Saturday coffee.
Here I am standing in front of the last stop on the Ohio Turnpike before I-80 runs through Indiana just south of Toledo.
Coffee in hand.
Last Saturday Anne and I headed east to Brooklyn to spend Thanksgiving week with family and friends.
Yesterday morning we left Brooklyn for the drive back.
A Starbucks app on my i-phone will instantly tell you where the nearest latte is, which is not a bad thing to know on a trip like this.
I-80 is not the most beautiful road in America. It runs 800 miles between the Indiana Skyway and northern New Jersey (two areas which look remarkably alike). And the final few miles as you near New York City (if you’re heading for the Holland Tunnel and not the GW bridge), is detoured through parts of industrial New Jersey that would make even the director of the Soprano’s cringe.
Four days behind the wheel, with Anne and I trading off every couple of hours, is not a bad way to spend time together. We talked, read to each other and sang loudly along with the radio and the cds we brought with us. The hills of western Pennsylvania are pretty if undramatic. The food stops are mostly chain and dismal if you don’t have time to go searching for the better local diners.
Last night we got a room at a Cleveland Marriott for $50 on Priceline. A couple of high school football teams were staying there too. Thanksgiving weekend at a business hotel with no businessmen. Just Anne, me and the kids from the Gators.
But, Thanksgiving with family was the payoff, and we’re home now and time to check on a few things.
It turns out that while I was gone eduction bloggers, including my brother, posted some interesting information about Ed Sector and Andy Rotherham. Apparently ethics are not something Andy is too concerned with when it comes to reporting out data that doesn’t conform to his politics.
Yesterday I scanned just the exec sum of this report from Ed Sector. It was clear that the recommendations were merely Ed Sector’s pro-privatization agenda, said nothing about what presumably were findings of various kinds of problems with charters. Now it seems Ed Sector changed the original report by its co-founder Tom Toch, removing lots of content and tacking on its ideology as ‘recommendations’.
The NY Times’ Bob Herbert reminds us that what is all to common an environment for children is not what was shown at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
We still keep fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home, where the need for nation-building is beyond critical.
The U.S. should be a paradise for young people. We need big changes in this country, approaches that are constructive, creative and fundamentally new, if we’re going to give those smiling kids I saw on Thanksgiving Day the kind of society they deserve.
I will not be surprised to read more reports like this as the US-Afghan war escalates. It turns out that the promise Obama made to shut down torture chambers like the one at Bagram Air Force Base was not kept.
An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still secretly holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
