Support for President Barack Obama’s education agenda is slipping among Americans, according to a poll released today of the public’s attitude toward public schooling.
The survey, conducted by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Gallup Organization, reports that just 34 percent of those polled would give the president an A or B when grading his performance on education during his first 17 months in office, compared with 45 percent in last year’s poll, which covered the president’s first six months in office. ("Obama School Ideas Getting Good Grades," Sept. 2, 2009.) The president’s grades fell not just among Republicans surveyed, but also among Democrats and Independents, who increasingly gave Mr. Obama grades of C or lower.
Poll respondents, for example, took a decidedly different tack than the president and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when it comes to turning around low-performing schools. When asked what was the best solution, 54 percent said the school should remain open with the existing teachers and principal and receive outside support...
“The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general,” Obama said. “It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system. And it erodes the trust that's necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.”
...Earlier, McChrystal had been criticized for his role in the faulty reporting of the 2004 friendly fire death of Army Ranger (and former NFL football player) Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
...In a rare show of bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans alike applauded Obama’s decision.
Fareed Zakaria: This is a masterstroke. Petraeus needs no on-the-job training, knows the theater, and is beloved by the troops. He understands COIN [counter-insurgency strategy], literally wrote the book on it, and most important -- knows how to execute it. He has superb political skills and understands that a close working relationship with his civilian counterparts from the State Department, White House, and other agencies is not a bother but at the heart of the mission's success...The question I have, which in some ways is greater, is not whether Gen. McChrystal is guilty of insubordination but of incompetence. ...What you see in Gen. McChrystal is someone who is openly disdainful of and sets himself up almost in opposition to the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, the State Department high representative Richard Holbrooke, the national security adviser, the vice president...If McChrystal and his team are so contemptuous of these other people whose support is absolutely critical to the success of the mission, then he's failing at his mission...
If you compare McChrystal's attitude toward his civilian counterparts with that of Gen. Petraeus in Iraq, it's night and day. Petraeus was extremely respectful of Ryan Crocker, the ambassador, extremely respectful of the State Department, always talking about how he really admired and appreciated their efforts and wanted them more involved, held almost all his briefings along with Crocker. And that clearly was a crucial part of why the surge succeeded, because the whole premise of the surge is that the military part is not by itself going to be enough...
ORIGINAL POST:
Can the US win in Afghanistan? It would be more likely if Karzai and McChrystal were more loyal--not just to each other, but to the people of Afghanistan and the US, respectively.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal to explain anti-administration comments The top U.S. general in Afghanistan was summoned to Washington for a White House meeting after apologizing for flippant and dismissive remarks about top Obama administration officials. By Greg Jaffe and Ernesto Londoño Washington Post June 23, 2010
...During his 12 months in Kabul, McChrystal has earned a reputation as a forthright commander with an unscripted style and a strong work ethic. He has forged a close working relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was quick to come to the general's defense Tuesday, saying that his loss would be a major setback for the war effort. ad_icon
Still, McChrystal has stumbled frequently in his interactions with the media, often to the great irritation of the White House. It has interpreted the general's outspoken manner as an effort to box Obama into backing a major troop surge and large-scale counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
In the article, McChrystal suggests that Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, the top U.S. civilian in Afghanistan, "betrayed" him by suggesting in a classified cable last fall that Karzai was not a credible partner in the counterinsurgency strategy that McChrystal was advocating...
Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck has apologized for a segment on his radio program in which he made fun of President Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter, imitating her in a childish high-pitched voice and criticizing her intelligence... Read full post here.
Fabrice Tourre comes across as an arrogant investment banker in the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against him and his employer Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
But personal emails released by Goldman /quotes/comstock/13*!gs/quotes/nls/gs (GS 151.93, -5.47, -3.48%) this weekend show Tourre struggling with "ethical questions" as he sold complex mortgage-related securities that he worried were suspect.
The SEC charged Goldman with securities fraud on April 16, alleging the investment bank didn't tell investors in a collateralized debt obligation that hedge fund firm Paulson & Co. helped structure the deal and was betting against it. Goldman and Paulson have denied wrongdoing. Read about the charges.
The SEC also charged Tourre, an executive director in Structured Products Group Trading, with securities fraud, alleging he was mainly responsible for the CDO, known as ABACUS 2007-AC1. Pamela Chepiga, an attorney for Tourre, declined to comment.
In the suit, the SEC quoted a January 2007 email that Tourre sent to a friend.
"More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now...Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]...
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- As the 2008 financial crisis was developing, top Securities and Exchange Commission employees and contractors were using government computers on official time to view pornography, according to an SEC inspector general.
The SEC's inspector general found that 33 employees or contractors violated commission rules and policies by viewing porn, according to a memo obtained Friday by MarketWatch. The investigation was requested by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo reported incidents by year:
*
2010: 3 so far *
2009: 10 *
2008: 16 *
2007: 2 *
2006: 1 *
2005: 1
The 33 employees cited in the memo represent less than 1% of the SEC's approximately 4,000 employees. Of those employees, 17 were senior officials whose salaries ranged from $100,000 to $222,000, according to the memo. It isn't clear if the employees discussed in the memo were involved in oversight matters related to the financial crisis.
According to the memo, a regional office supervisory staff accountant admitted he frequently viewed pornography at work on his SEC computer for about a year and accessed pornography on his SEC-issued laptop computer while on official government travel.
Another regional office supervisory staff accountant admitted that he used an SEC assigned computer to access Websites containing pornography and other sexually explicit material during work hours fairly frequently, sometimes twice a day, according to the memo.
Another regional office staff accountant received 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the SEC's Internet filter as "Sex" or "porn" in a one-month period. "In addition, the hard drive of this employee's SEC laptop contained numerous sexually suggestive and inappropriate images," the memo said.
A senior attorney at the SEC's headquarters in Washington admitted accessing Internet port so frequently that, according to the memo, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet porn.
"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the memo said.
Rep. Darrell Issa , R-Calif., the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was disturbed by the findings.
"It is nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation's economy to the brink of collapse," he said in a statement. "This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority. Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions."
Ronald D. Orol is a MarketWatch reporter, based in Washington.
I know you'll all be comforted, as I was Wednesday, by the public vote of confidence from Steve Schwartzman, chief executive of private equity giant Blackstone Group, when he said that his firm would continue to do business with Goldman Sachs and that he's never had a shred of doubt about the investment bank's ethical character.
So let me get this straight. Goldman Sachs is now relying on the character reference of a Wall Street sharpie who notoriously snookered investors into buying non-controlling shares of a private equity firm at the very moment when a credit-induced takeover bubble was about to burst...
President Obama challenged some of the nation’s most influential bankers on Thursday to call off their “battalions of financial industry lobbyists” and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis.
Speaking in the bankers’ backyard, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Obama castigated a “failure of responsibility” by Wall Street for having led to the financial crisis of 2008, and he pressed his case for what he called “a common-sense, reasonable, non-ideological” system of tighter regulation to prevent any recurrence. He took issue with the claim that his proposal would institutionalize the idea of future bailouts of huge banks.
“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not true. In fact, the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts...
WASHINGTON (March 11) — President Barack Obama plans to donate the $1.4 milllion from his Nobel Peace Prize to helping students, veterans' families and survivors of Haiti's earthquake, among others, drawing attention to organizations he said "do extraordinary work." Obama is giving a total of $750,000 to six groups that help kids go to college. Fisher's House, which provides housing for families with loved ones at Veterans Affairs hospitals, will receive $250,000, the White House said Thursday. And the Bush-Clinton Haiti Fund, for which two former presidents are raising money to rebuild earthquake-ravaged Haiti, will receive $200,000..
