It shouldn't be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can't have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they've been unjustly imprisoned -- not even on grounds of mistaken identity. But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch.

  So begins today's Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson, whose title I used for this diary. Th imagery of Bush taking a chainsaw to the rule of law so captivated me I wanted to be sure it was seem more broadly.  

I will explore the column in this diary, and per my practice offer some commentary of my own.

So I open up my daily email from Mike Allen of Politico, about his Politico Playbook, and read the following:

The Hill -- GOP MEMBERS NOT PUBLICLY BACKING OR ENDORSING McCAIN: Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Rep. John Doolittle (Calif.), Rep. Randy Forbes (Va.), Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (Md.), Rep. Virgil Goode (Va.), Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.), Rep. Tim Murphy (Pa.), Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), Rep. John Peterson (Pa.), Rep. Ted Poe (Texas), Rep. Todd Tiahrt (Kan.), Rep. Dave Weldon (Fla.), Rep. Frank Wolf (Va.).

The Hill -- GOP MEMBERS WHO WOULD NOT COMMENT: Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Sen. Larry Craig (Idaho), Rep. Rob Bishop (Utah), Rep. Terry Everett (Ala.), Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (N.J.), Rep. Elton Gallegly (Calif.), Rep. David Hobson (Ohio), Rep. Timothy Johnson (Ill.), Rep. Doug Lamborn (Colo.), Rep. Buck McKeon (Calif.), Rep. John Mica (Fla.), Rep. Gary Miller (Calif.), Rep. Jerry Moran (Kan.), Rep. Sue Myrick (N.C.), Rep. Mark Souder (Ind.), Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), Rep. Don Young (Alaska).

And against this, we are worried about Joe Lieberman (as if he is a Democrat, right?), and Dan Boren (who will vote for Obama and not endorse him?).

Follow me below the fold for a few thoughts reading those two lists inspired, at least in my warped mind.

Progressive and Netroots favorite Barry Welsh, who is running against the noxious Mike Pence in the 6th District of Indiana, will be at a meet and greet on Capital Hill tonight.  Barry is in town seeking to develop support for his run against Pence.  Below the fold I will offer some details about the race, and about the response Barry was able to develop yesterday.

We really want you to come and meet Barry.  Like Tom Perriello, he is a person of faith (Barry is an ordained minister) who is also a strong progressive, yet capable of winning a district currently held by a Republican.

We will be at Hawk 'n Dove, 329 Pennsylvania Ave SE, from 5-7:30 this evening.  We will be in the 1st floor party room.  This is your chance to come and meet Barry, if you do not already know him.  The event is free (cash bar), because we want to encourage you to come.

Please keep reading.

There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement.

   That is the opening sentence of a piece in the current issue of Time.   Written by Claudia Wallis, the piece is entitled as it this diary, and it is very much worth your going to this link and taking the time to read it.  It is especially interesting as we now have on record a key insider in the Bush Department of Education acknowledging the arguments of critics that for some in the Department

No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.

It is a piece that has been widely discussed on some of the educational lists in which I participate, and I thought it might be worthwhile for me to examine it and  offer some commentary here.  

That is the the last of a series of questions James Carroll asks today in his Boston Globe column,  The editors have entitled the column Here's what she wants, as if the column is an answer to the question raised by HRC herself on Tuesday night, that question being "What does Hillary want?" answered then by "I want to hear from you" being addressed to her supporters.  

But as Carroll reminds us in his column, the question is, and always has been, less about Hillary Rodham Clinton, or any woman.  It is rather an expression by those in power who see their power threatened and are seeking to find the minimal way of responding to the challenge they now perceive.  And the same way Obama asks of us a new kind of politics, I think it is time we demand of ourselves and others a different manner of expression and analysis.   The two are, at least to me, inextricably intertwined.

perhaps we ought to listen to what they have to tell us.  That is why this year, instead of doing a panel on educational issues as I have at the two YearlyKos conventions, I will moderate a discussion entitled Politically Active Youth on Political Participation and Civic Education: What They Have to Teach Us.  The description we submitted in our proposal read as follows:

This discussion includes three politically active high school students who will share their experiences, perceptions and perspectives about their own participation, with suggestions of how to better take advantage of the talents and interests of young people in the political and civic processes of our nation. They will also discuss the relevance or lack of relevance of the civic education available to them and most American teenagers.

Please read below the fold so that you can learn about why this topic, and meet the interesting young people who will make up the panel

On Wednesday afternoon the Washington area experienced a severe weather event that had a major impact.  For us personally it was somewhat expensive, as our electricity failed as the weather rolled through at 3 PM - we were not home now but neighbors say that is when the power failed.  Judging by clocks it came on at about 11 AM yesterday, a 44-hour gap for whose termination we are exceedingly grateful, as it was very muggy yesterday, and we will have a heat index over 100 today. It also interfered with the end of our school year, and with many events of normal life.  And it caused us to take some time to reflect on how much we take for granted.   This diary is a combination of looking back and of that reflection.   It offers no profound insights.  But perhaps you still might choose to continue reading?  If you do, I welcome you.

Congressional Candidate Barry Welsh, running in the Indiana 6th against Mike Pence, is going to be in Washington next week.  I have set up a meet and greet / meetup event at Hawk 'n Dove on Wednesday at the close of the work day.

Barry is an active member of the DailyKos community.  If you were in Chicago for YearlyKos 2007 perhaps you had a chance to meet him.  Below the fold I will give a bit more of his background.

For now, consider just this.  In the May 6 Indiana primary, Barry got 94,924 votes while Pence received only 43,795.  While this is not an easy race, it is clearly doable, which is why Barry is meeting with the DCCC.

So hold the date and time and prepare to come on

Wednesday June 11
5-7:30 PM
Hawk 'n Dove
329 Pennsylvania Avenue SE

we will be in the party room.  It is a cash bar.  Not a fundraiser (although feel free to contribute on the web page), but a chance to meet a great candidate.

What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country.

And as we find out in Opponents of Evolution Adopting New Strategy in today's New York Times, those opponents are going to use the power of Texas's state-wide approval of textbooks to yet again try to undercut the teaching of evolution.  Their strategy will focus on three little words: "strengths and weaknesses."  The advocates of requiring inclusion of the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolutionary theory is yet the latest strategy from The Discovery Institute (and I will NOT include a link for that noxious organiation).

which today is entitled What Obama Left out and which is critical of Obama's speech at Wesleyan's graduation, where he substituted for Kennedy.   Why is Kristol critical?  After picking at pieces previously in the piece, just because he thinks he can, things like Obama's salary as an organizer is equivalent, when inflation adjusted, to what he pays editorial assistants at Weekly Standard, he lets us know:

But there’s one obvious path of service Obama doesn’t recommend — or even mention: military service. He does mention war twice: "At a time of war, we need you to work for peace." And, we face "big challenges like war and recession." But there’s nothing about serving your country in uniform.

This afternoon I returned from the 35th reunion of my final class at Haverford, '73. The last thing before I left was to go with two others to the home of Dana Swan, the long-time athletic director.  Dana was also the last football coach, and the person who introduced Lacrosse to Haverford - which this year saw its men's team nationally ranked and going to the NCAA quarterfinals.    But Dana did not get to see them perform.   He is home now.  And he is dying of brain cancer.

For nearly five decades, the United States has pursued a policy toward Cuba that could be described as incredibly stupid.

  That is the first line of Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column this morning, entitled as it this diary.  As is typical of Robinson's words, whether written or spoken on MS-NBC, they are cogent, offering a succinct and potent analysis of an issue, one in this case which is not given the attention it deserves outside of the presumed political danger of engaging with a Castro-run regime in Havana.    I will quote several additional lines from the piece, including this:

Other than providing Fidel Castro with a convenient antagonist to help whip up nationalist fervor on the island -- and prolong his rule -- the U.S. trade embargo and other sanctions have accomplished nothing.

 But I will use the column to offer some different but related ideas.

Today, if you are interested in seeing what alternative assessment of student learning looks like, you will have a chance.  Yes, I wrote about this yesterday in A different way of assessing student learning, but I wanted to be sure that as many people as possible were aware of the opportunity to see a student exhibition as possible.  There are ways of students demonstrating competence - that is, sufficient application of learning to warrant graduation from high school.  The webcast should provide an opportunity for those who have not seen what this can look like.

I will within the week do another diary which explores the subject in more detail when I have time to go through my notes.  In the mean time, if you have the time and have any interest in changing how we evaluate the learning of our students, I urge you to watch.   Details are below the fold.

is rather than by tests by portfolios and performances.   Yesterday I attended a  conference in Providence, Rhode Island co-sponsored by the Rhode Island Department of Education which was mainly put on by the Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization which flows from the work of Theodore Sizer, who was one of the speakers.

I plan to write in depth about what I saw when I have time to organize my thoughts - I did not get home until 1 AM this morning, and I still have my own school responsibilities.  I saw some examples of student performances and portfolios, I have where possible tried to use the approach in my own teaching, know there is literature that supports the approach, and mention right now that the state of Rhode Island now includes this as a graduation requirement.

But since I may not post my more detailed report for several days, and there is something of value tomorrow, I wanted to be sure if you are interested in performance assessment, whether as an educator, a parent, a student, a policy maker, or simply a citizen, tomorrow you will have a very special opportunity, and I wanted to give you the heads up now.

  Please keep reading.

A competition between Obama and McCain over who can issue the most compelling summons to service would serve the country far better than an empty rhetorical skirmish over which of these candidates is the true patriot. And, yes, it's a good thing that Obama has been seen wearing the flag pin again.

  While I might disagree with the last sentence - after all, McCain does not wear such a pin - the rest of the concluding paragraph of E. J. Dionne's column this morning, entitled Obama's Patriotic Call,  raises a key point, a method of claiming an important word and infusing it with a meaning more to our advantage than empty displays of pins and military bluster.  And for good measure, Dionne also quotes Teddy Roosevelt, the supposed model of John McCain:

"We cannot meet the future," Roosevelt said in a 1916 Memorial Day speech, "either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all, we cannot meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by silly sentimentalism in words."

Not long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set me thinking of the answer. Not the answer that you and I should give to each other-not the expression of those feelings that, so long as you live, will make this day sacred to memories of love and grief and heroic youth--but an answer which should command the assent of those who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.

So begins perhaps the most famous Memorial Day address of all time.  It wsa spoken in Keene, NH, May 30, 1884, well before this day became movable as to date while fixed on a Monday for our convenience.  The author had served in the Massachusetts 20th, where once, at the Battle of Fort Stevens, he had pulled down a tall figure trying to see what was happening by saying "Get down you fool" only to realize that he had just addressed President Abraham Lincoln.    The speaker was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  

I write this looking out over Charlottesville from the top floor of the Omni Hotel, at the end of the Downtown Mall.  And in the midst of the storms of politics, I thought I would take a few minutes to share something that matters to me, and perhaps might interest others.  These will be lyrics of two songs from the Quaker singer/songwriter John McCutcheon, from his album The Greatest Story Never Told, which shares the title of one of the songs on it, although not one from which I will quote the lyrics.

Several of the songs on this album were inspired by the events of September 11, which makes the relevant in the midst of our current political storms.  I will share the lyrics of these.  The link above will give you the lyrics of all the songs on the album, including introductory remarks about each by McCutcheon.

I will below the fold explain why I am thinking about these songs today.  

Perhaps it is not necessary to add another diary about the word offered by Hillary Clinton that have created such a firestorm.  Others have written profoundly and insightfully about what she said, and how it was not the first time she has used the word "assassination."   Certainly anyone who watched Keith Olbermann yesterday has a very clear picture of how many times Clinton and her campaign have been outside the lines of what is acceptable.  For me it was a sad way to end my 62nd birthday, to come home from dinner and spend the hour watching Keith, and then my wife and I talking about the show, and especially the Special Comment, and even more the litany of transgressions included in that special comment.

And yet, and yet . . .