Eugene Robinson's Blog, page 125

The racket with standardized test scores

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.

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In pursuit of maximum mayhem

The gunman in the Newtown, Conn., massacre fired 154 bullets from his Bushmaster military-style rifle in fewer than five minutes, killing 20 first-graders and six adults. He brought with him 10 large-capacity magazines, each holding up to 30 rounds, which allowed him to reload quickly. He also carried two semiautomatic handguns, one of which he used to take his own life.

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Gay marriage and the Supreme Court

Don’t take anything for granted. The conservative activists on the Supreme Court may not be able to halt the inexorable shift toward acceptance of gay marriage, but we probably should expect them to try.

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Harry Reid’s surrender

Shame on Harry Reid for killing any prospect of an assault weapons ban. I understand why he did it, but that doesn’t make it right.

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama spoke with fiery eloquence about the cost of gun violence in shattered lives. “They deserve a vote,” the president said of the victims, challenging Congress to take a stand on reasonable legislation to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of killers.

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Some signs of life in the GOP?

At first glance, last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference looked like a hot mess. On closer inspection, it looked even worse.

Difficult though it might be, however, progressives should resist the urge to gloat. CPAC may have been a disaster, but the Republican Party is showing faint signs of brain activity and a fluttering pulse.

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Questions from a ‘Dirty War’

They are impolite questions, but they must be asked: What did Jorge Mario Bergoglio know, and when did he know it, about Argentina’s brutal “Dirty War” against suspected leftists, in which thousands were tortured and killed? More important, what did the newly chosen Pope Francis do?

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Paul Ryan’s make-believe budget

If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.

You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts — to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify — along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending.

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Rand Paul makes the right call with filibuster

Rand Paul was right. There, I said it.

The Republican senator from Kentucky, whom I’ve ridiculed as an archconservative kook — because that’s basically what he is — was right to call attention to the growing use of drone aircraft in “targeted killings” by staging a nearly 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor.

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Sequester, held in contempt

I hate the sequester, beginning with its name. “Sequester” is a verb, not a noun. This ridiculous exercise is not just unwise and unproductive but ungrammatical as well.

I hate the way the sequester diverts attention from issues that actually matter, such as unemployment, gun violence, climate change, failing schools and the need to spur economic growth. I hate the way it heightens our insularity at a time when we really ought to be paying attention to the rest of the world. Remember Syria? Dictator Bashar al-Assad is still slaughtering civilians left and right. Wasn’t he supposed to be gone by now?

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A grieving father’s plea for a gun ban

Most of our top elected officials probably didn’t notice — they were too busy making fools of themselves over an idiotic budget “crisis” of their own making — but something worth remembering happened in Washington this week: A grieving parent pleaded softly for a ban on military-style weapons such as the one used to kill his son.

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