Washington has twice faced off with states over federal health care expansions, when Medicaid initially launched in 1965 and with the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997. In both cases, all 50 states ultimately signed up – but not without some wrangling.

Six governors say they will opt out of Medicaid. 

How long will they hold out?

By Sarah Kliff , Updated: July 9, 2012

Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared Monday his state would not participate in the health law’s Medicaid expansion, becoming the sixth Republican governor to make such a promise. Taken together, those governors opting-out would single-handedly shrink the Medicaid expansion by nearly 4 million people.

While the stakes are high for the White House, the territory is by no means uncharted. Washington has twice faced off with states over federal health care expansions, when Medicaid initially launched in 1965 and with the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997. In both cases, all 50 states ultimately signed up – but not without some wrangling.

Senior administration officials look to that history with optimism. “When Medicaid was enacted with a much smaller federal share…the states all ultimately came in,” White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew told ABC’s This Week.

Some Medicaid experts, however, see a different history lesson. They say that previous experience shows expanding coverage to be a difficult endeavor that could take years to complete. “It may take a little bit of time,” said Charles Brecher, a professor of public and health administration at New York University.

Medicaid got a chilly reception when it launched in January 1966. It was up to the states to decide whether to participate and only six initially signed up: Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Twenty-seven followed suit later that year. Across the country, governors weighed the boon of new federal dollars — Washington would foot half of Medicaid’s bill — against the drawback of putting state money into a new program.

Nascent Medicaid programs quickly faced threats: Republican legislators in the New York introduced a bill in 1967 calling for the state to “live within its means” and repeal its Medicaid program.

Doctors, meanwhile, lamented the program’s bureaucracy and griped that payments often arrived late. “Doctors’ complaints tie up our telephone lines all day, every day,” Frederick W. Richmond, chairman of the Citizen’s Committee for Medicaid, told the New York Times in 1967. Some pharmacists voted to boycott the program altogether.

Over time, however, the lure of federal dollars proved strong enough to win over resistant states. Eleven joined the program in 1967. Another wave of eight, largely Southern states came on board in 1970. Arizona proved the last holdout, not joining Medicaid until 1982.

“It was pretty ideological for a long time,” said Brecher, who studied the Arizona case. “This was the Arizona of Barry Goldwater, and they didn’t want to participate in a federal program.”

Arizona counties were seeing  indigent health care costs rising – from $50 million in 1974 to $125 million in 1980 – and petitioned the legislature to accept federal funds. Critics argued that Arizonans paid federal taxes to support the Medicaid program, and ought to see some benefit brought back to the state.

“The counties were operating local hospitals and expenses were going up,” Brecher said. “They said, ‘Why don’t you get federal money for this?’”

In recent years, some states have mulled leaving the program – a handful of Texas legislators floated the idea as recently as 2011 – but have never taken meaningful steps towards such action. The federal government now sends states $263 billion in Medicaid funding annually.

States faced a similar question in 1997, when Congress passed the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) to extend health coverage to low-income children. The federal government once again left states to decide whether to participate.

“It wasn’t clearly known how quickly states would act,” Nathan Arnold of the Urban Institute, who studied states’ adoption of CHIP.

But the CHIP program had many factors that worked in its favor. It launched in the late 1990s, when the economy was booming and many states saw budget surpluses. Some were also eager to expand coverage on their own after President Clinton’s push for more comprehensive insurance failed.

“This was federal financing for something we were already trying to do: Expand health insurance coverage,” said Sandra Shewry, who launched California’s CHIP program.

There, was, however, a catch: States would have to pay about 35 percent of the program’s bill. That was a better match that Medicaid’s regular contribution of 50 percent, but still left states with some financial responsibility – and a commitment to participate in a new government program.

That made CHIP a subject of heated debate in Texas, where the Democratic-controlled legislature clashed with then-Gov. George W. Bush over whether to participate.

“States like Texas sat on the opportunity for a while,” said Jason Cooke, who served as Texas’ first CHIP director. “The governor was not interested in calling a special session to get it authorized and, frankly, didn’t want the CHIP program authorized in the first place.”

Texas did eventually enroll, with Bush signing legislation authorizing the program in 2000. By the end of that year, all states had adopted the CHIP program.

Enrollment, however, moved slowly. President Clinton, reportedly “dismayed” with the low uptake, used his 1998 State of the Union address to order federal and state agencies to step up efforts. Today, 84 percent of children eligible for CHIP are enrolled.

Some question whether the Medicaid expansion will receive equally widespread adoption. Part of it has to do with the economic climate, with states now staring down recession-squeezed budgets.

The structure of the program could matter, too. While the CHIP program allowed states to impose waiting lists and limit enrollment to curb costs, Medicaid requires states to cover all residents eligible for the new benefits.

“When we ran out of money, we had a waiting list,” said Rose Naff, who oversaw Florida’s CHIP program for 17 years. “States got to manage their programs based on the availability of their own money and federal money. Implementing a Medicaid program states won’t have those limitations, which made it more comfortable.”

Optimists have a different take: They argue that the Medicaid expansion is an even better for the states because the federal government will fund 100 percent of the cost through 2017. The match drops to 90 percent in 2020.

“I do think that virtually all states ultimately will decide to implement,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. “They would be committing fiscal malpractice if they left all this money on the table.”

© The Washington Post Company

How in the world does two university courses being taught on Stephen Colbert translate into an "obsession in academia?"

Truthinessology: The Stephen Colbert effect becomes an obsession in academia

By Paul Farhi, Published: July 9

Nation, our so-called universities are in big trouble, and not just because attending one of them leaves you with more debt than the Greek government. No, we’re talking about something even more unsettling: the academic world’s obsession with Stephen Colbert.

Enquiring minds wish to know, just how deep does the academic world's alleged "obsession" with Stephen Colbert run?  Will we have any Univeristy professors, regents, or Presidents interviewed to comment?  Will we have any statistics on how many universities offer courses in truthiness?

Last we checked, Colbert was a mere TV comedian, or a satirist if you want to get fancy about it. (And, of course, being college professors, they do.) He’s a TV star, like Donald Trump, only less of a caricature.

More people can identify Colbert than can identify their State House of Representatives or State Congressional candidate.  What's "mere" about being a comedian? 

Just WHICH college professors want to get fancy about "it?" And, I would consider Colbert to be the ultimate caricature.  That's just me.

Yet ever since Colbert’s show, “The Colbert Report,” began airing on Comedy Central in 2005, these ivory-tower eggheads have been devoting themselves to studying all things Colbertian. They’ve sliced and diced his comic stylings more ways than a Ginsu knife. Every academic discipline — well, among the liberal arts, at least — seems to want a piece of him. Political science. Journalism. Philosophy. Race relations. Communications studies. Theology. Linguistics. Rhetoric.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do tell me WHICH ivory-tower eggheads have been devoting themselves to studying all things Colbertian?  How many papers submitted to scholarly journals are based on Colbert? Oh, you mean the business community does NOT want to get a piece of him? Which Theology departments?  Which Linguistics departments? Are there any specifics that can be cited in support of the proposition?

There are dozens of scholarly articles, monographs, treatises and essays about Colbert, as well as books of scholarly articles, monographs and essays. A University of Oklahoma student even earned her doctorate last year by examining him and his “Daily Show” running mate Jon Stewart. It was called “Political Humor and Third-Person Perception.”

Okay.  That's a one-for the money!  And it sounds as if her paper encompassed more than just Colbertianisms - as Stewartianisms also seem to have been suggested by the author - and is her paper solely focused on Stewart and Colbert as the only examples ever of Political Humor?

The academic cult of Colbert (or is it “the cul of Colbert”?) is everywhere. Here’s a small sample. Jim . . .

●“Is Stephen Colbert America’s Socrates?,” chapter heading in “Stephen Colbert and Philosophy: I Am Philosophy (And So Can You!),” published by Open Court, 2009.

And just exactly how many universities are using this as a course text book?

●“The Wørd Made Fresh: A Theological Exploration of Stephen Colbert,” published in Concepts (“an interdisciplinary journal of graduate studies”), Villanova University, 2010.

This is an interdisciplinary journal.  How many university courses are being taught using this journal as a text - either primary, or secondary?

●“It’s All About Meme: The Art of the Interview and the Insatiable Ego of the Colbert Bump,” chapter heading in “The Stewart/Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real Impacts of Fake News,” published by McFarland Press, 2011.

This book sounds interesting. Real Impacts of Fake News - is exactly what got George W Bush elected by a 5-4 margin to the Presidency of the United States of America - the War on Gore being one of the most unreported stories in the history or history.

●“The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” a 2009 study in the International Journal of Press/Politics that its authors described as an investigation of “biased message processing” and “the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert.” After much study, the authors found “no significant difference between [conservatives and liberals] in thinking Colbert was funny.”

I still would like to know at how many universities / colleges / joco's that this 2009 study is being taught.

Colbert-ism has insinuated itself into the undergraduate curriculum, too.

Fancy that!  Colbert was the commencement speaker at Knox College, in Galesburg, IL, a few years ago.  So was Patrick Fitzgerald, at a different commencement.

Boston University has offered a seminar called “The Colbert Report: American Satire” for the past two years, which explores Colbert’s use of “syllogism, logical fallacy, burlesque, and travesty,” as lecturer Michael Rodriguez described it on the school’s Web site.

FINALLY!  We get an example of a University offering a seminar featuring the Colbert Report.  I will call it: ONE!

This fall, Towson University will roll out a freshman seminar on politics and popular culture, with Colbert as its focus.

Okay.  Now, let's call it TWO (but, we must wait until this fall!

All this for a guy who would undoubtedly mock-celebrate the serious study of himself.

Satirical tradition

The college crowd says Colbert is worthy of study because his single-character political satire is unique in the annals of television. His character, an egomaniacal right-wing gasbag, connects him to a long Western satirical tradition going all the way back to the Roman poet Horace and the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, although neither of those guys had basic-cable gigs.

“Colbert deserves to be held against the greatest satirists in American history,” says Sophia McClennen, a professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State and the author of “Colbert’s America: Satire and Democracy.”

McClennen says Ben Franklin and Mark Twain — to name-drop two of Colbert’s forebears — used satire to mock the powerful, critique prevailing social attitudes and shape American democracy “at a moment when the U.S. was in the midst of transformation, change and crisis. . . . My argument is that our democracy is in a tough spot now, when corporations are exercising increasing power over government, and that Colbert captures this moment as they did.”

To "name drop" two of Colbert's forebears?  Good Lord, if he is worthy of being name-dropped with those worthies, then he is assuredly worthy of study in academia!

Cross-cultural appeal

Geoffrey Baym, a media studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, says “The Colbert Report” and its host have compelled the people who study political communications to take entertainment TV seriously and the people who study entertainment and popular culture to think more about politics.

These would seem like important impacts for one person to have.  Such a person would be entirely worthy of being studied!

“I’m sure there are still a lot more books out there on CBS News and Edward R. Murrow, but you could argue that the emergence of satire news at this level is an important phenomenon that I don’t think we still completely understand,” says Baym, the author of “From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News.”

The emergence of satire news - like, The Onion? Anyone?

Colbert, Baym says, “is doing something important in a political sense” by educating his TV audience about the nuances and defects of the electoral system. He cites Colbert’s ongoing segments about his self-created super PAC — “Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” — as an unprecedented example of information, entertainment and activism.

Educating audiences about the nuances and defects of the electoral system sounds like pretty important work to me.  This is something one would be hard pressed to uncover in the so-called Main Stream Media.  Somebody really ought to be doing it!

The program also works as a kind of “gateway” for greater civic engagement for young people, says Amy Bree Becker, a communications studies professor at Towson who will teach the school’s Colbert course next semester.

My assertion has always been that the purpose of an education is to create critical thinkiners, critical readers, critical listeners, who can flesh out subtext, and become contributing members of their communities.  A "gateway" for greater civic engagement seems like a wonderful thing to have available to assist in helping to achieve these lofty aims.

“It’s a very good way to get young people who would normally not pay much attention to politics to learn a little more,” she said. “You have to know something to get the joke. [The show] encourages people to find information from other sources.”

It is VERY important to get young people (and the not so young) to pay attention to politics, AND to learn a little more.  anything that encourages people to find information (research) from other sources ought to be a very important thing.  Because, they would have to dig pretty deep to find such stuff in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc, etc, etc.

Becker suggested there’s another obvious reason why students and professors enjoy studying Colbert: He’s a lot funnier than Emerson or Keats or Kierkegaard.

“People in universities like to laugh, too,” she said.

And that’s the Wørd.

I'm thinking this writer phoned in this piece, knowing all the long that he had an interesting punch line (hook) at the end.

I'm further thinking there is something like "celebrity envy" going on - that the author is jealous of Colbert's success, and has written what was intended to be a hit piece that in actuality pretty much disproves the points he was trying to make early.  As in, he just doesn't get it! 

A WHOLE lot of Obama's record ought rightly to draw criticism from "the left"

Obama’s record on outsourcing 

draws criticism from the left

View Photo Gallery — President Obama on the 2012 campaign trail: President Obama’s reelection campaign is raising money and reaching out to voters and volunteers.

By Tom Hamburger, Carol D. Leonnig and Zachary A. Goldfarb, Published: July 9

Barack Obama promised voters four years ago that he would work to slow the outflow of American jobs to other countries, proposing to revamp a federal tax code that encourages companies to maintain overseas operations.

Obama as president has continued to call for rewriting the rules that allow U.S. corporations to avoid paying taxes for a time on income generated overseas.

But the broad tax changes have not happened.

While White House officials say they have been waiting on Congress to act, Obama’s critics, primarily on the political left, say he has repeatedly failed in other ways to protect American jobs from being moved overseas. They point to a range of actions they say he should have taken: confronting China, reining in unfettered trade and reworking a U.S. visa program that critics say ends up sending high-tech jobs abroad.

The issue of overseas outsourcing has returned to the center of the presidential campaign, with Obama hammering the record ofMitt Romney’s financial company. The debate intensified in recent weeks with Obama’s campaign attacking his Republican rivalafter a Washington Post article reported that Romney’s private-equity firm, Bain Capital, had invested in companies that specialized in helping other firms relocate work overseas.

American jobs have been shifting to low-wage countries for years, and the trend has continued during Obama’s presidency. From 2008 to 2010, U.S. trade with China alone cost about 450,000 American jobs because of the growth of Chinese exports, said Robert E. Scott, a pro-labor advocate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. That figure was less than in previous years, but the decrease was probably tied to the U.S. economic slowdown, which crimped demand for imports.

“I think he has walked away from the campaign commitments,” said Scott, the institute’s director of trade and manufacturing policy research. “He has done far too little to improve U.S. trade.”

According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, large American companies in 2010 barely added any workers in the United States, increasing their numbers by 0.1 percent, while they expanded their foreign workforce by 1.5 percent. That was business as usual — between 2004 and 2010, the bureau reported, foreign affiliates hired 2 million workers while 600,000 were added by the companies at home.

White House defense

White House officials say Obama has fought to slow the movement of jobs overseas, even when that meant confronting difficult political opponents and powerful global economic forces.

“The president could not have been more emphatic about his vision for trying to eliminate the incentives for offshoring and increase incentives to create jobs here,” said Brian Deese, deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. “We have tried to use all the tools available to us to make creative administrative changes where we can to discourage offshoring.”

During his run for president in 2008, Obama promised to “end those tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas.” It was a pledge he made repeatedly on the campaign trail.

Obama has continued to propose the tax rewrite during his presidency, but only this year did he put it in the spotlight. In his State of the Union address in January, he unveiled his most ambitious plan yet to overhaul the tax code and discourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. The proposal’s centerpiece was a minimum tax on global corporate profits that Obama has continued to tout.

But neither Democrats in the Senate nor Republicans in the House have taken up the measure.

White House officials say they are pushing Congress to bring the issue up for a vote before the August recess. It remains unclear whether lawmakers will do so. The tax rules could be addressed during negotiations over a broader overhaul of the tax code, which is unlikely to occur until after the November election.

“We laid them out in a very high-profile way,” said senior White House economic adviser Jason Furman. “Now for broad reform, you need Congress. Everybody acknowledges that substantive tax reform takes time to accomplish.”

American jobs have been flowing overseas for years. While the dynamic hurts groups of workers, it can lead to less-expensive goods and services for American consumers and can produce more-advanced American industries to replace old ones.

His aides say Obama has enforced U.S. trade laws far more aggressively than his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and sought to erect tariffs to protect American workers in the tire industry and force China to stop hoarding raw material used in high-tech manufacturing. Administration officials also say Obama has used his bully pulpit, pressuring U.S. employers to keep jobs in the country.

But Obama’s critics say the most important step the president could take — but hasn’t — is to declare China a “currency manipulator,” which could ultimately allow the U.S. government to erect tariffs to protect American industries.

“I’m perplexed by this decision because it runs counter to the goal of re-shoring jobs from China,” Scott Paul, head of the labor-backed Alliance for American Manufacturing, said in a May statement.

Many economists say that China manipulates foreign exchange markets to keep the value of its currency, the renminbi, lower than it would be if freely traded — a practice that makes it more attractive for companies to hire workers there rather than employ them in the United States. Romney says he would declare a China a currency manipulator on his first day in office.

Administration officials say Obama has avoided labeling China a currency manipulator because that would prompt a trade conflict with the country. Such a clash could lead to retaliation by China that would hurt American companies and workers. Officials say quiet and persistent pressure on China is more effective — and over the past few years, the value of the renminbi has noticeably gained against the dollar, though the increase has slowed lately.

Free trade

For critics of Obama’s strategy, his decision not to brand China a currency manipulator fits into a broader pattern of embracing unfettered trade despite its costs to American workers; free trade can encourage the movement of some work done by Americans to countries with lower labor costs.

Obama has signed trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia into law and is negotiating an agreement, covering at least eight other countries, known as the Transpacific Partnership. Obama says these agreements will create jobs in the United States, while federal programs will help workers displaced by foreign competition.

Obama’s critics say his approach has been shaped by economic policy advisers who share the prevailing view among American economists that the benefits of unrestrained trade outweigh the costs.

Diana Farrell, who was Obama’s deputy economic policy adviser for two years, promoted the benefits of offshoring while she worked at the McKinsey Global Research Institute. Farrell was the primary author of a 2003 report called “Offshoring: Is it a Win-Win Game?,” which concluded that the benefits to the United States of offshoring exceed the costs.

Farrell did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Critics also point to the president’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council, which was assembled in 2011 to advise the White House on how to boost employment. The council is composed mostly of top executives at companies that have large foreign operations and is led by Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, which was at the forefront of offshoring in the 1980s.

A GE spokesman said that the company’s hiring reflects its global presence and that it has continued to hire thousands of workers in the United States.

Among engineers and others in the high-tech labor force, the migration of work to places such as India has become a primary concern. They say U.S. visa rules foster the outsourcing of technology jobs to other countries. Many engineers criticize Obama, in particular, for not overhauling the H-1B program that allows foreigners with technical skills to come to the United States for work. The concern is that these foreigners get trained in the United States and then set up competing enterprises once they go home.

“The H-1B program is obviously speeding up the offshoring of jobs,” said Ron Hira, a professor who studies outsourcing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Yet the Obama administration has failed to ask for legislative reforms or even make administrative changes clearly within its purview.”

White House officials officials say they have taken a tougher stance toward H-1B visas than the Bush administration did. For instance, Obama officials say they have denied more applications and have demanded more evidence from employers about their need to hire foreign workers.

According to some critics, a galling example of the Obama administration fostering overseas work came as part the 2009 stimulus program. They point to millions of dollars meant to develop a domestic clean-energy industry that instead landed in the hands of foreign businesses. An April 2010 study by the Energy Department found that 60 percent of the 40 largest wind farms then financed by the stimulus relied on foreign manufacturers for their central components, including turbines.

White House officials say foreign components were necessary in 2009 to support the program because there were not enough U.S. manufacturers of the parts. But now U.S. production has expanded as a result of the stimulus and is supplying the components, officials say.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

During the "silly season" of "Presidential Election Analysis," we can always count on two stories: the horse race, and the money race - apparnetly tweedle dumb and tweedle dee are running neck 'n neck!

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney remain in a deadlocked contest, tied at 47 percent among registered voters and basically where they stood in late May.

The new numbers reflect a stubborn constancy: Only twice in 13 surveys over more than a year has either candidate held a lead exceeding the poll’s margin of sampling error. Now, the campaign appears destined to remain extremely close in the final four months before Election Day.

The fundamentals seem firmly planted: About two-thirds of Americans consider the country seriously off course, a majority have not approved of Obama’s overall job performance in more than a year, and the president remains in negative territory on dealing with the economy, health care and immigration. Also unmoved since fall are Americans’ attitudes toward spending, with as many saying they would prefer an increase in federal spending to try to spur economic growth as wanting to prioritize deficit reduction.

The stability persists despite the costliest blitz of early campaign advertising the country has ever seen. Both sides have run some positive ads, but the Obama team and its allies have relentlessly attacked Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, an investment firm the Republican co-founded, in its paid spots. Romney and his supporters, meanwhile, have focused a considerable portion of spending on Obama’s economic record.

The lack of movement underscores intense polarization — about nine in 10 Republicans back Romney, and a similar proportion of Democrats support Obama — and a relatively small percentage of voters say there is a “good chance” that they could change their minds before November.

At this point, 74 percent of all voters are “definitely” supporting Obama or Romney, and 12 percent say it is unlikely that they will switch from one to the other, making the race a settled issue for nearly nine in 10 voters. For both campaigns, such a high level of early commitment shifts the focus to turnout — and to which side can muster the most effective get-out-the-vote operation.

Obama still benefits from a clear, but dwindling, enthusiasm gap. Just over half, 51 percent, of his supporters back his candidacy “very enthusiastically,” compared with 38 percent of Romney’s. There is also a difference in motivation, with 75 percent of Obama supporters saying their vote is “for” him, in contrast with 59 percent of Romney’s backers saying their vote is “against” Obama. (There was a similar distinction in 2004, with President George W. Bush’s supporters affirmatively behind him, and most of Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry’s aligned in opposition to the Republican.)

Romney’s business background has been a focus of the ads against him — and the spots have had some results. Compared with February, more people in the eight states identified as “toss­ups” by The Washington Post now say Romney did more to cut than create jobs in the United States when he worked as a corporate investor before entering politics. And twice as many swing-state voters consider Romney’s work in buying and restructuring companies a reason to oppose, rather than to support, his candidacy. Just over half of all voters say that work is not a big factor for them.

Voters in these swing states — all of which Obama won in 2008 — divide down the middle on whether their vote will be more about what the president has done in his first term or what they think he would do if reelected. That distinction makes a pivotal difference: Nationwide, political independents focused on a prospective second-term side with Obama over Romney, but those assessing Obama’s first term prefer Romney by more than 20 percentage points.

The challenge for the president may be trying to turn attention away from a stubbornly negative take on his performance. His overall rating hasn’t budged since May, with 47 percent of Americans approving and 49 percent disapproving, hardly the split an incumbent would hope to see when facing reelection. Intensity continues to run against him, with more people strongly disapproving of his work than strongly approving.

On the campaign’s top issue, the economy, 54 percent of all adults and 60 percent of independents give Obama negative marks. But when measured against Romney on the economy, voters divide about evenly, with 48 percent saying they trust the former Massachusetts governor and 45 percent saying they have more faith in the president. Obama has a 12-point advantage on the question of which candidate has a clearer plan to deal with the country’s economic woes.

Obama’s biggest counterweight to the economic drag on his candidacy continues to be double-digit advantages among registered voters on important attributes. He has a clear lead over Romney on who has greater empathy for people facing economic problems and on standing up for his beliefs. On appearing “more friendly and likable,” Obama maintains an advantage of better than 2 to 1.

Even one-third of voters backing Romney consider the president to be the more likable of the two.

Americans split evenly on the Supreme Court’s recent 5 to 4 decision upholding Obama’s health-care law, with 42 percent approving of the decision and 44 percent opposing it. But in a significant change, the legislation is now viewed less negatively than it was before the ruling. In the new survey, 47 percent support the law and 47 percent oppose it. In April, 39 percent backed it and 53 percent opposed it.

Obama, Romney still neck and neck, poll shows

Dan Balz and Jon Cohen 11:00 PM ET

House Republicans will vote again this week on a measure to repeal the health-care law. In the poll, just one-third of all Americans favor repealing the legislationin its entirety or in part. At the same time, Thirty-eight percent of Americans consider Romney’s support for repeal a major reason to vote for him, compared with 29 percent who say it is a major reason to vote against him.

Although the race remains close, Obama’s supporters are significantly more confident about the outcome. Nearly all voters who want the president to prevail say they expect him to win, whereas most, but far fewer, of Romney’s backers think he will win.

The telephone poll was conducted July 5 to 8 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points for the full sample as well as the sample of 855 registered voters.

Peyton M. Craighill and Scott Clement contributed to this report.

What has been exposed is that the notion that we are “post-sexist” is a lie. There is a disturbing similarity to how the election of an African American president has masked the worsening realities for large numbers of African Americans—in the words of prison rights activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “One African American in the White House and a million in prison.”

Sunday, June 17, 2012 by Rethinking Schools

The New Misogyny: What It Means for Teachers and Classrooms

Rethinking Schools Editorial

As we go marching, marching, 

we’re standing proud and tall

The rising of the women means

the rising of us all.

Our lives shall not be sweated

from birth until life closes,

Hearts starve as well as bodies:

bread and roses, bread and roses.

The song “Bread and Roses” and the 1912 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the phrase originated, remind us how important women’s struggles have been in U.S. history, and that the liberation of women is central to progress toward social justice.

There hasn’t been much talk about women’s liberation lately. Women have the vote; more than half the students at universities are women; rape is classified as a crime; there are women doctors, lawyers, soccer players, and secretaries of state. A lot of young professionals—and a lot of our students—would say that the whole idea of women’s liberation is passé, a non-issue.

Then, this spring’s political campaigns revealed a deep and ugly wound: misogyny that ranged from Rush Limbaugh’s crass attack on Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke to the repeal of Wisconsin’s pay equity law, from the Republican attacks on Title X (which subsidizes cervical and breast cancer screening, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control for 5 million low-income women) to Virginia’s mandated vaginal ultrasounds for women who want abortions.

What has been exposed is that the notion that we are “post-sexist” is a lie. There is a disturbing similarity to how the election of an African American president has masked the worsening realities for large numbers of African Americans—in the words of prison rights activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “One African American in the White House and a million in prison.” Professional opportunities for a narrow stratum of women have masked the worsening realities of life for millions of women caught up in the welfare system, the prison system, low-paying service jobs, domestic violence, and the ideological misogyny of growing fundamentalist religious and political perspectives.

The Stereotype of the ‘Lazy Teacher’

The vilification of K-12 teachers is part and parcel of this misogyny. Last year, when teachers led the occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol, many pointed out the obvious: Attacks on teachers—and other public sector workers like nurses and social workers—are overwhelmingly attacks on women. When “reformers” from former D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie portray teachers as incompetent, incapable of leadership, and selfish, they don’t need to specify women teachers for that to be the image in people’s minds—76 percent of U.S. teachers are women; at the elementary school level, it’s nearly 90 percent. As education blogger Sabrina Stevens Shupe wrote recently, “The predominantly female teaching profession [is] among the latest [targets] in a long tradition of projecting community/social anxieties onto ‘bad’ women—from ‘witches’ to bad mothers to feminists and beyond.”

The decimation of teachers’ unions and tenure structures seems aimed at forcing K-12 teaching back to the era before teaching became a profession, when young women—barely trained and constrained by regulations enforcing their clothing, living situations, and drinking—taught for a few years before they got married. Here are some requirements from a typical teachers contract in 1923: The teacher is “not to ride in a carriage or automobile with any man except her brother or father” and “not to dress in bright colors.” She is “to wear at least two petticoats” and “to sweep the classroom floor at least once daily.”

More Than ‘Add a Woman and Stir’

These attacks on women—as teachers, as those with the right to control over their own childbearing, as human beings who deserve respect from politicians and the media—are being taken on by unions, political organizations, and activists across the country. But one aspect rarely discussed is what this new misogyny means for us in the classroom. As we have seen in other social justice struggles, claiming and passing on the history is integral to fighting for the future. It’s impossible to confront racism, militarism, or environmental degradation without understanding the history. The same is true for the oppression of women. Our students need a critical understanding of women’s lives and struggles in the past to understand and respond to the present.

If you go by most U.S. history texts, the only piece of women’s history worth space in the curriculum is the fight for suffrage. But women defining and fighting for freedom for themselves and their communities has been at the center of American history from the beginning. The everyday lives of women are half the story in every historical moment—as Native Americans forced out of their lands, black mothers enslaved and resisting, white settlers crossing the plains in covered wagons, immigrants at Angel Island and in New York’s Lower East Side.

And, if we move past what Geraldine Clifford named the “add a woman and stir” approach to incorporating women into historical study, we can see that a feminist perspective calls into question how history is usually organized: centered on heroes, villains, and wars. For example, the Civil Rights Movement is often narrated as the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic leadership of a mass movement. No doubt, any treatment of the Civil Rights Movement that did not discuss King’s work would be incomplete. But a more accurate and more helpful-for-the-future narration might start with the many years of house-by-house organizing by the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, long before King arrived in that city; and the grassroots, democratic leadership modeled by Ella Baker that was responsible for so much of the success of the movement. As Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteer and historian Joanne Grant explains, Baker “taught the SNCC students the importance of nurturing local leaders, the value of organizing local groups who would make their own decisions, and the vital concept of a group-centered leadership as opposed to a leadership-centered group.”

When we relegate these stories to a captioned photo, a colorful “historical highlight” box, or a paragraph at the end of the chapter, we miss an opportunity to tell a richer history, and we disarm our students from understandings they need to navigate a world of militarized masculinity and misogynist femininity.

The History of Birth Control

Take, for example, a controversial piece of history that relates directly to the current political debates: women’s control over reproduction. Birth control, if taught at all in our schools, is usually segregated in health classes. But women’s control over childbearing has actually been a key issue in U.S. history. As the women’s rights movement grew before the Civil War, white middle-class women became interested in controlling how many children they had in order to be able to extend their experiences beyond the home. For black and Native American women, control of their bodies meant primarily the ability to make choices about fertility that weren’t dominated by rape and the inability to keep their children safe and free. In the early 20th century, when Margaret Sanger first started handing out birth control—a crime for which she was repeatedly arrested—she saw it as part of a larger fight for the emancipation of the poor. But, only a few years later, influenced by the eugenics movement that fueled Jim Crow at home and imperial designs abroad, she was defining the “chief issue of birth control” as “more children from the fit, less from the unfit.” A generation later, many activists fighting for the legalization of abortion ignored the sterilization of black women in the South, Native American women on reservations, and colonized women in Puerto Rico.

What a rich, complex historical vein—all the contradictions around gender, class, and race that lie at the heart of supporting students to think critically about history and social justice strategies. When we open up history in this way, we encompass gender issues, homophobia, and LGBTQ history. Many aspects of current society that don’t show up in the standard curriculum—mass incarceration, poverty and the welfare system, the impact of militarization at home and abroad—are arenas where an exploration from a more feminist perspective can connect to students’ lives and expose them to a more expansive view of what history is and why it matters.

Whatever happens in the next election cycle, the “new misogyny” is a wake-up call. As education activists, we need to expose and confront the misogynist underpinnings of the current attacks on teachers. And, as teachers and teacher educators, we need to center women’s lives and history in our curricula; there is no way to build for the future without it.

© 2012 Rethinking Schools