Barnsdall Art Park is vital part of Los Angeles — and municipal art gallery and park that the LA City Council now wants to privatize, citing budget issues. To do so would limit citizens’ access to enjoy and create art and go against the goals of the land’s donor. Sadly, the privatization seems to be steamrolling ahead with minimal community outrage input as a way to keep Barnsdall open.

Reports reveal that private prison corporations with interests and operations in Arizona stand to benefit and profit greatly as a result of immigration laws like SB1070. And, that isn’t altogether surprising because these same reports are indicating these corporations played a role in influencing the law, which is proof that border politics and the private prison businesses are tied.

David Brooks wants to caricature progressives as fans of big government and conservatives as free market advocates, but this is not the ways things break down.

Video interviews with Margaret Flowers of PNHP and Katie Robbins of Healthcare-Now! on the deficit cutting agenda being pushed by AmericaSpeaks through “town hall meetings.” Last weekend, 21st Century Town Hall Meetings were held involving citizens in discussion and debate on the budget and economy, allowing citizens to talk about what they would like to cut so economic problems in this country could be properly addressed and solved.

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger

In the fall of 2008, decades of finance-first, bankers-know-best economic policies coalesced to create one of the worst economic crises in history, one that the banks themselves could not survive without staggering levels of government support.

Don’t buy into the Pete Peterson message and his claims of ‘economics of mass destruction.’

If Democrats don’t want public insurance, Republicans may have the last laugh.

HCR discussion,neo-liberal policies, challenges in the future

Book review: Garrison, Mark J. A Measure of Failure: The Political Origins of Standardized Testing. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2009. 140 pages.

Essentially Garrison’s book critiques standardized testing in the public schools as a power trip — what type of power trip a particular test is for, Garrison argues, depends upon the standards which are erected and the purposes to which the final scores on the tests are used. It is argued, then, that standardized tests have had different purposes in different historical periods. The high-stakes testing regime of the No Child Left Behind Act (of the Bush administration) is argued to be destructive (in this regard) of public schooling in general.

(Crossposted at Orange)

I just caught a radio interview of Florida Congressman Alan Grayson on Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s “Ring of Fire” Air America program this afternoon.

I was distracted, working on something that required focus, but the things I caught Grayson saying were so penetrating I kept grabbing a pen and jotting them down. I would like to hear the show again, maybe find the podcast, with my full focus, but before his points drift out of my mind or I lose my scribblings or can no longer decipher them, let me share. Keep in mind, this is me paraphrasing his points. So these are not quotes. These are my interpretations!