anything from anyone in the Senate who has called this "education reform" what it really is an attempt to make education a cash cow for contractors who will make generous kickbacks to those who give them the contracts.

Who is opposing this in a position of power?

We have our kid in private school to avoid the overcrowded classes, mindless drills for test, and PUBLIC announcement of individual test scores, but we can barely afford it. Keeping her there will probably preclude saving for her college or us ever buying our own home.

The candidate who bluntly calls this the corrupt, crony serving policy it is and pledges to end it will get my support, as well as most teachers and a lot of parents across the political spectrum who are sick of this.

Petrodollar and aggressive push for clean energy: is it possible to have both?

I'm wondering if it's possible for a president to do much more on switching to clean energy than Obama has done as long as our dollar is propped up by oil being traded in dollars.

Wouldn't going all out to eliminate fossil fuels through a major monkey wrench in our monetary policy?

I'm not defending Obama or petrodollar recycling, but if people don't know how big the obstacles are to solving a problem, they're not going to bring a big enough ladder.

We should call fracking ecoterrorism

At the very least it would muddy the waters.

Dumb question on Iran: what DOESN'T nuclear nonproliferation treaty do that we want from Iran?

that's all.

another way to BOYCOTT standardized testing & corporate driven education reform

In the face of corporate and sports boycotts, Indiana's governor has scrambled to amend their "Religious Freedom" law that is really intended to allow businesses to refuse to serve the LGBT community, and Arkansas's Republican governor has just announced he will boycott a similar bill when it comes to his desk.

This is no small concession for Republicans. Distaste for gays and appeals to the religious right are how they drive their base of voters to the polls, especially when their other policies of endless war and free rein to corporate criminals isn't playing so well.

Public school educators are faced with an ongoing assault on our freedom to teach our students based on our training and experience and are instead being handed a script written by hedge fund managers that conveniently requires that we teach and test and grade using materials that they have invested in and will profit from. And when the test results are declared a sign of failure, rather than investing more tax dollars in lower student-teacher ratios, social workers, and other programs to make the school a success, those same hedge fund managers demand the school be closed and replaced with a for-profit charter school or turned over to a for profit education management company that they will also profit from.

Needless to say, decent pay and job security for teachers would cut into those profits, so we must be reduced to the equivalent of tour guides, mindlessly parroting the script they write for us, rather than thinking on our feet and tailoring our lessons to what works and doesn't with a particular group of students.

Educators are resisting by refusing to administer the tests, and encouraging parents to opt their children out of the tests, but this recent fiasco in Indiana and Arkansas shows we have another, probably even more powerful tool at our disposal: boycott.

Where teachers and administrators have any say in the buying of textbooks, software, and testing materials, they should block the purchase of those sold by backers of the corporate take over of public education. If they can't get around the testing requirements, then fight for open source materials developed by teachers themselves that won't give our tax dollars to those trying to privatize our schools.

While K-12 teachers and administrators might have limited flexibility in these matters, they have a potential ally that has almost unlimited flexibility with choice of materials: colleges and universities, especially those with teachers prep programs.

Many of those schools of education that train future teachers have seem a dramatic drop in enrollment because students can see the assault on teachers in the mainstream media and deciding not to dedicate their lives to getting a public beating.

Those who teach future teachers and those students who want to be teachers without being Wall Street's whipping boy might be very eager to take action to save their profession.

Likewise, professors and college instructors in other departments might be surprisingly easy to persuade to join in for a number of reasons:

1. They know their students are being directly screwed by overpriced textbooks that are randomly rearranged and amended every year or two just enough that students can't use an old edition for their classes.
   
   Many instructors already rely on their own handouts and materials available freely online to do without commercial textbooks. This would simple be an incentive for more to do so.



2. Professors and administrators are increasingly aware that the same investor class that wants to divert tax dollars from K-12 education to their own pockets have their eye on public higher education too, and are devising metrics of failure and even trying to close colleges the way they have K-12 schools.
   
   The hedge fund managers, their foundation, and astroturf citizens groups are even trying to drive the same stake into the heart of higher ed that they've already driven into K-12: common core.


Professors don't want to teach at a McCollege any more than K-12 teachers want to teach at a McSchool.


3. The concepts of boycott and divestment are hardly alien to college campuses. In the 80's, college students demanded their schools divest from and boycott apartheid South Africa, and today they are demanding divestment from fossil fuels--and getting it.
   
   And while not all will agree with cause, many are calling for a boycott of and divestment from Israel because of their dealings with Palestinians. It's unsettled the Israeli government enough that they have publicly responded to the movement.

PIC: Scott Walker, future commander in chief of our Armed Forces

HOUSE Judiciary Committee page looks like a BUZZFEED article:

This is just bizarre.

If you've ever read through one of those vapid Buzzfeed articles with vaguely related gifs, you have the reading comprehension ability to get through this.