Why not test ‘em in the womb?

Bloomberg/Klein now want to give standardized tests to kindergartners, says the NYT.

In an e-mail message sent on Monday evening, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, James S. Liebman, urged principals to join a yearlong pilot program with five testing options for kindergarten through second grade, including timed paper-and-pencil assessments in which students record answers in booklets for up to 90 minutes, as well as ones in which teachers record observations of individual students on Palm Pilots.

WGN Swift-boater torpedoed

Chicago’s superstation WGN gave over two hours to swift-boater Stanley Kurtz on Milt Rosenberg's Extension 720 show, to "expose" Bill Ayers' alleged ties to the Obama campaign. The campaign struck back, getting angry listeners to call in their protests in record numbers.

"I would say this is the biggest response we've ever got from a campaign or a candidate," he said. "This is really unprecedented with the show, the way that people are flooding the calls and our email boxes."

Was McCain really tortured?

Not according to the definition of torture used by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Andrew Sullivan, at the Daily Dish, says:

In the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.