HuffPost editor Roy Sekoff appeared on "The Ed Show" Thursday night to decry the "crassly commercial" for-profit rally Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are hosting on Sept. 11.

"There it is -- I finally know what 'restoring honor' looks like. Boom, there it is. It's $225 a pop for a meet-and-greet with the guy who wants the victims' families to 'shut up,'" Sekoff told host Ed Schultz.

Sekoff speculated that Beck and Palin may end up embarrassed into donating some portion of the profits from the event to charity. "It's clearly cashing in on this sacred event," he said. "[Palin] said she can think of no better way to commemorate 9/11? I can think of about nearly 3,000 ways."

WATCH:

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Our desires sometimes lead us astray from what we feel is right. But sometimes even what we feel is right proves wrong.

This becomes clear when we read Genesis 22 on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Abraham the patriarch -- one of the great prophets of the Torah -- readies himself to kill Isaac, his most beloved son, as a sacrifice to the Divine. He does so, no less, in the name of God.

Most perplexing about Abraham's actions is that the right desire motivates them: the urge to show reverence for God. But Abraham's goals are unspeakably wrong. To kill an innocent person -- much less one's own beloved son -- is an atrocity. Reading about it turns the stomach. But the process of reading this gut-wrenching Torah portion is profoundly illustrative of more common foibles. It shows us, as readers thousands of years later, the extent to which our own misapprehensions lead us astray.

In Abraham's case, it appears that his upbringing may be at least in part to blame. As the first Jew, and arguably the first monotheist of any kind, Abraham may well have been immersed in ancient cultures that hailed the practice of child sacrifice. It was seen as the ultimate show of faith to certain deities, of which the ancient Near East abounded.

Yet Abraham's feeling of need to show faith in this way was fundamentally misguided. God had already established a covenant with him in Genesis 17; his decision to sacrifice Isaac went well beyond the scope of their pact. It would seem, in fact, that Abraham was being led astray by his own zealotry, itself channeled by the understanding of total devotion he had garnered from encounters with ancient polytheists and their idols.

Evidence for this theory lies in the carefully selected terms for "God" and "god" used in Genesis 20. Elohim is an unspecific term, which can refer either to the God of Israel or a local Near Eastern deity; the tetragrammaton, whose pronunciation is now unknown and filled in for with the Hebrew word Adonai, specifies the universal and singular God of Abraham.

The unspecific term Elohim is used throughout the first part of Genesis 22. The Elohim "put Abraham to the test" (22:1, JPS translation for all quotes); when Isaac asks about the animal to be sacrificed at the altar -- not realizing it was in fact to be him -- Abraham replied that "[Elohim] will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, My son" (22:8).

Abraham's motivations to sacrifice his son Isaac are inspired by a deity which is likely not the universal and singular God with whom he entered into covenant. I would suggest, in fact, that The Elohim does not refer literally to a particular Near Eastern idol or its adherents, but to the powerful, unspoken theological assumptions that Abraham carried with him into his pact with God. The Elohim in Genesis 22 is his preexisting set of notions about faith and obedience. Ancient Near Eastern deities spoke to Abraham solely from within his psyche. His zealotry is the product of an emotional residue, accumulated from observing child sacrifice earlier in his life.

The general term for deity stops abruptly in verses 11 and 12 of Genesis 22. Adonai -- the God of Abraham -- returns as the focus of Abraham's faith and desire to live by it, transforming the unfolding tragedy into an ethical drama. Adonai intervenes to put an end to his prophet's zealotry, just moments before Abraham would have caused irreparable harm.

Here in verses 11 and 12 we see the shift take place between Elohim and Adonai within Abraham's consciousness: "The angel of [Adonai] called to him [Abraham] from heaven: 'Abraham! Abraham!' And he answered, 'Here I am.' And he said, 'Do not raise your hand against the boy ... For now I know that you fear [Elohim], since you have not withheld your son.'" The remainder of the chapter exclusively uses the term Adonai.

God's intervention enables Abraham to rid himself of theological norms established in his earlier life. The prophet had tried to show his reverence for Adonai in a way defined by The Elohim (as suggested by the fear of Elohim referenced in verse 12); he carried over norms set by adherents to other deities. But Adonai, the singular and universal God, sent a heavenly messenger to stop Abraham from acting on his misplaced zealotry. Verses 11 and 12 of Genesis 22 represent a sacred call to end zealotry wrongfully carried out in the Divine name.

Genesis 22 is particularly clear in its demand to end religious extremism. Yet even extremism has moderate forms, namely misplaced goals based on false assumptions. We can do harm in good faith, both to our relationship with God and in our relationships with other people. Genesis 22 is a call to be humble in our assumptions and cautious in our actions, particularly when we perform them in God's name.

Arianna appeared on CNN's "Situation Room" Thursday evening to push back against the media's round-the-clock coverage of the Terry Jones Quran-burning controversy.

"It's a little bit like watching events unfold in an alternate universe that has nothing to do with what is really happening in this country, with the plight of the jobless, the people losing their homes," she said, comparing the situation to "balloon boy" Falcon Heene. "By having Donald Trump insert himself -- who else is going to insert himself into this three-ring circus?"

WATCH:

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I was incredibly excited when I learned that DonorsChoose.org was giving $5 gift cards to anyone who pledges online to see Waiting for "Superman". For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's an amazing organization that makes it possible for individuals to directly fund classroom projects across the country. A teacher can post a need for a new projector, a wish for a field trip to the Supreme Court, books and study guides...anything educational that she needs help funding.

Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose.org, calls it microphilanthropy. I call it a light-bulb-moment. Just like swapping out your light bulbs for energy-efficient ones helps to lower your energy use, this, too, is something you can do in just a few minutes that has an enormous impact. Your entire donation goes straight into the classroom, facilitated directly by DonorsChoose.org. And perhaps the best part is that the teacher and students send notes and emails to each and every donor, updating you on how the project is going. So while you are taking the time to figure out who you can encourage to be a great teacher or identifying who is on your local school board and where they meet, this is a great interim step that can be done in just a few minutes.

Last year I gave a DonorsChoose.org gift card to my sister-in-law for her birthday. She politely looked at the card, turned the card over, nodded, and said with a smile, "Oh, how interesting. Thank you." Then a week later I got a phone call from her and she was ecstatic. She had gone through all the classroom projects, found ones she liked in various parts of the country and gave a little bit to each of them until she had used up her card. She said it was the most fun she had ever had with a present and that she was now following the projects to see when they achieved full funding.

Now that over 50,000 people have pledged to see Waiting for "Superman", there are entire class projects that have been funded by our pledgers. Recently, Ms. G's "Parents Empowered!" request in Durham, North Carolina, was funded to provide take-home study packs as a way to help parents stay in involved in their kids' learning and support their learning at home. Ms. E in Webb, Mississippi, was able to provide ACT Prep Books to her students so they can study for college exams. Could it get any better?! Well, actually it does. I've just learned that when Waiting for "Superman" hits theaters, you will get a $15 dollar DonorsChoose.org code when you buy a ticket online through Fandango. You didn't know being a hero could be this easy, did you?

Lesley Chilcott is a documentary film producer. After being a producer on the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Chilcott partnered with director Davis Guggenheim to form Electric Kinney Films, a feature documentary production company. Chilcott began her career at MTV Networks and was part of the creation of the first MTV Movie Awards. She left MTV to produce music videos and commercials as an independent producer. Chilcott has produced It Might Get Loud, the Barack Obama bio-film A Mother's Promise for the Democratic National Convention, the animated short It Was A Dark and Silly Night, and Waiting for "Superman". She also co-founded the nonprofit Unscrew America to address sustainability and environmental issues.

Jessica Simpson was in the house at Lincoln Center this morning, wearing a shimmering silver dress that would make a disco ball jealous (and, likely, launch a thousand Michael Kors insults, seeing as "disco" is his favorite slur) as she alighted to the stage at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week to serve in her official capacity as guest judge for Project Runway's Season 8 runway show. "Is she fat or skinny?" a woman behind me whispered to her seatmate, a man who claimed to have finished fourth place twice on The Amazing Race.

Actually, the fattest judge in attendance was Nina Garcia. (Apparently she has some kind of uterine growth). Frau Klum went bold in a coral pantsuit, while Kors stuck to his GTL regimen and uniform of black t-shirt, black blazer, jeans, and mirrored sunglasses. As guests waited for the show to start, they dug through goody bags that included a copy of Tim Gunn's new book (YES) as well as products from Garnier and L'Oreal.

Finally, the lights went down and the ten -- yes, ten (there was an audible gasp when Heidi announced it) -- mini-shows began.

Michael Drummond went first, listing his inspirations as X-rays and Mark Rothko. There was a third, but in his nervousness it was escaping him. "Oh!" he remembered just before the lights dimmed. "Women's underwear!" Um, best inspiration list ever.

His collection was full of unfinished-looking (on purpose, I hope) dresses and knitwear in shades of gray punctuated by the odd metallic flash. The models sported gravity-defying ponytails that made them look as though they were trapped in a wind tunnel.

Verdict: No way he makes it all the way.

Next was Valerie Mayen, who cited her "wackadoo childhood" as informing her sensibility. "Being Guatemalan I love color," she said, going on to compare her collection to the love child of Rainbow Brite and David Bowie (again, YES).

Indeed, the models walked in perfect ROYGBIV order, ending with a few more muted black and white looks. The construction was impeccable, the pieces were fun and wearable (well, possibly with the exception of a pair of high-waisted, banana-colored pants), and all in all the crowd loved our gal Val.

Verdict: A definite possibility for the finals.

Christopher Collins went third, barely speaking into his mic as he described his collection as being "about roots, race, and romance." This coming from a white boy who lives alone in a tree.

His looks were all over the place -- the first few showcased a stark black-and-white print, which then disappeared in favor of clingy metallic dresses and a few more casual pieces, including a lace romper. Proportions seemed off.

Verdict: No.

Casanova came onstage to lots of applause. Now, English is not his first language, but I'm pretty sure he said that his collection was called Arcadia and was inspired by his grandmother...

... who must have been a whorish gypsy showgirl, because OMG these clothes were over-the-top. The first look was a belly shirt (oh, dear God, please let's not allow these to come back in vogue) paired with tight satin pants. Also! Each pair of pants had giant sparkly pieces of flair on each butt cheek that looked like the symbol for Prince. And did I mention that each model was wearing gold face paint? My notes devolved from after that. Here's what I wrote:

ALL PANTS SHINY!
ALL ASSES SPARKLY!!!!
STUDDED BOOBIES!!!!!!!!!

An elderly woman next to me turned and whispered, "Good tops, bad bottoms." She was pretty old, though, so she might have been partially blind.

Verdict: Hell no.

Ivy Higa served as the halftime show, telling us that she was inspired by her favorite beach in her native Hawaii. Her looks were paired with odd, two-layer sunhats and the everything was safe and boring resortwear. Can you tell I don't like Ivy? Also: I don't need another spring and summer season of rompers, people, so stop making them and maybe they'll go away.

Verdict: Unlikely.

Showing sixth was Michael Costello, the most polarizing character this season, who may or may not have little elves coming in the middle of the night to sew his clothes. Michael was inspired by his friend Sunny Lopez, which gives the collection no context whatsoever. The entire thing was brown, though, so we can deduce that Sunny Lopez:

A) Is herself brown (Name sounds Latina; likely)
B) Loves chocolate and/or spray tanning
C) Is a shitty friend

Almost every look was a shiny brown dress with jewel accents and/or fringe. It was not cute. Also, the house music that was playing included a woman whispering "Michael Costello" over and over again, which struck me as unnecessarily masturbatory.

Verdict: Brown. I mean, no.

An uncomfortably long pause (like, five minutes) followed Michael's presentation, leading me to wonder if the remaining designers had tackled him backstage and were in the process of beating him senseless with discount pumps from the Piperlime accessories wall.

Eventually, though, Gretchen Jones emerged, wearing a see-through skirt that showcased a pair of booty shorts. "This has been a long journey of self-discovery," she said somberly. Her collection was called "Running Through Thunder."

"She's a 'See-you-next-Tuesday,'" I heard the Amazing Race guy mutter under his breath. HA.

A lot of Gretchen's looks featured vaguely African prints and chevron-shaped necklaces. A garish, shiny green vinyl that looked like petrified Hefty Bag was incorporated into a few pieces. But overall, the collection was incredibly well-made.

Verdict: Given her villainous role this season and the fact that she's one of the best designers in the bunch, I think odds are even that Gretchen makes it to the final three.

Mondo Guerra came out next, to the biggest applause of the show. And seriously, he is so cute. "My inspiration came from what I know and love," Mondo said. "I like to have fun." He then dedicated the collection to his grandmother and "spiritual guide" Betty. Aw.

Mondo's collection was nothing if not fun -- a super-stylized, riveting parade of wild prints, bedazzled t-shirts, and colorful headgear that made his models look like retro pinup girls. It was kind of Carmen Miranda meets Harajuku. And while it was over-the-top, it also had much more depth and personality than the heavy-handed glitz of Michael C. or the ridiculous excess of Casanova.

Verdict: If there is any justice in the world, Mondo will make it to the finals.

Next up was April Johnston, who was inspired by the image of "dusty dolls going to a tea party and being washed away." Yup.

Her models wore Ace bandage-like head wraps that made them look like accident victims. The first gown out looked like it was made out of hospital sheets and a straight jacket, complete with buckles. The colors were all muted, bloodless pastels, and the whole thing was very Girl, Interrupted.

Verdict: I don't know. I have a theory that would land April in the final 3 but I'll wait to share it until after we've dispensed with...

Andy South, who presented last. Andy gave a little speech about how the moment took his breath away and "makes living so amazing." Then something about following his dreams. Or maybe the collection was inspired by dreams? My attention span, as you can tell, had waned by this point. Then Andy's models came out and each of them had gold head pieces that looked like reindeer antlers or maybe one of those earring trees you can sometimes find at Claire's Accessories, and I'm pretty sure little charms and stars were dangling from the ends of each branch. And when you put your models in distracting conceptual headgear that's meant to communicate the meaningfulness of your dreams, it's hard for people to pay attention to the clothes. I think I saw some green shorts, though, and they were shiny.

Verdict: Dream on.

Okay, so, my theory.

I went to the show last year, and while I didn't know the outcome then, I looked back at my notes and it turns out that Seth Aaron, Emilio, and Mila all showed in a row in the middle of the group (they were 7th, 8th, and 9th to present I believe).

SO.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the same trick was used this year, and that all three finalists showed in a row. Based on the strength of their collections, I'm inclined to believe that Gretchen and Mondo are two of the three. Which would mean that either Michael C. or April would be the third. I can't really imagine that it's Michael C. (if it is, he is the clear third-place finisher), so it's go to be April.

Then again, maybe last year was a fluke and I'm totally off-base. Still, that's my official wager: Gretchen, Mondo and April. In about six weeks, we'll see if I'm right.

Check out some of the designers' work:

Economic downturns aren't all bad news: one upshot is that they force people to reexamine their expenditures. When money's tight, most of us start to scrutinize where every cent is going. We reprioritize. Spending $25 for a night out at the movies, when we stop to think about it, doesn't really make much sense -- especially when we could wait a few months and own the movie on DVD for half the price. Four-dollar lattes each morning suddenly seem absurd.

Recessions and depressions help us see, and correct, our wayward ways. We trim the fat, after having insisted for years there wasn't any fat to trim.

But when the economy is flying high, nothing looks fatty -- though that's only because no one's really looking. We invent and grow accustomed to new toys, and we wonder how we ever lived without them. We forget that there's a world of difference between needing what we have and having what we need. "Want" and "need" become synonyms.

The field of education isn't exempt from this phenomenon. In boom times, we expand curricular and extracurricular offerings, we upgrade facilities, we hire more staff and we reduce class sizes. We have no doubt that if we build it, they will come. That was the theory behind the construction of the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles, which will open to 4,200 public-school students in September. It sounded like a great idea back in 2006 when voters approved bond measures to the tune of $20 billion for such projects.

California has proven particularly adept at the game of conflating "want" and "need," which helps explain its current fiscal woes. In 1996, when the Golden State was awash in cash, California decided to launch a state-wide class-size reduction program that would, over time, reward districts for capping classes in grades K-3 at 20 students. The effort is estimated to have cost the state at least $20 billion.

By many accounts, class-size reduction is a success story. Parents love it, as their children get more individualized attention. And teachers, of course, love it. Who wouldn't want fewer students in each class? Costs were initially irrelevant because in the heady days of the late 1990s, California was routinely running multi-billion-dollar budget surpluses.

Now it's 2010, and class-size reduction programs in California and elsewhere -- especially Florida -- look foolish. They were built on a shaky foundation, a single study out of Tennessee that was conducted in 1985. The Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project compared the academic achievement of low-income elementary students in small classes of 13-17 with that of similar students in larger classes of 22-25. In the much smaller classes, modest but enduring gains were observed among poor African-American kindergarteners and first-graders.

Thinking they'd found the holy grail to raising student performance and erasing the achievement gap between poor and affluent children, politicians and policymakers in some states sought to shrink class sizes.

The trouble is, they didn't pay close enough attention to the study's results, and they crafted programs that bore little resemblance to the conditions in the Tennessee study. California, for instance, went universal with its program -- handing out money to any district in the state that capped classes at 20 in grades K-3. This had the unintended effect of creating a run on good teachers: the best teachers tended to flee to the suburbs, which were suddenly hiring and which offered better pay and working conditions. (Many also already had smaller classes, so they were given state money for doing nothing -- simply a case of the rich getting richer.)

Harder-to-staff schools soon found themselves in desperate need of bodies at the front of their classrooms. Overnight, nearly 21,000 new teachers were needed state-wide. People were hired off the street and granted emergency credentials to teach. The percentage of uncertified teachers skyrocketed: in 1995, about 1 in 50 California teachers lacked full credentials, compared to 1 in 7 teachers four years later. Poor children were, predictably, much more likely than middle-class or affluent children to be taught by unqualified teachers.

It's little wonder, then, that the successes of Project STAR were nowhere to be seen in California.

An even more disastrous scene has unfolded in Florida, where voters in 2002 approved an amendment to the state constitution that gradually reduced class sizes in all grades. At the high school level, classes in core disciplines cannot exceed a school-wide average of 25 students. Beginning with the 2010-11 school year, the amendment's requirement will have to be met at the individual classroom level. The state legislature, realizing the classroom-level requirement will cost taxpayers an extra $353 million this year alone, will ask Florida's voters to loosen the regulations in November. The state has spent an estimated $16 billion on class-size reduction thus far.

Increasing class sizes makes no one happy. When Chicago school officials announced their intention to raise class sizes in June, the teachers' union immediately filed suit to block the move. In New York City, some parents and teachers are outraged that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have allowed class sizes to creep up on their watch, despite campaign promises to the contrary.

The reality, though, is that of all the things we should worry about in providing a quality education to our children, class size isn't high on the list. Teacher quality matters a lot more. Zeke Vanderhoek, the founder of The Equity Project Charter School in New York City, knows this. His teachers are the most highly compensated public-school educators in the country, earning minimum salaries of $125,000 per year. How does the school afford such salaries? Because Vanderhoek decided he'd much rather have the nation's top educators teaching classes of 30 students rather than mediocre folks teaching classes of 20 students. And the research backs him up.

Champions of small classes, who invariably cite Project STAR, fail to grasp that the study's findings have little bearing on current debates about class size in this country. The STAR study wasn't about tinkering at the margins, reducing classes by one or two students, and it certainly wasn't about the effects of small classes on student achievement at the middle- or high-school levels. The study has very little external validity, which is a polite way of saying its findings shouldn't be generalized to other contexts.

The question isn't whether class size matters. Of course it matters -- at the extremes. Elementary students in classes of 50 would almost certainly learn a lot less than similar students in classes of 10 or 20. But what we're talking about in the U.S. is marginal reductions to class size, going from 30 to 25 students per class, and the benefits versus the costs of such reductions.

The real question is whether across-the-board, marginal reductions to class size are a sounder investment than any number of other reforms we could try. That is, is reducing class size a move that yields a disproportionate bang for our buck? Decades of research suggest the answer, sadly, is no. Investments in teacher quality would do much more than smaller classes to raise student achievement in the U.S.

I'm a teacher myself. If given the option, I naturally prefer to teach fewer rather than more students. Because my time is finite, I fear each of my students will get less of my attention as my classes increase in size. But, all things considered, smaller classes aren't the smartest investment we can make. They're a bit like flying first class: lovely if you're flush with cash, but by no means necessary to arrive at your desired destination. Yes, first class offers you extra leg room, better food and more attention from the flight attendant, but it also costs ten times the price of coach. In other words, it's a luxury -- like small classes -- we can no longer afford.

A version of this article appeared in The Providence Journal on September 5, 2010.

Billboard on the site of a collapsed building in Havana. The text reads:
The Revolution Is Working Well. Fight, Work, Advance. Continue Onward! Fidel

If my memory doesn't fail me, they expelled many Communist Party members for lesser or similar phrases, and purged innumerable Cubans who served long sentences. The Maximum Leader systematically pointed his finger at those who tried to explain that the country wasn't working. And not only were the nonconformists punished, but we were all forced to don the mask of subterfuge to survive on an island he tried to remake in his own image. Pretense, whispers, deceit, all to hide the same opinion that the "resuscitated" commander now flippantly tosses out to foreign journalist.

Perhaps it is a fit of honesty, as assaults the elderly when it comes time to assess their lives. It could even be another desperate try for attention, like his prediction of an imminent nuclear debacle or his late mea culpa for the repression of homosexuals which he came out with a few weeks ago. To see him acknowledge the failure of "his" political model, makes me feel like I'm watching a scene where an actor gesticulates and raises his voice so that the public won't look away. But as long as Fidel Castro doesn't take the microphone and announce to us that his obsolete creature will be dismantled, nothing has happened. If he doesn't repeat the phrase here in Cuba, and, in addition, agree not to interfere in the necessary changes, we're back to square one.

Note:
Yesterday, on hearing the news, I wrote a brief tweet: "Fidel Castro joins the opposition, telling the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore." Shortly after a dissident friend to whom I'd sent the same message by text called me. His words were ironic, but true: "If He has joined the opposition, I'm moving over now to the official side."

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.

Produced by Eyes and Ears 2010, The Huffington Post's Citizen Journalism Unit devoted to midterm election coverage. To join the team, click here:

Councilman Phil Davison of Minerva, Ohio made a fiery speech at Wednesday evening's Stark County Republican Party's executive committee meeting to select a nominee to run for Stark County treasurer.

Davison rocked the assembly at Malone University's Johnson Center with his impassioned political presentation the likes of which few politically involved citizens have ever seen.

While Davison did not get the nomination (North Canton Finance Director Alex Zumbar did), he certainly made a lasting impression.

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As the school year kicks off, parents, students, employers, workers -- just about everyone with a stake in education -- can see that our system isn't working as it should. Yet we all know that education is the key to the future. What, then, is the single most important priority for improvement? I looked for answers in the realms of policy-making, public education and universities. Here are a few ideas:

1. No Dollar Left Behind

What people are willing to pay for "education" is wildly out of sync with common sense.

The case is clearest with higher ed. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and similar schools cost something north of forty thousand dollars a year. But hundreds of other institutions come close, even though it's obvious that most offer students a lot less, no matter what you think the Ivies really provide. If you read newspapers, then you know that thousands of students attending for-profit higher ed institutions appear to have spent themselves into debt peonage for life, with, all too often, only remote prospects of obtaining the work they thought they were preparing themselves for.

What does this tell you, besides that hope springs eternal and that government regulation is, once again, inadequate? Probably this: that there's something weird about the product that makes it hard for people to assess what they are paying for. A good guess is that the market for education resembles the "market" for medical services. As everybody but our political leaders know, individuals are just not in a position to sort between doctors and recommended treatments. So most of the time they just accept whatever the network of oligopolies dish out. In medicine, markets typically don't work and, I will venture, they probably never will.

Is there anything that might improve higher education? My usual advice to people who want happy endings is to go see a Disney movie. Now that Tim Burton has signed on at the Mouse factory, that nostrum is looking shaky. There are many reasons for doubting that higher ed is going to get fixed anytime soon, but I think it is clear that at least one reform is possible. The recent wave in favor of "accountability" has produced at least one serious effort to measure the higher intellectual and analytical skills that colleges are supposed to impart to students. That's the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which has the additional merit of being relatively cheap to administer and not taxing for students. That development, though, fills many schools, including at least some Ivies, with dread that their "value added" might turn out to be a lot less than people expect. So all sorts of other methods of assessment are getting airtime, to blur and confuse everything. Tests are often poor guides for individuals, but they are much better for assessing the progress of large groups.

If I were Secretary of Education for a day, I would stop yammering about teachers unions, "races" to the top or bottom or wherever, and simply insist that all higher education institutions getting federal funds be required to report (and certify the truth of) scores on the CLA to IPEDS, the government educational statistics database. Everyone would still be welcome to propose other measuring rods, but if this one step were forced on state assessment boards and reluctant college administrations (whose salaries continue to rise far above that of faculties), we'd probably see some change for the better. Especially if, at the same time, the public institutions also got some new money to make up the savage cuts they've taken recently.

~Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow (*member of the Council for Aid to Education's Public Advisory Committee that developed CLS)

2. Resource Equity

The single most important factor in a quality education is access to equitable material, human, and financial resources. It is no secret that the U.S. public school system perpetuates a form of educational apartheid that forces low-income students (who are also disproportionately students of color) to attend schools in districts that have been systematically under-resourced. This is largely due to our reliance on using local property taxes to provide the bulk of funding for local schools. When you combine this funding formula with segregated residential patterns in many communities and requirements that force students to attend public schools in the areas in which they reside, you will get what our nation has: a public school system that systematically under-educates its students by design.

The fact that the public school system in some communities is fundamentally broken is driving our nation's current focus on fixing the problem. Unfortunately, while most understand that closing the achievement gap is essential for our nation's prosperity, many still do not understand that not all kids in the U.S. receive an equal opportunity to learn. It is common sense that students can't learn effectively if the schools they attend do not have the materials (books, facilities, and equipment), quality teachers and leaders, wrap-around services/community involvement, and the financial resources they need to support an expansive, enriched, and engaging curriculum. Nevertheless, in the debate over the direction of education policy it has become de rigueur among some education policy experts and leaders to claim that financial resources don't matter (ironically, some of these same experts say money doesn't matter for public schools while arguing for equal funding for charter schools). But this line of argumentation is not only wrong, it is reckless.

The only way our nation will reach the goal of providing a quality public education for all children regardless of their socioeconomic background is to dismantle the inequitable funding system on which public schools currently rely. This means that our nation's local, state, and federal leaders have to get beyond discussions about Title I funding formulas and Race to the Top funding to systematically address the root structural issues driving the inequities. If we do not summon the political will to address this issue, we will continue to see a decline in U.S. educational performance and a decline in our nation's standing in the world.

~Maya Rockeymoore, President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions.

3. Human Capital: Our Most Valuable Resource

Two issues, the problem of quality in undergraduate education and the role of human capital, intersect in ways that present the most important opportunity to improve education by resetting the way we think about it. The education system has failed 47 million high school dropouts (16% of the U.S. population). Moreover, close to sixty percent of students who enter college do not read, write or do math at a college ready level. And many students graduate from college still not college ready.

If human capital -- the knowledge, skills, and education that citizens of a country possess -- is the principal national resource, education should be recognized as the key to the success in all other policy areas such as health, economic, environment, energy, agriculture and national security. This means that the quality of education should be the central priority of the national government. Instead, our leaders continue to put up with what has become an education "tragedy of the commons." The case of the quality of education falls under what recent Nobel-laureate Elinor Ostrom calls a common pool problem (CCP). Common pool problems arise whenever a group of people depend on a public good that everybody uses but no one owns, and where one person's use affects another person's ability to use them, and either the population fails to provide the resource, over consumes and/or fails to replenish it. When the CPP becomes acute, as in the problem of education quality, either bold action is taken to solve it or the common pool problem becomes a permanent crisis, a tragedy of the commons.

The implications of the human capital argument will create new and higher limits for the role of education because leaders will connect the dots and come to understand the critical importance of dealing with the problem of quality of education because it dwarfs all the other issues this country faces.

~Roger Benjamin, President of the Council for Aid to Education

4. The Blind Men and the Elephant

What single issue most influences the lack of satisfaction with the current educational system? The answer to that question could identify the priority for improvement, unless the answer is an issue tangential to the reason for student and school failure. Low test scores are an immediate response to educational dissatisfaction. However, what if all students received test scores that met or exceeded proficiency levels on any measure of assessment? Would that desirable result improve our educational system or at least one's perception of it? It probably would not, especially when colleges, universities, and employers would still need to offer remediation to unprepared students who score satisfactorily on standardized tests that do not reflect authentic learning.

What, then, is the priority that could improve our educational system, not just make it look good in the public's eye? No one answer is probably adequate; however, one can examine the basis for a student's ongoing education to see what lies at the core of this formative process. For example, where is the student's initial placement in life? The family is the core of the student's existence and formative experiences. As long as families continue to disintegrate, we will continue the downward spiral of children born in the womb of conflicting views about conception and child rearing practices.Our system is plagued with dysfunctional families that send emotionally imbalanced, academically unprepared, and chronically apathetic students.

But there are many other influences. Students are sent to schools where beleaguered teachers range from fully- to not-even-qualified-and-interested. We see school administrators who make empty claims about being instructional leaders as they maintain a holding pattern of discipline and conformity with sometimes arbitrary expectations. We find local school boards that shift with the community's political persuasion. We have voters who cannot understand why schools demand increasing shares of a locale's budget. We deal with state officials who vary in their competency and commitment to educational issues and children. We face federal officials who increasingly want a return on their financial and political investments. We cope with businesses that want to protect their bottom lines as they demonstrate good public relations. On the other hand, we have a global community that transcends the local disputes among stakeholders about the cost and failed promises of education. And then, finally, there is the child, who interacts with this global community via rapid advances in technology that are not subject to boundaries of political issues or educational impact.

What, then, is the problem? Which problem then becomes the priority? It's almost as if one is blindly describing the proverbial elephant by concentrating upon that one part of the elephant that is accessible to the blind person's sense of touch, hearing, and smell. When we insist that our individual points of reference become the defining description of this massive elephant, we become mired in verbal battles about the most accurate description of the elephant. The elephant, meanwhile, does not remain dormant, unless it is tranquilized or dead. How we resolve the multiple perspectives about this elephant's description depends upon our purpose for describing this elephant and the elephant's ultimate purpose for being in our midst. Educational priorities are no less cumbersome and problematic.

~Vinetta Bell, Coordinator of Special Projects: K-12 Curriculum and Instruction, N.C. Department of Public Instruction

5. Qualitative Measuring

To say that current education reform efforts are facing resistance would be an understatement. I think we all support the goals; we want all students to have equity and opportunity, to be college and career ready, and to attend schools with great teachers and leaders. Certainly raising the bar and rewarding excellence is not a bad thing.

Quite frankly, I believe the problem lies in how we define the achievement of these goals -- how we measure success. It is our definition of success that drives how we achieve such goals. Current policy appears to dictate: if you can't quantify the learning, then no learning has occurred. Crucial components of learning like innovation, creativity, and critical thinking are stifled in an educational environment that is driven by a definition of success that hinges on quantitative data.

We need to redefine success. It's time to stop equating improved statistics with learning, and see education for what it really is: individuals uniquely growing as students, as people, and as citizens. When we recognize that measuring sticks are not the best way to gauge student performance and opt for a holistic, qualitative approach to measuring success, I believe we will start seeing real improvements in the nation's quality of education.

~Kirsten Hill, Summer Advantage USA Graduate Fellow and National Director for Educational Policy Implementation, Roosevelt Institute Campus Network

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Nearly nine years have passed since the tragedy of 9/11. Although it was the farthest thing from my mind at the time, the terrorist attacks would mark the beginning of my political education as a 9/11 widow. It is an education I did not and would not choose for myself.

I was reminded of this recently when on August 2nd, two men were convicted of conspiring to blow up jet-fuel tanks at JFK Airport in New York. Authorities said this plan was intended to "dwarf" the attacks of September 11th 2001. As much as that horrifies me, I am more frightened that the U.S. has yet to address some of the country's largest vulnerabilities -- primarily any one of the hundreds of U.S. chemical plants that use and store tons of poison gases.

According to the worst-case scenario reports provided to the EPA, 484 U.S. chemical facilities each put at least 100,000 people at risk of a Bhopal-like disaster. As we learned from the BP oil spill disaster, worst-case scenarios do happen and sometimes they are far worse than what we could have ever imagined possible. Such is the case when we ponder the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's own estimates of an attack on a chemical facility:100,000 people could be killed or injured in the first 30 minutes.

When congressional Republicans were worried about losing control of Congress in 2006, they slapped a temporary 700-word bill, or "rider," on the Homeland Security funding bill and called it "chemical security." That temporary law contains loopholes that actually prohibit the government from preventing disasters through the use of safer, more secure chemicals or processes. It also has security gaps that exempt 2,400 water treatment plants and 500 chemical port facilities from using processes that would increase public safety.

Over the last decade, more than 287 examples of safer chemical processes have proven effective at eliminating these catastrophic risks for 38 million Americans. However, if conversions to safer technology continue at the current rate, it will take several decades before all high-risk plants become safer. Legislation prioritizing these conversions is essential to neutralizing them as terrorist targets. It also creates thousands of new, more secure jobs. Additionally, more than 85 percent of surveyed facilities reported their conversion costs to be $1 million or less, and one third said they expect to save money.

The House of Representatives adopted a bill last November that would close the loopholes and security gaps in the current law and ensure that the highest risk plants use safer, cost-effective alternatives. This bill has widespread support, ranging from organized labor to first responders, health professionals and even railroad workers who no longer wish to transport these unsafe chemicals.

Despite these facts, on July 28th the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by Senator Susan Collins of Maine adopted a bill that would simply extend the current temporary law with its loopholes and security gaps for three more years. America can't afford to wait until 2013 for chemical disaster prevention.

The release of a poison gas (such as chlorine) at just one of these plants can endanger people up to 25 miles down wind. At high concentrations it would literally melt the lungs of victims. Poison gases at these plants also put thousands of area firefighters and first responders at risk.

There is still time for Congress to act this year. Senator Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to take up this legislation in September. For the first time since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security, the EPA, the White House and congressional leadership all agree on the need to require disaster prevention and eliminate major security gaps in the current law -- but they must stop their hollow talk and actually DO something about it.

So while many across the country continue to speak out about their outrage, their hurt feelings, their constitutional right, and the wisdom (or lack thereof) in building a mosque near Ground Zero, perhaps we should all be more focused on an issue that actually saves lives by protecting millions of Americans who remain at risk from chemical disasters.

Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow and activist, is known for pressuring officials in Washington to provide the American people with a public account of what went wrong on September 11th and in the months preceding the disaster that claimed the life of her husband and more than 3,000 others.

At a conference in London, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. conceded that someday the New York Times Company will be forced to stop publishing a printed paper.*

This sounds obvious, but it's a big deal.

The economics of the online news business will not support the infrastructure or newsroom that the printed paper supports.

Unless the New York Times Company can come up with a miracle new digital revenue stream, therefore, it will eventually have to be restructured and downsized (or sold to a deep-pocketed Sidney Harman-type who runs it at a loss out of love).

Importantly, even a successful online paywall will not allow the paper to maintain its current cost structure.

We estimate that the NYT currently spends about $200 million a year on its newsroom and generates about $150 million of online revenue. If the paywall is highly successful -- attracting, say, one million subscribers who pay $100 a year -- this will add another $100 million of online subscription revenue (assuming the company doesn't lose ad revenue). With $250 million of revenue, the NYT might be able to sustain newsroom costs of about $100 million.

Now, a $100 million newsroom budget is a HUGE newsroom budget -- one that most online publications would kill for. So the New York Times isn't going anywhere. But $100 million is also a lot less than the New York Times' current newsroom budget.

So if Arthur Sulzberger is right that the New York Times will eventually have to stop printing the print paper -- and we certainly think he is -- his company is likely to have to be restructured.

That is, unless, NYTCo can find a Bloomberg-like sugar daddy to run it at a loss indefinitely.

______________

* Here's what Arthur said, exactly, as reported by Emma Heald of editorsweblog:

Asked about his response to the suggestion that the NYT might print its last edition in 2015, Sulzberger said he saw no point in making such predictions and said all he could say was that "we will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD."

That's the first time we've heard him say that. And we suspect it's news to a lot of folks who have been telling us that we're wrong about the NYT because the company will be printing papers forever.

Google's mission may be to open the world to information, but it is refusing to let our consumer group buy a search advertisement promoting wildly popular online animation that takes CEO Eric Schmidt to task over his statements about privacy issues. It seems the search giant cares a lot more about its own corporate privacy, than it does about its users' privacy.

We sent Mr. Schmidt a letter asking him to revisit the denial of search word advertising requests that are critical of Google and taking him to task over recent statements this week in the wake of our animated short, Don't Be Evil?, which has over 300,000 views on Youtube in six days.

Schmidt said in Berlin this week: "We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: we know where you are, we know what you like."

The statement's more than a little creepy. Privacy is all about personal control -- our ability to say "no" to a company or government agency collecting our information, our ability to say "no" to any person or group knowing where we are, what we like, and what we care about, so that it can suggest what we should do next.

The comments, as our letter says, "suggest an Orwellian future where deprivation of choice and independence are paternalistically justified as unparalleled advances in consumerism.

"Collecting this type of information without allowing users the ability to control it or remove themselves from tracking in total is, for want of a better word, evil -- even if you don't plan to use the information for nefarious purposes."

Consumer Watchdog's "Don't Be Evil?" animation features Eric Schmidt giving free ice cream to children while taking their personal information. The statements by Schmidt this week show that Google fails to recognize its business model is incompatible with personal privacy absent the company's support for a federal "Do Not Track Me" list that allows consumers not to be tracked online, or a "make me anonymous" button on its services. Consumer Watchdog has been calling for such a reform for two years.

Consumer Watchdog's case to Schmidt regarding opening up search word ads that criticize Google is this:

Google seems to value its corporate privacy far more than it values individual Internet users' privacy. Recently, we were denied a search word advertisements that contained the word "Google" in it. The reason for the denial: "Trademark in Ad Text."

A company that owns a search engine that controls 70% of the market and wants to know everything about us should at least let people buy search word advertisements that criticize it by name.

You denied our search word promotion based on trademark rights, even though Google has
become a matter of common parlance like "Kleenex" or "Xerox." We call upon you in the future
to name a price for search word promotions that criticize Google and not to assert the trademark defense.

Your comments in Berlin reaffirm the fact that Google is not just any other company. Google is becoming the Internet, and it has a moral obligation to let critics communicate with Internet users via Google search.

Trademark holders do not always assert their rights to prevent search word advertisements that include their trademark. In 2007, when Intel ran what we viewed as a racist advertisement, we bought search word promotions critical of the company and were allowed to run them on your search engine. We call upon you now to allow the same. Open up Google to the same scrutiny every other person or group faces on the Internet.

Google responded to our animation by saying "We like ice cream as much as anyone, but we like privacy even more." In our letter today we offer to buy the CEO and founders some ice cream if they are willing to reevaluate their notions of online privacy:

We are happy to buy you and the founders a scoop in honor of Google's twelfth birthday at a shop of your choosing if you are open to discussing the possibility of supporting an anonymizer button and a "Do Not Track Me" function.

We have been making the same offer for two years, but you have refused to meet with us and have even attempted to revoke our funding by contacting the charitable foundation that supports our work. We didn't appreciate that, but we will gladly put it behind us -- and buy the ice cream -- if you will begin to consider granting individuals the option to fully control their personal information.

After all, there is no such thing as free ice cream.

------------------------

Jamie Court is the author of The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell and the President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

I grew up on the South side of Chicago in the 1940s and 50s. My father and mother raised four children in a house that was less than a 1000 square feet. The stairwell to the second floor was so low that we had to stoop over on the walkup. Later in life, my mother confided in me that when she first saw the house she wept and told my father she "couldn't raise four children in a house that small." My dad consoled her and told her "not to worry, that it was only temporary -- that things were looking up." My dad was a true believer in the American Dream. My mother died in that same house 63 years later.

The breadwinners in our neighborhood worked in the steel mills nearby in East Indiana and in the sprawling Chicago stockyards. They were policeman, fireman, municipal workers, mechanics, house painters and assorted tradesman.

And here's the rub. We all were convinced that we were part of the "great American middle class." It was only when I went to college that I became aware of the term "working class" and that I was a product of it.

Americans have long entertained the idea that we are all middle class, or aspiring middle class. The aspiration itself is a kind of a promissory note that if we get a good education and work hard, we can pass through our initiation phase and become a full fledged member of the middle class; or at least we can sacrifice during our lifetime so that our children can become members of this very special club.

Every generation, until recently, bought into the idea that if not a classless society. America is, nonetheless, an overwhelmingly middle class society, where merit rules, hard work matters and the reward for a lifetime of putting one's nose to the grindstone is the most coveted prize of all -- the realization of the American Dream.

And to be frank, for two centuries the American Dream had legs. Succeeding generations came to America, often destitute but full of hope, and they and their offspring moved on up. As late as the 1960s, we could justifiably boast that we were the most middle class society in the world and millions of Americans could offer demonstrable proof -- their own achievement of the America Dream.

Unfortunately, I have seen the middle class shrink and the American Dream plummet in my lifetime. Today the United States ranks 31 out of 33 OECD nations in income disparity -- that is, the gap between the handful of the very rich at the top and the millions of working poor at the bottom. Only Mexico and Turkey fair worse in disparity of income. And, for the first time, our own US Census tells us that many immigrants are not making it out of poverty and becoming part of the American middle class and will never taste the sweetness of the American Dream.

What has happened to the great American Experiment that was, for so long, considered the gold standard to which millions of people in the world looked for inspiration and guidance?

Arianna Huffington has taken us on a difficult journey -- a kind of collective self-discovery. Her new book, Third World America, is hard to read, not because of the way it's written -- the prose is eloquent and riveting -- but because of what she's telling us. She lays bare the unraveling of the American Dream at the hands of the "special interests" on Wall Street and their friends in high places in the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

The book is really about two intertwined stories: the first is the story of the coup d'état -- the systematic dismantling of the coveted American way of life by the rich and powerful; and the second is the very personal, heart-wrenching stories of some of the millions of families whose lives have been ruined as a result of that coup. By the end, we come to understand that the great numbness hanging over America today resembles a post dramatic stress disorder, the kind of battle fatigue that soldiers experience after long periods of engagement in war zones -- except this is not a hot war or a cold war but a stealth war executed with ruthless calculation and designed to rob millions of Americans of their birthright. It succeeded.

But now, at least, there is no longer any way to claim we didn't know. Arianna is asking us to quit living in a kind of mass denial about what's happened to our country. As she said, we need to "connect the uncomfortable dots" and the most important connection she makes is the financing of elections by special interests. The bottom line is that our elected officials are, to a great extent, beholden to the corporations that "donate" millions of dollars to their campaigns to ensure that their voice will be heard above all others when it comes to drafting and passing legislation. It's a national disgrace.

President Obama had a moment in which he could have turned America around and put us back on track but he chose not to understand the opportunity presented to him or seize it. When Wall Street was threatened with collapse in the Fall of 2008 and desperately needed the American people to bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars, the president could have demanded a quid pro quo. That is, in return for the tax payers' bailout of Wall Street, the business community would have to accept the passage of legislation that would end private financing of elections and require that all elections be publically financed as they are in many other democratically elected governments in the world. Wall Street would have had no choice but to capitulate. It didn't happen. In fact, I suspect that no one in Congress even thought about taking such a course of action. Why would they since most of them owe their public careers, in large part, to the generosity bestowed on them by the Wall Street interests that they are supposed to oversee and regulate?

As to the recent bitterly divided 5-4 Supreme Court decision that corporations have a Constitutional right to make contributions to politicians, I suspect that the passage of tough, uncompromising legislation mandating an end to the practice might have led to a different outcome -- or, at the very least, forced an interesting debate between the Court and the public about the relationship between financial and political power and the governance of America.

Unless we end this despicable practice of buying elections, we will continue to witness a free fall of the American Dream, a shriveling of the American Middle Class and an erosion of what was once the greatest social experiment in modern history. Is anyone listening?

If back-channel sources are correct, the Deficit Commission is finalizing a deal that would increase Social Security benefits slightly for low-income recipients while cutting them for everyone else. The Commissioners apparently believe that putting this "progressive" gloss on a package of unneeded cuts would allow them to move forward with their predetermined anti-Social Security agenda.

The new proposal would pit middle-class seniors against the elderly poor, forcing them to compete for a stripped-down pool of dollars. The end result would be the one that many Commission members have pursued for years: to cut the most stable and successful program in the Federal government's history.

Accounts of this pending deal come from the top-secret, behind-a-firewall, inside-the-Cone-of-Silence proceedings of the Commission itself, which is why they can't be officially confirmed. (Remind me again: Why are such critical issues being debated in secret, only to be presented to Congress for ratification after the November elections?) But if these reports are correct -- and there is good reason to believe they are -- some members of the Commission presumably believe this strategy would confuse and divide the many Americans who oppose Social Security cuts, while defusing the growing resistance to their actions among progressive members of Congress.

The Commissioners have clearly been stung by the nickname bloggers have given them: the "Catfood Commission." This recommendation would take the edge off that name, since they could now claim they've made sure nobody will be eating Purina Old Folks' Chow as a result of their actions. It would also give them chance to bait their opponents: Don't you care about poor people? But there are a number of problems with their proposal, and there are fairer and more cost-effective ways to help impoverished seniors. Here's what this new proposal gets wrong.

They're misreading the public: First, progressives aren't the only ones opposed to cutting Social Security. Recent polling by the Celinda Lake organization showed that seven out of ten voters opposed cutting benefits for people earning over $30,000 in order to reduce the deficit. 76% of independents oppose cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit, as do 77% of Republicans -- and 76% of Tea Party supporters! Putting an antipoverty gloss on overall cuts won't impress these voters. Nuanced arguments -- "we're cutting the program to save it" or "we're not reducing the deficit, we're stabilizing the program" -- will be lost on angry voters with finely-tune BS detectors who have contributed to the program for years.

It's a broken promise: This policy would violate a compact the United States government made to generations of its citizens: Pay into the system and you'll receive what's been promised in the end. Social Security is a self-funded system that provides some income security during old age or disability. Using employee and employer contributions to reduce poverty would be a redirection of the money that working Americans and their employers paid to help them when they're disabled or retired. If the Commissioners have a new antipoverty mission, there are better ways to pay for that.

There aren't enough "rich" beneficiaries: The Commissioners will no doubt make the argument that Warren Buffett and others in his income shouldn't receive the same benefit income as somebody who's struggling to make ends meet. But there aren't enough Warren Buffetts in the system to make a difference. Since Social Security benefits are capped at a relatively low level, Warren Buffett isn't likely to receive any more in benefits than someone who earned less than $100,000 per year.

If benefits are going to be tied to overall income and wealth in the future, cuts will have to reach deep into the middle-class in order to make any real difference -- especially if there's a slight benefit increase at the low end. The number of Social Security recipients who are still impoverished (from 2000-2002 data) is 1. million, or 8.7% of the elderly. Since Social Security currently keeps 13 million seniors out of poverty, that leaves a lot of stable or increased benefits that would have to be offset by by reducing benefits for middle-class recipients in order to cut overall costs.

Benefit redutions will have to be deep, wide, and painful. This new proposal bears some resemblance to "progressive price indexing," a Republican proposal that would have left benefits intact for recipients with the lowest incomes while progressively reducing them for everyone else. Unfortunately, a 2005 paper by Jason Furman (now the White House's Deputy Director of the Economic Council) showed that this approach would cut benefits for today's average 25 year worker by 16% if he or she retires in 2045, and would result in a 28% for the average worker retiring in 2075. Any other approach the Commission takes will come up against the same challenge: If you're not willing to raise revenues by lifting the payroll cap, you'll need to make deep benefit cuts for the middle class. (And if you are willing to lift that cap, benefit cuts are unnecessary.)

It will cut a needed lifeline for seniors living on modest incomes.Those cuts would hurt a lot of people. Social Security benefits represent 40% of seniors' income, on average and that figure'ss bound to rise as corporations continue to cut back on employee pension plans. The median income for Social Security recipients in 2008 was $18,001. Cuts would affect people whose average incomes are somewhat higher, but most of them certainly won't be wealthy. The demographics and income statistics show that Commission can't make a meaningful dent in the overall numbers without cutting benefits for people with modest incomes. (Figures are from the Employee Benefits Research Institute.)

Administrative costs would offset a lot of their expected savings. Current administrative costs amount to less than 1 percent of benefits, a figure that's extremely low when compared to other programs. While linking benefits to income or other assets may sound like a good idea, it will add enormously to the administrative costs. It's not just a matter of cross-referencing the Social Security system to the IRS databases -- although that's a lot bigger undertaking than it sounds. Any needs-based system will require appeals processes, exceptions for certain mitigating circumstances, and other provisions that will be labor-intensive to administer. Part of the beauty of the current Social Security system -- and one of the keys to its success -- is its simplicity. That would be lost under this proposal.

Fortunately, there's a solution:

Lifting the payroll tax cap is fairer and more efficient. The administratively simple, cost-effective approach to Social Security's minor long-term funding problem is to raise the payroll tax cap from its current $106,000 level. Systems are already in place to handle that change (at the IRS and in automated payroll systems for employers). That would address the long-term funding issues for Social Security itself, cleanly and efficiently. What's more, that move (perhaps supplemented by a relatively modest payroll tax increase for very high earners) could also help fortify benefits those low-income recipients. A progressive adjustment to the payroll tax would provide for the needs of that 8.7% still in poverty more cost-effectively and more fairly than this plan would.

In other words, the Commission's new goal can be more efficiently and fairly funded by a marginal increase in taxes for the wealthiest Americans. If Commissioners lack the political will to make this kind of antipoverty commitment on behalf of the well-to-do -- and with the preponderance of conservatives and millionaires on the Commission, that's likely -- why are they asking middle-class seniors with an average total income of $18,000 to carry that burden instead?

If this were a public debate and not a secret one, this latest move could be used to start the debate we should be having: Why don't we strengthen and increase Social Security, rather than cut it?

Of course, the minor adjustments needed to stabilize Social Security for a century aren't the only issue. Many Commissioners want the Federal government to keep the $2.5 trillion it borrowed from Social Security's trust fund (and therefore from working Americans and their employers) so they can continue to use it for other purposes. That would amount to a regressive tax on the middle class.

Overall, this new proposal is simply a smokescreen for overall benefit cuts, camouflaged by a small social mission subsidized by a hidden tax on the middle class. It's a political trick. Commissioners like Alan Simpson can now claim to be working on behalf of the "lesser people," to use his preferred choice of words, defending them against "greedy geezers" whose desire to collect the benefits they've subsidized is selfish and uncaring. That may sound like smart divide-and-conquer politics to the Commission, but it won't play as well on Main Street as it will on Wall Street.

There are ways to help impoverished seniors that don't involve cutting Social Security benefits or forcing more sacrifices onto the middle class in order to protect the well-to-do. The Deficit Commission shouldn't use impoverished seniors as hostages in order to finish what many of them have been trying to do for decades: cut Social Security.

Sign the petition: Social Security doesn't contribute to the deficit, so stop the Deficit Commission from cutting Social Security.

Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer (and former insurance/finance executive), is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. This post was produced as part of the Strengthen Social Security campaign. Richard also blogs at A Night Light.

He can be reached at "rjeskow@ourfuture.org."

Website: Eskow and Associates

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness. 

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown -- by the media conglomerates of their choice -- the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.  

The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned.  Unlike, say, BBC Radio, corporate television did not tell the small stories -- of, for instance, the female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the land.  That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate news-for-profit.  (The print press was better at covering with the crisis, as was publicly-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)

In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week, Barack Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, “But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  Even if Pakistan were not a major non-NATO ally of the United States, it is the world’s sixth most populous country and the 44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.  The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country’s modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid.  If the floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.

News junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was nearly invisible on American networks.  I did a LexisNexis search for the terms “Pakistan” and “flood” in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American networks) from July 31st to September 4th, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.  A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search results in the same period and one for “Iraq,” more than 3,000 hits (the most the search engine will count).  A search for “mosque" and "New York” yielded 1,300 hits.  Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial frenzy by anti-Muslim bigots like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and GOP hatemonger Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani flood victims.  

Of course, some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity, including CNN’s Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air time and poor time slots. (Gupta’s special report on the Pakistan floods aired the evening of September 5th, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)  As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored.  On August 13th, reporter Dan Harris interviewed NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show at 7:45 am.  The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms are going to become more common later in the twenty-first century.   Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment at 4 pm on August 16th.  My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was about it for commercial television.

The “Worst Disaster” TV Didn’t Cover

It’s worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:

The deluge began on July 31st, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan.  Within two days, the rapidly rising waters had already killed 800 people.  On August 2nd, the United Nations announced that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.

The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver aid, as public criticism of President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani surged.  President Zardari’s opulent trip to France and Britain (during which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was pilloried.  On August 8th in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.  Fearing the response in Pakistan, the president’s Pakistan People’s Party attempted to censor the video of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it.  Few or no American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident, though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their elected government.  (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound popularity into yet another in the country’s history of military coups.) 

By August 5th, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far larger than reported.  Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was initially greeted by the world community with a yawn.   The following day, the government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward southern Punjab.  At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected in some way.  On August 7th, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through some of the country’s richest farmlands just before harvest time, another million people were evacuated.  Prime Minister Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of the flood-stricken regions.

By August 9th, nearly 14 million people had been affected by the deluge, the likes of which had never been experienced in the region in modern history, and at least 20% of the country was under water.  At that point, in terms of its human impact, the catastrophe had already outstripped both the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  On August 10th, the United Nations announced that six million Pakistanis needed immediate humanitarian aid just to stay alive. 

On August 14th, another half-million people were evacuated from the Sindhi city of Jacobabad.  By now, conspiracy theories were swirling inside Pakistan about landlords who had deliberately cut levees to force the waters away from their estates and into peasant villages, or about the possibility that the U.S. military had diverted the waters from its base at Jacobabad.  It was announced that 18 million Pakistanis had now been adversely affected by the floods, having been displaced, cut off from help by the waters, or having lost crops, farms, and other property.  The next day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, surveying the damage, pronounced it was “the worst disaster” he had ever seen. 

The following week a second crest of river water hit Sindh Province.  On August 30th, it submerged the city of Sujawal (population 250,000).  The next day, however, there were a mere 16 mentions of Pakistan on all American television news broadcasts, mostly on CNN.  On Labor Day weekend, another major dam began to fail in Sindh and, by September 6th, several hundred thousand more people had to flee from Dadu district, with all but four districts in that rich agricultural province having seen at least some flooding. 

Today, almost six million Pakistanis are still homeless, and many have not so much as received tents for shelter.  In large swaths of the country, roads, bridges, crops, power plants -- everything that matters to the economy -- were inundated and damaged or simply swept away.  Even if the money proves to be available for repairs (and that remains an open question), it will take years to rebuild what was lost and, for many among those millions, the future will mean nothing but immiseration, illness, and death.

Why the Floods Weren’t News    

In the United States, the contrast with the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Haitian earthquake in January and the consequent outpouring of public donations was palpable.  Not only has the United Nations’ plea for $460 million in aid to cover the first three months of flood response still not been met, but in the past week donations seem to have dried up.  The U.S. government pledged $200 million (some diverted from an already planned aid program for Pakistan) and provided helicopter gunships to rescue cut-off refugees or ferry aid to them.

What of American civil society?  No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin.  No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases.  It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans. 

A number of explanations have been offered for the lack of empathy, or even interest, not to speak of a visible American unwillingness to help millions of Pakistanis.  As a start, there were perfectly reasonable fears, even among Pakistani-Americans, that such aid money might simply be pocketed by corrupt government officials.  But was the Haitian government really so much more transparent and less corrupt than the Pakistani one? 

It has also been suggested that Americans suffer from donor fatigue, given the string of world disasters in recent years and the bad domestic economy.  On August 16th, for instance, Glenn Beck fulminated: “We can't keep spending. We are broke! Game over… no one is going to ride in to save you… You see the scene in Pakistan? People were waiting in line for aids [sic] from floods. And they were complaining, how come the aid is not here?  Look, when America is gone, who's going to save the people in Pakistan? See, we got to change this one, because we're the ones that always ride in to save people.” 

Still, the submerging of a fifth of a country the size of Pakistan is -- or at least should be -- a dramatic global event and even small sums, if aggregated, would matter.  (A dollar and a half from each American would have met the U.N. appeal.)  Some have suggested that the Islamophobia visible in the debate about the Park 51 Muslim-owned community center in lower Manhattan left Americans far less willing to donate to Muslim disaster victims.

And what of those national security arguments that nuclear-armed Pakistan is crucial not just to the American war in Afghanistan, but to the American way of life?  Ironically, the collapse of the neoconservative narrative about what it takes to make the planet’s “sole superpower” secure appears to have fallen on President Obama’s head.  One of the few themes he adopted wholeheartedly from the Bush administration has been the idea that a poor Asian country of 170 million halfway around the world, facing a challenge from a few thousand rural fundamentalists, is the key to the security of the United States. 

If the Pakistani floods reveal one thing, it’s that Americans now look on such explanations through increasingly jaundiced eyes.  At the moment, no matter whether it’s the Afghan War or those millions of desperate peasants and city dwellers in Pakistan, the public has largely decided to ignore the AfPak theater of operations.  It’s not so surprising.  Having seen the collapse of our financial system at the hands of corrupt financiers produce mass unemployment and mass mortgage foreclosures, they have evidently decided, as even Glenn Beck admits, it’s “game over” for imperial adventures abroad. 

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it.  Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television? 

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters.  But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions.  Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars.  Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party.  What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?   

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us.  As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. You can catch him discussing flooded Pakistan on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Juan Cole

Next week, voters in the District of Columbia will go to the polls to pick their Democratic mayoral candidate, and nothing short of the future of D.C.'s public school system -- a major step forward or setback for reforming America's education system -- is staked on the outcome of the election.

Over the past three and a half years, the District of Columbia Public School system has undergone radical changes, and for the first time in decades, D.C. students are beginning to gain access to a high-quality education. That progress is attributable directly to the current mayor, Adrian Fenty.

However, despite the major strides forward, polls show that Fenty may be thrown out, and along with him all the progress that has been made. That would be a giant mistake.

Such a loss would condemn District students to a future filled with poor schools and ineffective teachers. Moreover it would also send a signal to the rest of the nation that voters are not willing to stand by those who push for full-scale (and sometimes unpopular) education reform, and embolden those forces that resist any change.

Since coming into office in January 2007, Fenty has made improving the DC public school system his number one priority, and over the last three and a half years his administration has made several major accomplishments that were once thought impossible.

For years, DC students performed abysmally on District and national assessments, and the gap between DC students and their more affluent peers across the Potomac seemed insurmountable.

Yet, under Fenty's watch, student achievement has begun to go up dramatically. DC middle and high school students in testing grades have improved their performance on the District's assessments by an average of 17 points in Math and 14 points in Reading. While there is still along way to go before every student is excelling, students are moving in the right direction.

The administration also was successful in negotiating one of the most progressive contracts with the Washington Teachers Union. The contract rewards teachers with top-in-the-nation salaries, offers teachers top-of-the-line development programs, and helps ensure that there is a quality teacher in every classroom by ending the "job for life" mentality that has pervaded many districts. The contract is quickly becoming a model other districts around the country want to emulate.

Finally, Fenty's commitment to reforming DC public schools was the fundamental reasons why the District was one of 10 winners in President Obama's Race to the Top competition. Washington will get up to $75 million in needed education dollars. Those much-needed funds wouldn't be coming to the District without Fenty's aggressive approach.

Yet just as the reforms instituted under Fenty are beginning to take hold, they are at risk of being completely unraveled. Fenty's challenger does not share the same enthusiasm for transforming the D.C. public school system, and there's a real risk that the system will revert to its previous state should Fenty lose the primary.

That would be tragic for Washington's students, and it shouldn't be allowed to come to pass.

Mayor Fenty was elected on a promise to transform the D.C. public school system and give Washington's students the type of high-quality education they deserve. Doing so has not been easy, and during his tenure Fenty has made some tough choices that have not always been popular.

But they were the right choices, and they have yielded strong results for Washington's students. Changing course now would be amount to a rejection of that progress.

Moreover, it would seriously undermine other reform efforts around the nation. President Obama's Race to the Top competition has encouraged lawmakers around the nation to undertake challenging legislative efforts, particularly around charter schools and teacher tenure. While these initiatives are in the best interests of students, they are fiercely opposed by teachers unions and other forces opposed to changes in the status quo. A loss will only embolden these forces to stand firm, knowing that voters won't support candidates who want to improve the system on election day.

We must ensure that doesn't happen and that D.C.'s public schools continue on the path toward great schools for all children. Mayor Fenty is the right choice to keep the system going in the right direction.

Joe Williams is Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform.

Every American now knows something about "shari'a" -- the Islamic religious law. What most know, or think they know, about shari'a comes to be symbolized by a few violent rules -- stoning, cutting off hands or lashing. Other practices many Westerners find disturbing, like veiling women's faces, regulations on female marriage autonomy or restrictions on the freedom of religion, are commonly justified in the language of Islamic law.

Let's be clear. Shari'a is not the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. All of the above practices are long-standing features of Islamic law. Those of us disturbed by the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West, which is often disingenuously presented as "resisting shari'a," do not need to defend Islamic law to defend the rights of our Muslim brethren to dignity, respect and equality. When the Quran-burning pastor in Florida says that all he wants to do is to take a stand against shari'a, you know that the shari'a-meme has gone off the rails.

At the same time, it has to be understood that while shari'a is not the Universal Declaration on Human Rights nor is it Mein Kampf or a list of sadistic punishments. For better or for worse, shari'a remains idealized by many (not all) Muslims as the expression of perfect divine justice. If so many Americans are now going to anoint themselves instant experts on Islamic law, then it behooves the rest of us to do some of their thinking for them. We need a better understanding of what Muslims think of when they think of shari'a and why it has the capacity to both justify and also oppose such things as stoning and indiscriminant terrorism.

To do this, let's take the example of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American "shaykh" who has lent his support to the Fort Hood attack and the attempted Christmas and Times Square bombings. To be sure, Awlaki's views on American foreign policy and the need for Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims are common in the Islamic world. But his call for American Muslim soldiers to attack American interests is not only a call to treason against America, but a call for Muslims to violate shari'a. How so?

First, what is Islamic law? Both Muslims and non-Muslims often ask "What does Islam say about x?" or "Is y permitted in Islam?" And while there is never a shortage of Muslims and non-Muslims willing to give straight answers to such questions, such straight answers can be deceptive. For Islamic law, shari'a, is not a code or an agreed list of rules. Rather, Islamic law is a field of debate and argumentation where learned scholars argue with one another about what the law permits or requires on the basis of evidence and reasoning. Often that evidence is from the Quran or the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad (the hadith, or the sunna), but just as often it is about trying to find the right analogies to older, more settled questions in Islamic law, or about arguing over the spirit and purposes of the law, or even about arguing over the political values and goals which the law purportedly advances.

This is why for every Awlaki proclaiming Nidal Hasan a "hero," there will be a dozen other scholars (not to mention civic activists) condemning what Hasan did as "against Islam." However, the fact that we hear such radical disagreement means neither that Islamic law is just about your politics nor that one of the sides is right and the other is lying. Instead, we should ask how the majority of Islamic legal scholars in the various schools have asked and answered such questions, on the basis of what kind of proof, and whether there is a predominant position.

So, who's right about shari'a -- Awlaki and Fox News or those countless Muslims who condemned the Fort Hood attack?

Asking such a question may be naive, but it is not absurd. In Islamic law, it is perfectly sensible to ask whether a Muslim citizen of a non-Muslim country, belonging to a non-Muslim military, may attack the members of that military if it is engaged in hostilities with Muslims.

Hasan's massacre was a crime in Islamic law, even for those Muslim scholars who believe that the US is waging aggressive wars against Muslims, that Muslims may not join the US military, and that Muslims are obligated to resist the US military. Even for those religious authorities Hasan committed a very specific Islamic crime -- the crime of betraying a trust or a contract. This is the crime of treachery or perfidy, known as ghadr in Islamic law. In other words, there are many Sunni religious scholars who may share the politics of Anwar al-Awlaki as pertains to Iraq and Afghanistan but who do not join in calling Nidal Malik Hasan a "hero."

From an Islamic legal perspective there are four primary questions at stake here:

1. Is it permissible to serve in a non-Muslim army?
2. Is it permissible to fight Muslims on behalf of non-Muslims?
3. What should a Muslim citizen of a non-Muslim state do if asked to fight Muslims?
4. Is it ever permissible to attack soldiers within your own non-Muslim army as an act of jihad?

Suffice it to say that for the first three questions, the majority of Sunni religious scholars have said that (1) Muslims shouldn't serve in non-Muslim armies if possible, that (2) they may never fight fellow Muslims on behalf of non-Muslims or "assist in killing a believer even by half a word," and that (3) if asked to kill fellow Muslims believers should submit to torture or even execution. However, in the contemporary period, pragmatic scholars like Yusuf al-Qaradawi have given fatwas allowing Muslims to serve in non-Muslim armies, even against Muslims if they can serve in non-combatant capacities.

However, if it is okay in Islamic law to fight U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (most scholars say this is a duty, in fact), why is it not okay to kill US soldiers in America?

Jihad and Treachery: Why Domestic Terrorism Falls Afoul of Islamic Law

While Islamic law places an extremely high premium on loyalty to the Muslim community, including through service in legitimate wars, that loyalty is not without rules. One of the most basic rules is that non-Muslims are eligible for contracts and that those contracts must be honored. All Islamic scholars believe that Muslims living in the West, whether native born, naturalized or legal residents, are under a firm "contract of security" ('aqd al-aman) which renders all non-Muslim life, property and honor inviolable. Even Muslim scholars who support certain jihadi activities by and large tend to believe that Muslim citizens of non-Muslim polities may not engage in such activities against their own states.

It is difficult to exaggerate how seriously most orthodox Sunni scholars take the obligation to honor contracts. Consider, for example, the position of one of the greatest medieval legal authorities in Sunni Islam, Imam al-Nawawi (died 1277):

If non-Muslims capture [a Muslim soldier] and then they free him on the condition that he is under a guarantee of security [aman] from them, then they are also under a guarantee of security from him on the basis of what the Almighty has said: "O you who have believed! Fulfill all contracts." [5:1] If they free him under a guarantee of safety but without asking for one themselves, then even in this case the majority say that they are still under such a guarantee on his part because of their placing him under a guarantee.

Note what this 13th century Islamic scholar is saying here: that even in the case of POWs waging a legitimate jihad, the mere suspicion that one believes oneself to be under a mutual "contract of security" (aman) renders fighting enemy soldiers prohibited. Of course, if this holds for POWs how much more does it hold for a citizen who voluntarily enlists in his (non-Muslim) country's military?

What is sometimes hard for a Western audience to appreciate is that an Islamic scholar (or layperson) can hold the following views with no internal contradiction:

• That America is waging wars of aggression in the Middle East
• That defensive jihad against America is required in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• That all persons aiding the US war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan countries are legitimately targetable.
• However, that a Muslim person with a "contract of security" with the US may not attack it, especially its civilians, especially if that Muslim is a citizen.

However hard it is for us to understand, that basic position is probably the predominant one in mainstream Sunni religious circles, even if the taboo on treachery and targeting civilians is sometimes difficult to perceive in the fog of war, apologetics and recriminations. For what Hasan committed last Fall was not only cold-blooded murder of his colleagues and comrades -- something anyone, Muslim or not, can find repulsive and evil without any religious rationale -- but was also, from a strict Islamic legal standpoint, an Islamic legal crime, a crime against shari'a. The Prophet Muhammad himself spoke very clearly on the punishment for the crime of ghadr (treachery or perfidy):

"He who betrays a trust will have a flag stuck in his anus on the Day of Judgment so that his treachery may be known."

This past Sunday was beautiful, bright and warm, not unlike the sky blue day when those two airliners hit the World Trade Center in 2001, just a mile or so from where I live. That day, a Tuesday, was a bit hotter, a bit more humid, yet just as sunny and promising.

But this Sunday morning's silence was broken by the sound of a bell and a small, organized crowd of friendly people chatting quietly among themselves, walking south down Seventh Avenue, the street that runs beneath my apartment windows, escorted by police and fire vehicles. With a prompt from the news on my radio, I remembered that this was an event that now takes place every year on the Sunday before the anniversary of 9/11.

The people walk in memory of Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan priest who died at the World Trade Center, the attack's first officially recorded death, designated Victim 0001. Chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, Father Judge had rushed to the disaster scene, delivered last rites to the dying, then gone inside the lobby of the north tower, praying for all those at Ground Zero but especially for his friends, the firefighters.

"Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!" he was heard to exclaim. And then the south tower collapsed. Debris came crashing through the north lobby. Father was struck and fell, dead -- "blunt force trauma to the head," the coroner's report read.

It would be foolish to pretend to know what Father Judge would make of the controversy over Cordoba House, the proposed Islamic center downtown a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, but there may be a clue in the words of the homily he delivered just the day before 9/11."No matter how big the call, no matter how small, you have no idea what God is calling you to do," he said. "But God needs you, He needs me, He needs all of us."

All of us. Not just Christians or Jews, but Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, the right, the left, everyone. Father Judge himself was both gay and a recovering alcoholic, struggles that gave him particular insight into the plight of all too many misunderstood souls working to make their capacity for love, compassion and courage known and accepted as equal to anyone else's.

So all of us have a role to play and none of them should involve inflaming hatred and prejudice among us, none of them should involve violating the rights of others or considering oneself superior to another or burning the scripture of those the ignorant and opportunistic want us to believe are evil or unholy.

Writing in Wednesday's New York Times, Feisal Abdul Rauf, chair of the effort to build Cordoba House and imam of the Farah mosque already in lower Manhattan, said, "These efforts by radicals at distortion endanger our national security and the personal security of Americans worldwide. This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides. The paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift."

Just returned from two months in the Middle East on behalf of the State Department, seeking conciliation between Muslims and other religions, Rauf continued, "Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends' belief in our values."

Reflect and meditate in silence, please. Many have urged that September 11 this year not be a time of demonstrations for or against Cordoba House or any other issue; rather, let it be a quiet day of commemoration and mourning.

The last time I attended the September 11 ceremonies at Ground Zero, on the fifth anniversary in 2006, as the names of the dead were read, solemn tranquility was disrupted and disrespected by those who tried to use the occasion to draw attention to themselves, crassly intruding with their conspiracy theories and raucous agendas.

And quiet, please, not only because it is a mark of respect for the deceased and their friends and families, but also because it is the sound of silence that many New Yorkers find so evocative of those days just after the attacks. Our streets closed to regular traffic, patrolled by police and the National Guard, we wandered in mute disbelief at what had happened, at the enormity of our loss. Even the emergency vehicles that raced along the empty streets did so without their sirens. We murmured softly amongst ourselves, looking for answers as many of our fellow citizens still searched for news of their missing loved ones.

Let our loss be what we remember on Saturday. That, and the words of St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the order of friars to which Father Mychal Judge devoted himself: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy."

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Michael Winship is senior writer at Public Affairs Television in New York City.

President Obama's plan for fixing America's badly-worn transportation infrastructure is not, as some critics have asserted, simply throwing more taxpayer money down the rabbit hole.

In fact, if implemented correctly, it could not only help us make up for a lot of lost time re-building a critical component of our economy, make us more competitive in the global marketplace, and serve as economic "game-changer," a fundamental re-orientation of how we structure long-range industrial policy.

Right now, most people are focused on jobs. U.S. unemployment rose to 9.6 percent in August, and for the construction industry, that figure is 17 percent, nearly double. What's worse, those numbers may continue upward when the money from the first stimulus package runs out. In short, far too many Americans are not going back to work tomorrow.

Rebuilding our third-rate transportation infrastructure will also help us catch up with established competitors like Germany and up-and-coming players like China, Brazil, and India. Those nations are investing in their economies and their future competitiveness by putting money into modern ports, freight rail, and other infrastructure. Right now, there are serious question about whether U.S. infrastructure can deliver the level of service American businesses need.

Finally, there is the matter of practical policy. The latest extension of our nation's transportation law runs out at the end of this year. In this toxic political environment, it may be impossible to get a renewal, which could force a shutdown of the program, as was the case earlier this year, and put thousands of existing jobs in jeopardy. Washington must show leadership now.

An effectively-designed infrastructure initiative can stabilize and strengthen our economy beyond the current crisis. Smart investments can generate productive, sustainable and inclusive growth. A strategy of "invest and reform" would ensure that infrastructure investments were driven by market logic, factual evidence, and performance rather than the greatest short-term political reward.

Does President Obama's plan do all these things?

The good news--there are several key reforms that promise to change the way transportation infrastructure projects are funded and chosen on the federal, state, and metropolitan levels: A merit-driven National Infrastructure Bank could be the vehicle for green-lighting projects that have the highest return on investment, rather than the greatest political reward. Another round of projects that support bottom-up decision-making linking transportation, housing, energy, and environmental concerns. A program for transportation modeled after the Education Department's Race-To-The-Top initiative that could instill meaningful reforms on the state level, where most decisions are made.

The investments in high-speed rail and next-generation air traffic control are important in that they begin to shift focus away from small-bore spending to the kind of transformational investments the federal government should be focusing on. Linking high speed rail to the rest of the transportation program will help us begin to think of these siloed investments as a holistic system.

Obviously, the big challenge is how to get this done. Effective transportation policy in the U.S. does not lack for good, practical ideas. It lacks funding, or, more accurately, it lacks interest in raising taxes to generate the funding. Most of what the president proposed is traditionally funded by the tax on gasoline. But as driving declines, and as more fuel-efficient cars mean we're consuming less gas, there's much less money overall.

President Obama has taken any gas tax increase off the table, proposing instead to repeal the domestic manufacturing deduction for oil and gas production. This may be enough to fund parts of the president's plan, but it is short of the comprehensive package we need.

We need to hear more about what the administration's priorities are for the long-term reauthorization of the transportation law. Again, there is no shortage of ideas. There's a draft bill in the House, and likely to be one in the Senate. Three national commissions have weighed in on this.

We need to know how the program--largely the same framework used to build the interstates a couple of generations ago--will be updated to reflect the realities of 21st century metropolitan America.

Finally, we need a frank conversation about how we're going to pay for all this, and then to exercise the will to do that. A jump start now is no good if we stall again down the road.

Heartbreaker is the kind of romantic comedy that Hollywood doesn't seem to know how to make anymore -- one that's actually both witty and romantic, with just the right accent of sadness and loss thrown in (because, you know, boy meets girl, then boy loses girl before boy eventually gets girl).

It's such an effervescent delight, in fact, that I have no doubt someone in Hollywood is making the deal right this minute to remake and totally screw it up.

Directed by Pascal Chaumeil from a script by a trio of writers, Heartbreaker stars the charming Romain Duris, who is lithe, handsome and incredibly fluid when it comes to shifting gears unexpectedly. He plays Alex, part of a trio whose business involves helping convince women who don't know that they're in a relationship with the wrong guy. As Alex explains in voiceover, there are three types of women: happy, unhappy, and ones who are unhappy with their relationships but don't know it yet. Those are the ones in which Alex and his colleages, Marc (Francois Damiens) and Melanie (Julie Ferrier), specialize.

Alex is first seen in Africa, where a woman, on vacation with her boyfriend, leaves the sullen lunk (who wants to stay at the hotel, drinking and watching a promised wet-T-shirt contest) behind for a tour of the dunes. But her boyfriend has caused her to miss the bus. Luckily, she finds a savior, who offers to show her the dunes, right after he makes a stop to do pro bono humanitarian work with orphaned children in a tiny village.

This, of course, is Alex and his team. They not only impress her -- they make her fall instantly in love with him, though he assures her they can never be an item because he's on his way out of the country. But it's enough: She goes back to the hotel and dumps the boyfriend -- and her brother, unbeknownst to her, pays off Alex and his colleagues.

But Alex may have met his match when he's hired by a wealthy flower merchant to break up his headstrong daughter from her fiancée. The daughter, Juliette (Vanessa Paradis), is set to marry an Englishman (Andrew Lincoln) who, from all appearances is perfect for her. Indeed, having done enough research to figure that out, Alex initially turns down the job.

But when a loan shark, to whom Alex owes a large sum, demands his money on pain of serious bodily harm, Alex changes his mind. He and his team specialize in doing research into their subject's likes and dislikes, then fashioning Alex as the ideal man. They'll just have to work a little harder this time.

That's amplified by the time constraint: Juliette is off to Monaco, where she will spend the week leading to her wedding making preparations. Alex inserts himself into her life as her bodyguard, hired by her father because of threats on her life. She initially resists -- she even ditches him a couple of times -- but he and his squad eventually manipulate her into viewing him as a necessity.

Turning him into the man who will cause her to call off her wedding is a tougher task. But, between her love of George Michael's music and her passion for the film Dirty Dancing, they've got enough to work with.

You can probably see where this is going; Before long, the distance Alex maintains from his clients vanishes and he finds himself doing the one thing he never does: falling for Juliette. Yet her fiancé's arrival is imminent -- can he pull it off?

The romantic comedy, in which one partner makes the other fall in love under false pretenses, always has a tough ending to pull off, yet Chaumeil manages it with both grace and ingenuity. Heartbreaker makes everything look easy, including learning that big dance number between Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey from the end of Dirty Dancing.

Much of that credit must go to Duris, a handsome but also rubbery and facile comedian. He has an ease that seems natural and smooth, unforced even at moments of jeopardy. And he has a solid foil in Paradis, who has the sly self-awareness of a French Michelle Pfeiffer. Nor can enough be said about the unobtrusive scene stealing by the rest of the cast: Damiens and Ferrier as his accomplices, Helena Noguerra as her slutty friend who shows up unannounced to throw a wrench into the proceedings.

Heartbreaker earns both its laughs and its romantic sighs. It is a soufflé of a comedy, airy and tasty at the same time.

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