Sunday links.
What does the Illinois Lt, Governor do? Well, if whoring, doing drugs, engaging in kick-back schemes and lying on your resume are in the job description, both Dems and the GOP have done well in picking candidates.
If Obama really wants to fix NCLB, these are two guys who could tell him how.
Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez and Gary Orfield discuss how charter schools have contributed to racial segregation at Democracy Now!
No link here. Just a reminder that there will be a rally at the state capitol on Wednesday demanding the legislators seriously address the budget crisis. Seriously.
NATO’s commander Gen Stanley McChrystal says that “we deeply regret this tragic loss of life.” This was going to be a different kind of counter-insurgency operation where no civilians would get killed. No more regrets. Get the hell out.
While I have no sympathy with those who affect to despise labor, even the humblest forms of it, and hold that whatever is needed to be done, it is honorable to do; it is nevertheless plain that no people, white or black, can, in any country, continue long respected, who are confined to mere menial service for which but little intelligence or skill are required, and for which but the smallest wages are paid or received, especially if the laborer does not make an effort to rise above that condition. While the employment, as waiters at hotels and on steamboats and railroads is perfectly proper and entirely honorable, in the circumstances which now surround the colored people, no one variety of the American people can afford to be known only as waiters and domestic servants. While I say this, I fully believe in the dignity of all needful labor. All honest effort to better human conditions is entitled to respect. I have met at Poland Springs in the State of Maine and at the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and other places, as well as at the late World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, many young white ladies and gentlemen who were truly such, students and teachers in High Schools and Seminaries, gladly serving as waiters during their vacation, and doing so with no sense of being in any degree degraded or embarassed by such service. But this would not have been the case with them if society by any law or custom, had decided that this service should be for such persons, their vocation in life. Daniel Webster used to say that New Hampshire was a good state to emigrate from. So I say of menial service. It is a good condition to separate from just as soon as one can find any other calling which is more remunerative and more elevating in its tendency. It is not the labor that degrades, but the want of spirit to rise above it. Frederick Douglass (Today is his adopted birthday. There was no record of the actual date).
