“We’ll occupy the streets, we’ll occupy the courts, we’ll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few.”

Hawaiian singer-songwriter Makana turned his gig playing dinner music for President Obama and Asia-Pacific leaders into a “subtle protest,” according to AFP, when he sang a 40-minute version of his new Occupy Wall Street-inspired song “We Are The Many.”

Makana, who goes by one name, was enlisted to play a luau, or Hawaiian feast, Saturday night for leaders assembled in Obama’s birthplace Honolulu for an annual summit that is formulating plans for a Pacific free-trade pact.

But in the midst of the dinner on the resort strip Waikiki Beach, he pulled open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read “Occupy with Aloha,” using the Hawaiian word whose various meanings include love and peace. He then sang a marathon version of his new song “We Are The Many.”

This year, two-thirds of state legislatures have introduced laws that undermine the right to vote. Early voting and Sunday voting are under attack. Photo ID requirements will introduce the first financial and document barrier to voting since the poll tax.

Join a coalition of labor unions and community organizations as we rally to protect our voting rights on Saturday, Dec. 10, United Nations’ Human Rights Day.

11 a.m.: March from the offices of the Koch brothers, major funders of anti-voting measures, located at 61st Street and Madison Avenue.

12 noon: Rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations located at East 47th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

See the flier for more details »

Hemp-growing Marxist fornicators have a secret diabolical plan to force you to gay-marry an illegal immigrant in a mosque at Ground Zero.

And this:

If we don’t act now, we won’t be able to stop the dope-smoking Trotskyites who have formed a secret society that plans to spread swine flue throughout the money supply.

Any goat was right for the job. Once picked it was thereby culpable and sent away or sacrificed. Its relegation to the wilderness or the altar served the purpose of allowing people to escape the entrapments of contrition and carry on with their lives as before. It came in very handy.

That was and remains the beauty of scapegoats. They are among the most adaptable or history’s premier fixtures and forces.

And New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a great believer in the efficacy of scapegoats.

He could teach a course in Defamatory Science. His bloodlust and obsession with teacher unions, which he has “goated” as morally unsanitary, could constitute a waiver for his lacking credentials.

He talks more about teacher unions, always in the same hateful and ignorant terms, than he reportedly does about all other problems in the world combined. At every public appearance he seizes any chance to spit unsolicited and unprovoked disdain. Where there is no natural opportunity he creates one. He sees teacher unions as one of the universe’s primary evils.

Being an antagonist of teacher unions doesn’t necessarily make a person vile, although it tends to point the subject in that direction. There’s nothing wrong, in fact it may be wholesome, to debate strengths and weaknesses from differing perspectives guided by common sense and good will. Some adversaries make their points respectfully while, by accidental virtue of their folly, advance the arguments of teacher unions.

But Christie is not among them. He thinks teacher unions have horns. Like goats and devils.

Last week at the Jeb Bush Annual Summit in Washington, D.C., he delivered a 50-minute keynote speech on education reform. The same nefarious anti-public school foundations and corporate agents that keep popping up like rodents in the Whac-A-Mole game popular in amusement parks sponsor this event.

Same template. Same agenda: vouchers, “accountability” as they define it, and healing education by making teachers heel, etc.

Christie said, “It is time to do what teachers’ unions say they do everyday — put the kids first.” The governor, an expert on architectural aesthetics, then slaps the teachers’ union offices, which he calls a “palace” and snivels about the selfish use to which members’ dues are put.

You can add Christie’s warped and sweeping condemnation of teacher unions to the short list of life’s identified certainties of death and taxes.

He is an incorrigible propagandist posing as an incorruptible politician.

As the website DFER Watch recently pointed out, at least two board members from the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute (co-founded by the infamous Koch brothers), made significant donations to DFER in the past several years, including former Cato Director Steven Ackerman and his wife, who gave a combined $10,000 to DFER in 2007.

DFER Watch also noted that Steven Klinsky, former hedge fund manager and founder of for-profit charter company Victory Schools, Inc., was one of only 17 donors to give the maximum $5000 contribution to DFER in 2010 – even though all of his other donations over the past year (over $29,000 in total) went to Republican candidates and political action committees.

Klinsky’s and Ackerman’s donations helped DFER support efforts such as the (unsuccessful) campaign to stop New York State from blocking new for-profit charters. It also supported the on-going efforts by DFER and its ally, the New York Charter School Association (where DFER head Joe Williams sits on the Board), to shift New York’s public workers into unstable 401K plans, which many Americans have seen disappear in the wake of the economic collapse – a collapse triggered by the same lack of regulation that hedge fund managers and libertarian groups now encourage us to pursue in public education.

Another DFER ally, Education Reform Now (whose Board Chairman, John Petry, is a DFER founder), just released a voters’ guide for the upcoming governors elections. Out of 37 states, ERN consistently gave Republican candidates higher ratings than their Democratic opponents – including in New York’s own gubernatorial race, where they favored Carl Paladino.

For New York Democrats who support non-profit public schools and a retirement safety net for our public workers, the questions stands – do DFER and its allies represent your interests?

Hat Tip: Crooked Timber

And did you realize that patriotism and progressivism are incompatible and mutually exclusive, according to these protectionists of privilege and portfolio?

If you want to save your country from ruin and takeover, then close your eyes (or better yet, blind them with pokers) and be led by the likes of the bloggers at Pajamas Media,  the supply-siders of motherhood, apple pie and those other quaint Yankee things that folks in lands with more equitable distribution of riches cannot relate to.

They prescribe panaceas for everything that ails America, especially in education.

In “Beyond Politics: Removing the Progressive Drag on America,” Jeff Perren advocates “fighting the soul-killing, wealth-destroying acts of progressives” and “neutralizing their influence throughout the culture.”

He claims “They control curricula for public K-12 education almost everywhere… dominate credential-required education courses, and strongly influence test book selection.”

Does he mean “neutralize” in a military sense?  He sounds like a guy who likes his earth scorched.

Perren, whose embrace of free enterprise (as in “anything goes”) allows him the inexcusable liberty of reassigning meanings of words and mixing and matching synonyms, goes on to use the term “post-modern” interchangeably with “progressive.”  Perhaps he believes that the same Constitutional Second Amendment that entitles him to brandish a pistol on his hip while at work or at play also guarantees his right to mutate the language.

He says that “post-moderns” (he also calls them “liberals”, as well as “progressives”, using those terms as epithets) have dominated the film and television industries disproportionate to their numbers. He yearns for yesteryear when “their views very sparsely infected the law.”

His thoughts and perhaps some companion imagery that he may conjure to amuse himself is chillingly derivative of certain European bureaus of “popular enlightenment” in the 1930s.

We who are the beneficiaries of Perren’s loathing (and we are an extended family) should be proud of it.  We are in some admirable company:

He accuses Scientific American of being “an organ for anthropogenic global warming propaganda” which represents a “full-scale assault on all classical values… freedom and industrial production.”

Perren is mired in the mainstream of kookdom.

The role of government-sponsored (public) education is to advance the “objective ethics” of a Pax Americana, he would say. Unfortunately, he has a highly subjective grasp of objectivity.

He wants American values and culture, as he defines those terms, to rule our schools and indeed the world, but he wants absolute and non-negotiable “laissez-faire” when it comes to textbooks and teachers presenting any opposing convictions.

Perren is so hostile to “progressivism” that I bet he’ll eventually change his surname so it starts with a different letter.

What, exactly, does “progressivism” mean, anyway, in regards to education? What do its practitioners stand for? Why do non-sages like Perren peg its proponents practically as enemies of the state? What are the relationships between “progressivism” and “progress” and “libertarian” and “liberty”?

This small closet of Internet space cannot accommodate an exploration of progressivism. But it’s a sure bet that if it is antithetical and a foil to Perren’s biases, then it must ultimately be found wholesome and fit for intellectual consumption.

And then your candidate is still decisively defeated in the election.

You whine about how teacher unions supported his opponent.

In New York City, the three high profile African-American State Senators on the top of the DFER hit list — Bill Perkins of Harlem, Velmanette Montgomery of Brooklyn and Shirley Huntley of Queens — won re-election in landslides with the support of the UFT. Perkins beat Basil Smikle and Huntley beat Lynn Nunes by 3 to 1 margins and Montgomery beat Mark Pollard by a 4 to 1 margin. In an open  State Senate seat in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, UFT-backed Adriano Espaillat bested DFER’s Mark Levine by over 10 percentage points. In the Bronx, UFT and union supported insurgent Gustavo Rivera beat Pedro Espada, Jr. by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. Espada,  currently under investigation on charges of corruption, was one of the three Democrat State Senators who had joined with the Republican caucus in the infamous Albany coup d’êtat that paralyzed state government; he was a favorite of Wall Street, real estate and anti-public education interests. In Queens, Hiram Monserrate, another of the three turncoat State Senators who was convicted of misdemeanor assault in a domestic violence case, was trounced 2 to 1 by UFT supported Francisco Moya. In congressional races, UFT supported Carolyn Maloney beat Wall Street candidate Reshma Saujani by a 4 to 1 margin and UFT supported Charles Rangel swept to re-election against 5 opponents, including DFER favorite Adam Clayton Powell IV.

The sole Wall Street and DFER victory in New York City was in the 73rd Assembly District, where incumbent Jonathan Bing put together the largest campaign treasury for Assembly candidates across the state and rode a 10 to 1 financial advantage to victory over public school teacher and UFT member Gregg Lundahl. Bing, who had sponsored legislation to allow the DoE to lay off New York City public school teachers without regard for the collective bargaining agreement, had received donations from Chancellor Joel Klein and his wife, among others. Lundahl’s valiant campaign against overwhelming odds sent a clear message that those who lead attacks on us will not go unchallenged.

In statewide races, UFT and union backed progressive Eric Schneiderman won a hotly contested race for the Democratic nomination for State Attorney General, beating four other candidates. In Buffalo, DFER favorite Assemblyman Sam Hoyt narrowly squeaked to victory over his opponent.

In Washington DC, incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty was decisively defeated by challenger Vincent Gray in an election widely seen as a referendum on the antagonistic, divisive education policies of his school’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the weeks leading up to the DC election it became clear that Fenty’s overwhelming financial advantage was not enough to overcome the Rhee legacy, and desperate Rhee supporters issued ever increasingly shrill threats on the dire consequences of turning Fenty out. In the blogosphere, DFER supporters argued that the election had little to do with Rhee’s  policies, and looked about for someone else to blame for the coming defeat. Despite Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s transparent efforts to support Fenty, some even blamed President Obama for not actively intervening in the election.

It all reminds one of the Bertolt Brecht poem, “The Solution,” written in response to a East German apparatchik’s statement that the people “had forfeited the support of the government” by rising up against the Stalinist regime. Brecht wryly concluded,

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

Apparently it doesn’t work.

According to ED, there was no statistically significant differences in student math or English performance between those elementary and middle schools with Leadership Academy principals and comparison schools led by other principals.

In the high schools, LA principals delivered significantly lower pass rates on math and global history Regents exams. There were no differences with comparison schools on the English and Biology Regents.

A failed experiment might have been OK when it was privately funded. But starting last year taxpayers are publicly footing the five-year $53.8 million contract for the program.

The Clearinghouse cautioned that the results are not conclusive because they couldn’t be sure the schools were totally equivalent. However, the results are of a piece with reports in the New York Post two years ago that found half of all LA-led schools got Cs, Ds, or Fs and that the program itself had a high drop-out rate.

Neutron Jack is the management figure closely associated with the idea of cutting out the bottom-performing 10 percent from your organization. One can’t help wondering if that would apply to the Academy?