Monday Morning Food for Thought

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I'm having a wee bit of trouble taking seriously the bleatings of the corpulent king of greed and gluttony this morning as the videoclips of Roger Ailes on This Week make the rounds of the blogosphere and 24/7 cable. Maybe it was his slippery conflating of an obscure commenter's comparing him to FBI dame Jay Edgar Hoover at Huffington Post with the endless drumbeat of anti-Obama, anti-Democratic ranting by Ailes' own army of circus elephants named Beck and Hannity and O'Reilly.

Yeah, I know, they're all intimate friends with Barbara and maybe they've even been invited to salons at the Queen of Tarts' place a time or two.

But while these well stuffed, well botoxed elites blather on about what basically amounts to schoolyard bullying and fingerpointing, I'm thinking about real schoolyards these days.

The president is proposing significant changes to No Child Left Behind, and I'm betting it won't take long for the Faux News crowd to jump on this and sweep up attacks on teachers' unions as part of the enemies lists on which they thrive.

(Apparently thriving is going very well for Fox these days. $20something millions for Roger, Al Hunt practically drools, as though those dollars somehow signify something of importance other than Roger's ability to further stuff his face and build the gated fences higher and surround himself with more and more security....

(Ever wonder where those big audiences they boast come from? Take a look next time you visit grandma at the nursing home—you do visit grandma, don't you?—take a look at what cable channels are pumped in for her viewing. Betcha it'll be a whole lotta Fox and not a sign of msnbc. So much for liberal media.

(And then there are the apologists like the woman from USA Today whose name I mercifully missed. The print version of Fox person grudgingly acknowledges, well, yes, Fox prime time is conservative...blithely ignoring how Fox prime time memes weave through 24/7 programming.)

But back to food for thought of a more substantive nature. Those teachers that Fox loves to attack? Well, they're on the front lines day to day for more than just teaching. Any given Monday morning, for example, they can spot the signs of kids who are starving, malnourished, so hungry their bellies are growling, their heads are dizzy.

And the teachers, who already have dipped into their own wallets for school supplies, these days are on the front lines of seeing to it kids have food in their backpacks to take home for the weekends. And they're working now on ideas on how to keep kids fed during summer vacations.

Malnourishment just might be another good reason to extend the school year through the summer.

Is our kids learning? Not if the dumbing-down and impoverishment and destruction of the middle class lifestyle we used to take for granted keeps on going...

And this isn't happening in some far off third world country seen only in quick videoclips. No. This is pervasive hunger right in the middle of the heartland, where agriculture is big business and Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle are all too quick to earmark more of those farm subsidies, like the ones Michelle Bachmann's family farm rakes in.

President Obama has taken on a daunting challenge to change the status quo, whether healthcare, the economy or education or.... But the Forces of No will be doing everything in their power to bring things back round to the good ol' days of the 2000s. Because that all worked out so well for the middle class and America's children.
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crossposted at firedoglake's The Seminal