NEW YORK TIMES
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — In his first public appearance after the November head-on collision of his squeaky clean image and an unsavory secret life, Tiger Woods was somber in expressing remorse, stern in scolding the news media for stalking his family and reporting untruths, and spiritual in saying he had drifted from the Buddhist principles he was taught as a child.
In front of about 40 inner-circle people that included his mother, Kultida, but not his wife, Elin, along with a national television audience, Woods made his most direct statement about admitted infidelities in his marriage. “I had affairs,” he said. “I was unfaithful. I cheated.”
Woods said he had mistakenly believed that his enormous success and celebrity made him entitled “to enjoy all the temptations around me.” He added: “I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules.”
While creating the impression that his marriage hung in the balance, Woods vigorously defended his wife and denied reports and speculation that domestic violence had played a role in the episode outside his home in the early-morning hours on Nov. 27 that resulted in Woods’s crashing his sport utility vehicle into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree in the gated community of Isleworth near Orlando.
Acknowledging reports that he had undergone counseling for 45 days, Woods said he would continue the treatment beginning Saturday. He did not reveal the nature of the counseling. Woods also did not address a return to the PGA Tour until near the end of his statement, saying: “I do plan to return to golf one day, I just don’t know when that day will be. I don’t rule out that it will be this year.”
In the back row sat Tour officials. Woods’s mother was in the front, flanked by two Woods employees, Amy Reynolds and Kathy Battaglia. Nearby was his former college roommate at Stanford, Notah Begay III, a golfer on the PGA Tour. Woods spoke in a calm, measured tone, beginning by addressing the unthreatening environment he had insisted on. “Many of you in this room are my friends,” he said. “Many of you in this room know me. Many of you have cheered me or you’ve worked for me or you’ve supported me.”
He paused and added, “Now every one of you has good reason to be critical of me.” He proceeded to lambaste himself as “selfish” and “foolish.” He said he had betrayed his carefully crafted image as a person to look up to.
“Parents used to point to me as a role model for their kids,” he said. “I owe all those families a special apology. I want to say to them that I am truly sorry.”
How Woods’s first step will play to the audience at large remains to be seen, but two companies — Upper Deck and TAG Heuer — released statements saying that they were encouraged by Woods’s statement and that their relationships with him would continue.
The strongest support for Woods came from Kultida Woods, who tearfully embraced her emotional son when he finished his statement. “I’m so proud to be his mom, period,” she said. “As a human being, everyone has faults, makes missteps and learns from it.”
In the weeks and months ahead, even after he returns to the sport he has dominated for years, Woods’s sincerity will be debated over and over. But however staged his statement, there was one undeniable truth spoken by Woods regarding the state of his marriage and his reputation as he tries to go forward. It was a profound message he said came from his wife, not a speechwriter. “As Elin pointed out to me, my real apology to her will not come in the form of words,” he said. “It will come from my behavior over time.”
Monday, February 22, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis
NEW YORK TIMES
By JACKIE CALMES WASHINGTON — Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.
After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.
Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy.
“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”
Sensing political advantage, Republicans are resisting President Obama’s call for a bipartisan commission to cut the debt, although recent studies have implicated the tax cuts and spending policies of the years after 2000 when they controlled Congress and the White House. Even seven Republican senators who had co-sponsored a bill to create a commission nonetheless voted against it recently.
The president is not giving up. On Thursday, administration officials say, he will sign an executive order establishing the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He also will name as co-chairmen Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a moderate Democrat from North Carolina who, as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, brokered a 1997 balanced budget agreement with Congressional Republicans.
“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview Tuesday just before word of his role got out. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”
While he criticized some liberal Democrats’ refusal to reduce entitlement benefits, Mr. Simpson also dismissed Republicans’ antitax arguments that deficits could be controlled with spending cuts alone. “But they don’t cut spending,” he said, referring to the years Republicans governed with President George W. Bush.
Elected Republicans, however, are under intense pressure from their party’s conservative base to oppose any tax increases — a line in the sand that dims any prospects for bipartisan cooperation. Yet economists, including veterans of past Republican administrations, are vocal in insisting that the debt problem is too great to be solved without increasing revenues somehow and perhaps moving to a new consumption tax system like Europe’s.
By JACKIE CALMES WASHINGTON — Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.
After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.
Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy.
“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”
Sensing political advantage, Republicans are resisting President Obama’s call for a bipartisan commission to cut the debt, although recent studies have implicated the tax cuts and spending policies of the years after 2000 when they controlled Congress and the White House. Even seven Republican senators who had co-sponsored a bill to create a commission nonetheless voted against it recently.
The president is not giving up. On Thursday, administration officials say, he will sign an executive order establishing the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He also will name as co-chairmen Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a moderate Democrat from North Carolina who, as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, brokered a 1997 balanced budget agreement with Congressional Republicans.
“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview Tuesday just before word of his role got out. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”
While he criticized some liberal Democrats’ refusal to reduce entitlement benefits, Mr. Simpson also dismissed Republicans’ antitax arguments that deficits could be controlled with spending cuts alone. “But they don’t cut spending,” he said, referring to the years Republicans governed with President George W. Bush.
Elected Republicans, however, are under intense pressure from their party’s conservative base to oppose any tax increases — a line in the sand that dims any prospects for bipartisan cooperation. Yet economists, including veterans of past Republican administrations, are vocal in insisting that the debt problem is too great to be solved without increasing revenues somehow and perhaps moving to a new consumption tax system like Europe’s.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Experts Say Schools Need to Screen for Cheating
NEW YORK TIMES
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA — This week, Georgia officials said they had found evidence that cheating might have occurred on standardized tests at one in five public elementary and middle schools around the state. What was extraordinary, however, was not so much the extent of the problem, but the decision of the state to screen for cheating at all. Using a computer scanner, the state used a simple, quick analysis to flag classes where an unusually high number of wrong answers were erased and corrected. The testing company generated the data at no charge.
Yet even as test scores carry greater stakes for students, schools and districts, testing experts say most states fail to use even this most elementary means to monitor for cheating. “No one is doing it, and when you ask people why they’re not doing it, they shrug their shoulders,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at New York University who studies school accountability. Ms. Jennings suggested that the federal government should require states to check their test results. “It’s absolutely scandalous that we have no audit system in place to address any of this,” she said.
Cheating on tests used to be thought of as primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits have increasingly turned out to be educators, experts said.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to meet improvement goals or face penalties including, in the worst cases, the loss of jobs. Cities like New York and Houston have recently threatened the tenure of teachers whose students do not meet goals.
As the consequences have grown more serious, reports of cheating have exploded, said Robert Schaeffer, the president of FairTest, an organization that opposes the emphasis on standardized testing. “They’ve gone from a handful a year to a handful a month,” he said. Because parents, students and administrators all like to see higher scores, said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina, “There’s really no incentive to vigorously pursue cheaters.” He said some states did not ask their testing contractors to generate an erasure analysis, while others did receive them but did not use them.
States that have weathered widespread cheating scandals do not necessarily follow up with regular statistical monitoring. In 2005, after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News pointed to extensive cheating in Texas, the state hired Caveon Test Security, a Utah company that improves testing procedures, to conduct what the company calls “forensics analyses” of answer forms. But the company was not retained to do yearly monitoring, said John Fremer, Caveon’s president.
Caveon’s forensics analyses use several methods of detecting cheating, screening not only for erasures but improbable increases or decreases in scores, individual students whose performance swings widely from year to year, patterns where multiple students share the same wrong answers and other anomalies. Erasures alone only indicate certain types of misconduct, as when answers are changed after a test. Other methods, Mr. Fremer said, flag other types of cheating, like filling in the remaining answers on an incomplete form.
Of about 16 state public education clients of his company, Mr. Fremer said, fewer than 10 conduct such analysis regularly. A few other states use their own testing vendors, as Georgia did, to provide similar data. Mr. Fremer said he thought more states would move toward statistical analysis in order to maintain public confidence in test scores and school ratings. “I don’t think they can avoid doing it,” he said. “There’s too much riding on the test results.”
Southern states, which have embraced the accountability movement in education, have also been quicker to adopt statistical methods to combat cheating. South Carolina has been quietly using an erasure analysis since the 1980s, said Elizabeth Jones, the director of the state Education Department’s Office of Assessment. If a class is flagged for suspicious activity, the state sends testing monitors the following year, and sometimes educators are criminally prosecuted or lose their teaching certificates. Principals and teachers are well aware that the state can detect erasures, and only a handful of classes are flagged each year, Ms. Jones said.
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA — This week, Georgia officials said they had found evidence that cheating might have occurred on standardized tests at one in five public elementary and middle schools around the state. What was extraordinary, however, was not so much the extent of the problem, but the decision of the state to screen for cheating at all. Using a computer scanner, the state used a simple, quick analysis to flag classes where an unusually high number of wrong answers were erased and corrected. The testing company generated the data at no charge.
Yet even as test scores carry greater stakes for students, schools and districts, testing experts say most states fail to use even this most elementary means to monitor for cheating. “No one is doing it, and when you ask people why they’re not doing it, they shrug their shoulders,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at New York University who studies school accountability. Ms. Jennings suggested that the federal government should require states to check their test results. “It’s absolutely scandalous that we have no audit system in place to address any of this,” she said.
Cheating on tests used to be thought of as primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits have increasingly turned out to be educators, experts said.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to meet improvement goals or face penalties including, in the worst cases, the loss of jobs. Cities like New York and Houston have recently threatened the tenure of teachers whose students do not meet goals.
As the consequences have grown more serious, reports of cheating have exploded, said Robert Schaeffer, the president of FairTest, an organization that opposes the emphasis on standardized testing. “They’ve gone from a handful a year to a handful a month,” he said. Because parents, students and administrators all like to see higher scores, said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina, “There’s really no incentive to vigorously pursue cheaters.” He said some states did not ask their testing contractors to generate an erasure analysis, while others did receive them but did not use them.
States that have weathered widespread cheating scandals do not necessarily follow up with regular statistical monitoring. In 2005, after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News pointed to extensive cheating in Texas, the state hired Caveon Test Security, a Utah company that improves testing procedures, to conduct what the company calls “forensics analyses” of answer forms. But the company was not retained to do yearly monitoring, said John Fremer, Caveon’s president.
Caveon’s forensics analyses use several methods of detecting cheating, screening not only for erasures but improbable increases or decreases in scores, individual students whose performance swings widely from year to year, patterns where multiple students share the same wrong answers and other anomalies. Erasures alone only indicate certain types of misconduct, as when answers are changed after a test. Other methods, Mr. Fremer said, flag other types of cheating, like filling in the remaining answers on an incomplete form.
Of about 16 state public education clients of his company, Mr. Fremer said, fewer than 10 conduct such analysis regularly. A few other states use their own testing vendors, as Georgia did, to provide similar data. Mr. Fremer said he thought more states would move toward statistical analysis in order to maintain public confidence in test scores and school ratings. “I don’t think they can avoid doing it,” he said. “There’s too much riding on the test results.”
Southern states, which have embraced the accountability movement in education, have also been quicker to adopt statistical methods to combat cheating. South Carolina has been quietly using an erasure analysis since the 1980s, said Elizabeth Jones, the director of the state Education Department’s Office of Assessment. If a class is flagged for suspicious activity, the state sends testing monitors the following year, and sometimes educators are criminally prosecuted or lose their teaching certificates. Principals and teachers are well aware that the state can detect erasures, and only a handful of classes are flagged each year, Ms. Jones said.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Minnesota congresswoman suggests weaning people off Social Security
STAR/TRIBUNE
This is why they call Social Security the “third rail” of American politics. To even touch the subject is to get zapped. Which is why it’s not on anyone’s agenda in Washington at the moment, at least not anyone who holds an election certificate – and wants to keep it.
Take Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, who tells the Constitutional Coalition’s annual conference in St. Louis that we should “wean” future generations off of Social Security and Medicare.
Nobody argues that the two programs, unless they’re put on a sound financial footing, are headed for insolvency.
Bachmann, by her own account, has no plan. Nor do the Democrats. Realistically, the options aren’t great: Raise payroll deductions or trim benefits. No wonder Congress procrastinates.
So Bachmann suggests reorganizing Social Security, presumably along the lines of a favorite conservative nostrum, i.e., partial privatization, with personal investment accounts for future retirees that could presumably increase the potential for growth. (Though what would happen in a market crash a la 2008-09 is not clear).
President George W. (“Miss me yet?”) Bush tried the idea on a much more Republican flavored Congress less than a decade ago. It went nowhere. The fear was so great I remember Bachmann’s predecessor, Republican Mark Kennedy, dispute that there was even a plan (hence, of course, he had to take no position).
But back to Bachmann. Liberal bloggers may tell each other – and themselves – that she’s bat poop crazy. But she does not appear to be so crazy as to suggest that we yank Social Security away from the current geriatric set. Even in Washington, nobody’s that crazy.
So what does she say? She says: “What you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system…But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet.”
The reaction is predictably electric.
The Minnesota DFL turns “wean everybody else off” into “wean everybody off” to back up a press release entitled “Bachmann proposes eliminating debt on the backs of seniors.” (True, she said “wean everybody off” on second reference, but the meaning was clear: “keep faith with the people … already in the system.”)
DFL head Brian Melendez minced no words: “Representative Bachmann would like to kick senior citizens off of programs that they depend upon.” Ironically, one of Bachmann’s 2010 challengers, Physician Maureen Reed, simultaneously releases a statement saying Bachmann “purposely injects fear into public policy debates.” Another one, State Sen. Tarryl Clark accuses Bachmann of wanting to bring “an end to Social Security and Medicare.”
Maybe so, maybe no. But the word Bachmann used was “reorganize.”
Bachmann’s spokester Dave Dziok cites a potential fix based on a proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., which resembles a reheated version of Bush’s personal retirement accounts. (Ryan’s plan, in relevant part: “Individuals 55 and older will remain in the current system and will not be affected by this proposal in any way: they will receive the benefits they have been promised, and have planned for, during their working years. All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts.”)
Who knows what would work. But with the usual overheated rhetoric, it’s hard not to be skeptical that America will ever dig itself out of its deepening Social Security hole.
This is why they call Social Security the “third rail” of American politics. To even touch the subject is to get zapped. Which is why it’s not on anyone’s agenda in Washington at the moment, at least not anyone who holds an election certificate – and wants to keep it.
Take Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, who tells the Constitutional Coalition’s annual conference in St. Louis that we should “wean” future generations off of Social Security and Medicare.
Nobody argues that the two programs, unless they’re put on a sound financial footing, are headed for insolvency.
Bachmann, by her own account, has no plan. Nor do the Democrats. Realistically, the options aren’t great: Raise payroll deductions or trim benefits. No wonder Congress procrastinates.
So Bachmann suggests reorganizing Social Security, presumably along the lines of a favorite conservative nostrum, i.e., partial privatization, with personal investment accounts for future retirees that could presumably increase the potential for growth. (Though what would happen in a market crash a la 2008-09 is not clear).
President George W. (“Miss me yet?”) Bush tried the idea on a much more Republican flavored Congress less than a decade ago. It went nowhere. The fear was so great I remember Bachmann’s predecessor, Republican Mark Kennedy, dispute that there was even a plan (hence, of course, he had to take no position).
But back to Bachmann. Liberal bloggers may tell each other – and themselves – that she’s bat poop crazy. But she does not appear to be so crazy as to suggest that we yank Social Security away from the current geriatric set. Even in Washington, nobody’s that crazy.
So what does she say? She says: “What you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system…But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet.”
The reaction is predictably electric.
The Minnesota DFL turns “wean everybody else off” into “wean everybody off” to back up a press release entitled “Bachmann proposes eliminating debt on the backs of seniors.” (True, she said “wean everybody off” on second reference, but the meaning was clear: “keep faith with the people … already in the system.”)
DFL head Brian Melendez minced no words: “Representative Bachmann would like to kick senior citizens off of programs that they depend upon.” Ironically, one of Bachmann’s 2010 challengers, Physician Maureen Reed, simultaneously releases a statement saying Bachmann “purposely injects fear into public policy debates.” Another one, State Sen. Tarryl Clark accuses Bachmann of wanting to bring “an end to Social Security and Medicare.”
Maybe so, maybe no. But the word Bachmann used was “reorganize.”
Bachmann’s spokester Dave Dziok cites a potential fix based on a proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., which resembles a reheated version of Bush’s personal retirement accounts. (Ryan’s plan, in relevant part: “Individuals 55 and older will remain in the current system and will not be affected by this proposal in any way: they will receive the benefits they have been promised, and have planned for, during their working years. All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts.”)
Who knows what would work. But with the usual overheated rhetoric, it’s hard not to be skeptical that America will ever dig itself out of its deepening Social Security hole.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools
NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years.
To that end, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will deliver a speech Monday at the National Press Club in which he will insist, according to excerpts provided to The Times, that any vending machines that remain in schools be “filled with nutritious offerings to make the healthy choice the easy choice for our nation’s children.”
The first lady, Michelle Obama, said last month that she would lead an initiative to reduce childhood obesity, and her involvement “shows the importance all of us place on this issue,” Mr. Vilsack said.
The administration’s willingness to put Mrs. Obama’s popularity on the line is a calculated bet that concerns about childhood obesity have become so universal that the once-partisan fight over who should control school food offerings — the federal government or school boards — has subsided. But Republican support is far from certain.
Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican and the ranking member on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, met at the White House with Mrs. Obama on Tuesday to talk about childhood obesity. And while Mr. Chambliss released a statement saying that “schools play an important role in shaping nutrition habits of young children,” an aide refused to say whether he would support a ban on junk foods. Other Republicans said they would wait to see legislation before signaling whether they would put aside long-held views that school boards should control food offerings.
While Democrats have coalesced around the idea of denying sweets to schoolchildren, many students are not keen. When Asthtyn Bowling, a 16-year-old junior at Orange County High School in Orange, Va., was told of the looming ban, she was shocked. “That would be terrible!” she said.
The legislation would reauthorize the government’s school breakfast and lunch programs. It aims to transform the eating habits of many of the nation’s children and teenagers, but some school officials say it will further crimp already strained budgets. In addition to banning sugary treats, the new rules would require many schools to offer more nutritious options, which could be expensive. The administration has proposed spending $1 billion more each year on the $18 billion meals program, but the increase may not be enough to cover the extra costs.
The National School Lunch Program serves 31 million children in more than 100,000 schools. It was started in 1946 to ensure that children get enough to eat after health problems related to malnutrition were found in an alarming number of World War II draftees. Now, health officials are also worried that children are eating too much of the wrong foods. About two-thirds of the nation’s adults and a third of its children are overweight — double the rates of 1980.
Industry opposition to the new legislation has softened in part because the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo now sell far more than Coke and Pepsi. So instead of having to yank vending machines from schools, the companies could replace offerings with bottled water or juice.
Orange County High School has vending machines with Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, but even more popular among students is a candy cart wheeled into the school’s central hallway three times a day by Betty Almond, a school secretary.
The cart is laden with Pop-Tarts, Skittles and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Mrs. Almond and helpers barely keep up with demand from students on their way to class. Sales are between $400 and $500 a week, which Mrs. Almond uses to buy uniforms and equipment for school sports teams. Her most recent project was to outfit the wrestling team, on which her grandson competes. “The football team wants me to buy them a seven-man sled, but with this new legislation, they’ll never get it,” she said sadly. Principal Gene Kotulka said he planned to write his congressman to complain about a ban.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years.
To that end, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will deliver a speech Monday at the National Press Club in which he will insist, according to excerpts provided to The Times, that any vending machines that remain in schools be “filled with nutritious offerings to make the healthy choice the easy choice for our nation’s children.”
The first lady, Michelle Obama, said last month that she would lead an initiative to reduce childhood obesity, and her involvement “shows the importance all of us place on this issue,” Mr. Vilsack said.
The administration’s willingness to put Mrs. Obama’s popularity on the line is a calculated bet that concerns about childhood obesity have become so universal that the once-partisan fight over who should control school food offerings — the federal government or school boards — has subsided. But Republican support is far from certain.
Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican and the ranking member on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, met at the White House with Mrs. Obama on Tuesday to talk about childhood obesity. And while Mr. Chambliss released a statement saying that “schools play an important role in shaping nutrition habits of young children,” an aide refused to say whether he would support a ban on junk foods. Other Republicans said they would wait to see legislation before signaling whether they would put aside long-held views that school boards should control food offerings.
While Democrats have coalesced around the idea of denying sweets to schoolchildren, many students are not keen. When Asthtyn Bowling, a 16-year-old junior at Orange County High School in Orange, Va., was told of the looming ban, she was shocked. “That would be terrible!” she said.
The legislation would reauthorize the government’s school breakfast and lunch programs. It aims to transform the eating habits of many of the nation’s children and teenagers, but some school officials say it will further crimp already strained budgets. In addition to banning sugary treats, the new rules would require many schools to offer more nutritious options, which could be expensive. The administration has proposed spending $1 billion more each year on the $18 billion meals program, but the increase may not be enough to cover the extra costs.
The National School Lunch Program serves 31 million children in more than 100,000 schools. It was started in 1946 to ensure that children get enough to eat after health problems related to malnutrition were found in an alarming number of World War II draftees. Now, health officials are also worried that children are eating too much of the wrong foods. About two-thirds of the nation’s adults and a third of its children are overweight — double the rates of 1980.
Industry opposition to the new legislation has softened in part because the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo now sell far more than Coke and Pepsi. So instead of having to yank vending machines from schools, the companies could replace offerings with bottled water or juice.
Orange County High School has vending machines with Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, but even more popular among students is a candy cart wheeled into the school’s central hallway three times a day by Betty Almond, a school secretary.
The cart is laden with Pop-Tarts, Skittles and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Mrs. Almond and helpers barely keep up with demand from students on their way to class. Sales are between $400 and $500 a week, which Mrs. Almond uses to buy uniforms and equipment for school sports teams. Her most recent project was to outfit the wrestling team, on which her grandson competes. “The football team wants me to buy them a seven-man sled, but with this new legislation, they’ll never get it,” she said sadly. Principal Gene Kotulka said he planned to write his congressman to complain about a ban.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Defense officials say it's time to repeal 'don't ask, don't tell' ban on gays in military
STAR/TRIBUNE
By ANNE FLAHERTY , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - It's time to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and allow gay troops to serve openly for the first time in history, the nation's top defense officials declared Tuesday, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff proclaiming that service members should not be forced to "lie about who they are." However, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen asked for a year to study the impact before Congress would lift the controversial policy.
Reversing the Pentagon's 17-year-old policy toward gays "comes down to integrity," for the military as an institution as well as the service members themselves, Mullen told a Senate hearing. Unpersuaded, several Republican senators said they would oppose any congressional effort to repeal the policy.
The Pentagon announced an 11-month review of how the ban could be lifted, as President Barack Obama has said he will work to do. In the meantime, Gates announced plans to loosen enforcement rules for the policy, which says, in essence, that gays may serve so long as they keep their sexuality private.
Homosexuality has never been openly tolerated in the American military, and the 1993 policy was intended to be a compromise that let gay men and women serve so long as they stayed silent about their sexuality. Clinton had wanted to repeal the ban entirely, but the military and many in Congress argued that doing so would dangerously disrupt order. Repealing the ban would take an act of Congress, something that does not appear close to happening.
By ANNE FLAHERTY , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - It's time to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and allow gay troops to serve openly for the first time in history, the nation's top defense officials declared Tuesday, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff proclaiming that service members should not be forced to "lie about who they are." However, both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen asked for a year to study the impact before Congress would lift the controversial policy.
Reversing the Pentagon's 17-year-old policy toward gays "comes down to integrity," for the military as an institution as well as the service members themselves, Mullen told a Senate hearing. Unpersuaded, several Republican senators said they would oppose any congressional effort to repeal the policy.
The Pentagon announced an 11-month review of how the ban could be lifted, as President Barack Obama has said he will work to do. In the meantime, Gates announced plans to loosen enforcement rules for the policy, which says, in essence, that gays may serve so long as they keep their sexuality private.
Homosexuality has never been openly tolerated in the American military, and the 1993 policy was intended to be a compromise that let gay men and women serve so long as they stayed silent about their sexuality. Clinton had wanted to repeal the ban entirely, but the military and many in Congress argued that doing so would dangerously disrupt order. Repealing the ban would take an act of Congress, something that does not appear close to happening.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Obama sends multi-trillion-dollar spending plan to Congress with record $1.56T deficit in 2010
STAR/TRIBUNE
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama unveiled a multitrillion-dollar spending plan Monday, pledging an intensified effort to combat high unemployment and asking Congress to quickly approve new job-creation efforts that would boost the deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion.
Obama's new budget blueprint preaches the need to make tough choices to restrain run-away deficits, but not before attacking what the administration sees as the more immediate challenge of lifting the country out of a deep recession that has cost 7.2 million jobs over the past two years. "Until America is back at work, my administration will not rest and this recovery will not be finished," Obama declared in his budget message.
Addressing the fact that his budget first projects big increases in the deficit before starting to lower these imbalances, Obama told reporters, "It's very important to understand, we won't be able to bring down this deficit overnight given that the recovery is still taking hold and families across the country still need help."
Obama's budget offers tax cuts for businesses, including a $5,000 tax credit for hiring new workers this year, help for the unemployed and $25 billion more for cash-strapped state governments. All the temporary measures would boost the deficit over the next two years by $245 billion.
The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year's then-unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap, a number which had dwarfed the previous record of $454.8 billion set in 2008 under former President George W. Bush.
The administration is forecasting that deficits over the next decade will add an additional $8.5 trillion to the national debt, even if Congress adopts the administration's package of proposals to trim future deficits starting in 2011. Those include a three-year freeze on spending for government programs, an effort which does not touch popular benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare and which also exempts defense and homeland security. It also proposes a boost in taxes on the wealthiest Americans, families making more than $250,000 annually, by allowing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire.
Republicans were not impressed with Obama's deficit cutting, saying that it fell far short of the bold steps needed in light of the fiscal challenges the country is facing. "This country is sinking into a fiscal quagmire," said Sen. Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. "These circumstances call for a bold, game-changing budget that will turn things around."
The administration argued that Obama inherited a deficit that was already topping $1 trillion when he took office and, given the severity of the downturn, the president had to spend billions stabilizing the financial system and jump-starting economic growth.
The deficit for this year would be 10.6 percent of the total economy, a figure unmatched since the country was emerging from World War II.
Much of the spending surge starting in 2008 reflects the cost of massive economic stimulus measures passed by Congress to deal with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The surge in the deficits reflects not only the increased spending but also a big drop in tax revenues, reflecting the 7.2 million people who have lost jobs since the recession began and weaker corporate tax receipts.
Obama's new budget attempts to navigate between the opposing goals of pulling the country out of a deep recession and getting control of runaway deficits. The administration insists that once the recession is history, the government will turn its attention to attacking the deficits.
n a bow to worries over the soaring deficits, the administration proposed a three-year freeze on spending beginning in 2011 for many domestic government agencies. It would save $250 billion over the next decade by following the spending freeze with caps that would keep increases after 2013 from rising faster than inflation.
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER , Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama unveiled a multitrillion-dollar spending plan Monday, pledging an intensified effort to combat high unemployment and asking Congress to quickly approve new job-creation efforts that would boost the deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion.
Obama's new budget blueprint preaches the need to make tough choices to restrain run-away deficits, but not before attacking what the administration sees as the more immediate challenge of lifting the country out of a deep recession that has cost 7.2 million jobs over the past two years. "Until America is back at work, my administration will not rest and this recovery will not be finished," Obama declared in his budget message.
Addressing the fact that his budget first projects big increases in the deficit before starting to lower these imbalances, Obama told reporters, "It's very important to understand, we won't be able to bring down this deficit overnight given that the recovery is still taking hold and families across the country still need help."
Obama's budget offers tax cuts for businesses, including a $5,000 tax credit for hiring new workers this year, help for the unemployed and $25 billion more for cash-strapped state governments. All the temporary measures would boost the deficit over the next two years by $245 billion.
The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year's then-unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap, a number which had dwarfed the previous record of $454.8 billion set in 2008 under former President George W. Bush.
The administration is forecasting that deficits over the next decade will add an additional $8.5 trillion to the national debt, even if Congress adopts the administration's package of proposals to trim future deficits starting in 2011. Those include a three-year freeze on spending for government programs, an effort which does not touch popular benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare and which also exempts defense and homeland security. It also proposes a boost in taxes on the wealthiest Americans, families making more than $250,000 annually, by allowing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire.
Republicans were not impressed with Obama's deficit cutting, saying that it fell far short of the bold steps needed in light of the fiscal challenges the country is facing. "This country is sinking into a fiscal quagmire," said Sen. Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. "These circumstances call for a bold, game-changing budget that will turn things around."
The administration argued that Obama inherited a deficit that was already topping $1 trillion when he took office and, given the severity of the downturn, the president had to spend billions stabilizing the financial system and jump-starting economic growth.
The deficit for this year would be 10.6 percent of the total economy, a figure unmatched since the country was emerging from World War II.
Much of the spending surge starting in 2008 reflects the cost of massive economic stimulus measures passed by Congress to deal with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The surge in the deficits reflects not only the increased spending but also a big drop in tax revenues, reflecting the 7.2 million people who have lost jobs since the recession began and weaker corporate tax receipts.
Obama's new budget attempts to navigate between the opposing goals of pulling the country out of a deep recession and getting control of runaway deficits. The administration insists that once the recession is history, the government will turn its attention to attacking the deficits.
n a bow to worries over the soaring deficits, the administration proposed a three-year freeze on spending beginning in 2011 for many domestic government agencies. It would save $250 billion over the next decade by following the spending freeze with caps that would keep increases after 2013 from rising faster than inflation.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Obama and the House Republicans Vent Politely
NEW YORK TIMES
By PETER BAKER and CARL HULSE
BALTIMORE — President Obama denied he was a Bolshevik, the Republicans denied they were obstructionists and both sides denied they were to blame for the toxic atmosphere clouding the nation’s political leadership.
At a moment when the country is as polarized as ever, Mr. Obama traveled to a House Republican retreat on Friday to try to break through the partisan logjam that has helped stall his legislative agenda. What ensued was a lively, robust debate between a president and the opposition party that rarely happens in the scripted world of American politics.
For an hour and 22 minutes, with the cameras rolling, they thrust and parried, confronting each other’s policies and politics while challenging each other to meet in the middle. Intense and vigorous, sometimes even pointed, the discussion nonetheless proved remarkably civil and substantive for a relentlessly bitter era, an airing of issues that both sides often say they need more of.
But if it was at times a wonky clash of ideas, it also seemed to be a virtual marriage-therapy session — with the most pointed exchanges shown again on the evening news — as each side vented grievances pent up after a year of partisan gridlock.
Mr. Obama complained that the Republicans were painting him as a radical, making it harder to compromise. His health care plan, he said, was not “a Bolshevik plot.” The Republicans, for their part, complained that he did not listen to them and instead sat back while the Democratic “attack machine,” as one called it, demonized them. “I am not an ideologue,” Mr. Obama said at one point, drawing skeptical murmurs from the crowd that seemed to surprise him. “I’m not,” he insisted.
But if he rejected the Republican labels for him, the Republicans rejected his for them. “I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, a freshman from Utah, told him.
The encounter at a Baltimore hotel was unlike any of Mr. Obama’s presidency, or very many other presidencies, for that matter. Such a sustained and public dialogue with a hostile audience is rare for a president. Instead, Friday’s back and forth resembled the British tradition where the prime minister submits to questions on the floor of the House of Commons — something Senator John McCain had promised to do if elected president.
For Mr. Obama, the lion’s-den strategy of addressing a Republican audience reinforced his effort in the State of the Union address this week to reclaim a more bipartisan image and reach out to disaffected independents. Although he and other presidents have addressed opposition caucuses before, they usually close the doors for questions, but this time the White House insisted on letting the news media record the give and take.
That worked to his benefit as he took advantage of the staging that comes with being president. He commanded the lectern with the presidential seal and the camera was trained mainly on him, while his interlocutors were forced to look up to him from the audience. Moreover, Mr. Obama gave long, confident and informed answers and felt free to interrupt questioners, while it is typically harder for others to interrupt a president.
But Republicans said they believed they had achieved a victory as well, demonstrating that while Democrats might not like some of their policy ideas, they had advanced some proposals as evidenced by the president’s acknowledgment that he had read them and even incorporated some of them into his initiatives. “For him to say, ‘I have read your proposals and they are substantive proposals,’ that is a huge thing for Republicans,” Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said afterward.
Just to make the point that they have been more than the party of no, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, as he introduced the president handed him a booklet called “Better Solutions” compiling a variety of Republican ideas that they said the president had ignored or resisted over the last year. “We don’t expect you to agree with us on every one of our solutions,” Mr. Boehner said, “but we do hope that you and your administration will consider them.”
Mr. Obama opened with a speech saying voters wanted bipartisan cooperation. “They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive,” he said. But he was tough and even defensive at times, giving no ground on policy and five times using the phrase “not true” to describe Republican statements.
By PETER BAKER and CARL HULSE
BALTIMORE — President Obama denied he was a Bolshevik, the Republicans denied they were obstructionists and both sides denied they were to blame for the toxic atmosphere clouding the nation’s political leadership.
At a moment when the country is as polarized as ever, Mr. Obama traveled to a House Republican retreat on Friday to try to break through the partisan logjam that has helped stall his legislative agenda. What ensued was a lively, robust debate between a president and the opposition party that rarely happens in the scripted world of American politics.
For an hour and 22 minutes, with the cameras rolling, they thrust and parried, confronting each other’s policies and politics while challenging each other to meet in the middle. Intense and vigorous, sometimes even pointed, the discussion nonetheless proved remarkably civil and substantive for a relentlessly bitter era, an airing of issues that both sides often say they need more of.
But if it was at times a wonky clash of ideas, it also seemed to be a virtual marriage-therapy session — with the most pointed exchanges shown again on the evening news — as each side vented grievances pent up after a year of partisan gridlock.
Mr. Obama complained that the Republicans were painting him as a radical, making it harder to compromise. His health care plan, he said, was not “a Bolshevik plot.” The Republicans, for their part, complained that he did not listen to them and instead sat back while the Democratic “attack machine,” as one called it, demonized them. “I am not an ideologue,” Mr. Obama said at one point, drawing skeptical murmurs from the crowd that seemed to surprise him. “I’m not,” he insisted.
But if he rejected the Republican labels for him, the Republicans rejected his for them. “I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, a freshman from Utah, told him.
The encounter at a Baltimore hotel was unlike any of Mr. Obama’s presidency, or very many other presidencies, for that matter. Such a sustained and public dialogue with a hostile audience is rare for a president. Instead, Friday’s back and forth resembled the British tradition where the prime minister submits to questions on the floor of the House of Commons — something Senator John McCain had promised to do if elected president.
For Mr. Obama, the lion’s-den strategy of addressing a Republican audience reinforced his effort in the State of the Union address this week to reclaim a more bipartisan image and reach out to disaffected independents. Although he and other presidents have addressed opposition caucuses before, they usually close the doors for questions, but this time the White House insisted on letting the news media record the give and take.
That worked to his benefit as he took advantage of the staging that comes with being president. He commanded the lectern with the presidential seal and the camera was trained mainly on him, while his interlocutors were forced to look up to him from the audience. Moreover, Mr. Obama gave long, confident and informed answers and felt free to interrupt questioners, while it is typically harder for others to interrupt a president.
But Republicans said they believed they had achieved a victory as well, demonstrating that while Democrats might not like some of their policy ideas, they had advanced some proposals as evidenced by the president’s acknowledgment that he had read them and even incorporated some of them into his initiatives. “For him to say, ‘I have read your proposals and they are substantive proposals,’ that is a huge thing for Republicans,” Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said afterward.
Just to make the point that they have been more than the party of no, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, as he introduced the president handed him a booklet called “Better Solutions” compiling a variety of Republican ideas that they said the president had ignored or resisted over the last year. “We don’t expect you to agree with us on every one of our solutions,” Mr. Boehner said, “but we do hope that you and your administration will consider them.”
Mr. Obama opened with a speech saying voters wanted bipartisan cooperation. “They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive,” he said. But he was tough and even defensive at times, giving no ground on policy and five times using the phrase “not true” to describe Republican statements.
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