Diane Ravitch, who was the assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, has completely recanted her previous support for charter schools and privatization, and has been working to rally educators and families against Obama's "Race to the Top" progam -- which duplicates the failed George W. Bush policies. Here she is on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin with you, Diane Ravitch. Your response to President Obama’s major address yesterday on education?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I think that what happened in New York City is—shows that the direction he’s taking is wrong, because everything he is proposing in Race to the Top and also in his blueprint will rely on exactly the kinds of methods that led to a massive fraud in New York state—that is, that Race to the Top is requiring states to judge teachers by the student test scores, and we now know, based on this immense fraud in the city and in the state of New York, that the test scores are not reliable. So teachers will be judged by unreliable data, and we’re going to dismantle the teaching profession in pursuit of this mechanical fix that won’t work.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Diane Ravitch, one of the reasons President Obama gave that particular speech was that he’s coming under increasing fire even from civil rights organizations who are questioning not only the emphasis on testing, but the push for more and more charter schools regardless of the quality of those schools. And your sense of how the ground is shifting around the country, among parent groups, among civil rights groups, around the whole issue of school reform?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, you know, I think this week, in the last week of July of 2010, turns out to be a pretty momentous week. First of all, six civil rights groups came together and issued a joint statement that blasted Race to the Top and also the blueprint, the Obama blueprint, because he is building—although he doesn’t admit it, he’s building his education agenda right on top of the Bush education agenda, which is to test and punish, to close schools, to evaluate teachers in ways that are unfair and unsound from a research point of view, to increase the number of privately managed charter schools. All this is going to be immensely destabilizing, and it’s going to hit hardest on minority communities, because most of the schools that will be identified as the lowest-performing schools will be in poor Hispanic and black communities. And there will be massive—excuse me, massive destabilization. This is not good. And the civil rights groups recognize this.

There was a second report out that came out this week from a group of community—from an organization of community groups from across the country, echoing the same complaints: we don’t want more community schools, we don’t want more charter schools, we want better public schools—help our public schools get better, not by more testing, not by more charters, but by sensible approaches like more pre-kindergarten, smaller class size, more support for the people who are teaching in those schools—commonsense approaches, which this administration seems to be avoiding and looking for the quick fix that George Bush pursued and that Mayor Bloomberg pursued, and it didn’t work. So I think there are immense implications here.

And we also saw in the Congress where Congressman Obey tried to strip money away from Race to the Top, away from merit pay and away from charter schools. And the administration’s response was, "Don’t take money from Race to the Top. Take it away from food stamps." And Joel Klein said to take it away from Title I. These are all programs that benefit the neediest families in our society, and there were prepared to harm people who are in need of help in order to preserve the President’s favorite program.

So I think that the implications of this week, with the test score explosion, the blowup of the fraud in New York City, and these two grassroots groups saying, "This is not working, and take a more commonsense approach, and stop this destructive test and measurement and punishment approach," this is big, because up 'til now everybody seems to have gone along with the rhetoric of President Obama. But you have to separate his rhetoric, which is always very elegant, from what his administration is.

Whether you're a parent, a grandparent or just a concerned citizen, this is really important stuff. Please take the time to read the rest.

Duncan takes the right to task over the London shooting, and I say that he is right on.

"Bush and the Right generally have become masters of this rhetorical trick. Criticize the Bush policies in Iraq? You're attacking the troops! Criticze the Bush policies in Gitmo? You're attacking the troops! Criticize the 101st Fighting Keyboarders glee about the killing of "bad" brown people in London? You're attacking London bobbies! It's long past time for the Right to take responsible for its own actions and rhetoric, and stop trying to pawn it off on those on the front lines." read on

Link:

The Obama administration on Thursday released controversial memos outlining the legal rationale for interrogation techniques the Central Intelligence Agency used against terror suspects apprehended overseas, and vowed not to prosecute those that carried out what the administration described as "torture."

"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Thursday's developments underscore a quandary of sorts the administration finds itself in -- even as President Barack Obama is to be commended for his transparency in his bid to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration.

Even as the new president has renounced those Bush administration practices, Justice Department lawyers are defending the previous administration's top officials already accused of authorizing and carrying out those policies.

Bruce Fein, former deputy attorney general under Reagan and frequent critic of Bush policies:

President Obama has embraced the national security psychology of the Bush-Cheney duumvirate not only in matters of secrecy, but the entire range of civil liberties abuses justified by a purported global and endless war against international terrorism.

Indeed, Obama has invoked state secrets in litigation to conceal torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal surveillance, or arbitrary detentions that have given rise to private damages litigation against former government officials. He has claimed that Bagram prison in Afghanistan is a sanctuary for United States lawlessness. He has asserted that the entire world is a battlefield against terrorism; thus, drones can be fired without a judicial warrant to kill persons suspected of Al Qaeda membership on the President's say-so alone.

Like President Bush, he has issued a presidential signing statement claiming plenary power over the use of the American military. He has claimed authority to detain United States citizens as "enemy combatants" indefinitely without accusation or trial.

In sum, on national security and the war on terrorism, Obama has shown that the more things change, the more they stay the same, despite his adept semantical juggleries.

Glenn Greenwald has a far more generous reading:

I'll have more details as soon as these memos are available. One can certainly criticize Obama for vowing that no CIA officials will be prosecuted if they followed DOJ memos (though that vow, notably, does not extend to Bush officials), but -- assuming the reports about redactions are correct -- there is no grounds for criticizing Obama here and substantial grounds for praising him.

dday has more at Hullabaloo.

Remember when they explained to us we needed to have the Republicans in charge "because they're good with money"? Remember how excited the Villagers were about having a Harvard MBA president? Ah, good times!

The deep river of private money that helped knit together the global economy has abruptly dried up, new government figures show.

As the global financial crisis grew more severe this summer, foreigners sold almost $90 billion of U.S. securities — the greatest quarterly fire sale by overseas investors since the government began keeping track in 1960. U.S. investors also are retrenching; they unloaded about $85 billion worth of foreign holdings in the quarter, says the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

"We've had a global panic. Everyone is pulling their money home," says economist Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute in Washington, D.C.

That's bad for economic growth in the U.S. because it threatens to starve capital-hungry companies and entrepreneurs. But it's especially serious for emerging-market countries that rely heavily on outside financing. Capital flows into countries such as South Korea, Turkey and Brazil were evaporating even before the mid-September Lehman Bros. bankruptcy made things worse.

The reversal of private capital flows signals an abrupt end to a nearly two-decades-long era of financial globalization, says economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. Private flows into and out of the U.S. for purchases of stocks, corporate bonds and federal agency bonds have dropped from around 18% of economic output to near zero "in a remarkably short period of time," Setser says.

WSJ: Some Conservatives are not happy with King George

There's a split happening with conservatives over the behavior of President Bush. (except of course with most of the Bush-apologist bloggers.) This article has a very different view than let's say--Power Line.

WSJ:

"From the beginning, the folks who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq have found good reason to think that all other Bush policies, from torture to domestic surveillance, are justified," said Robert Levy, a conservative legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "This is just one in a litany of ongoing events that have separated the noninterventionist wing of the Republican Party from the neocon wing."

(via AmericaBlog)