What is the Dallas school board up to?

First they lay off hundreds of teachers and staff, supposedly because of budget shortfalls and central office mismanagement. Now they’re running ads offering to hire 60 new teachers. Another bureaucratic screw-up? Or is this a way to hire teachers on the cheap and do an end run around the union contract?

McCarthyism Redux

Menachem Rosensaft, a lawyer in New York City, is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The current Republican red-baiting attacks on Obama/Ayers bring back memories for Rosensaft, of Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith and her historic repudiation of the vicious character assassinations hurled by Senator Joseph McCarthy against countless Americans more than 50 years ago.

The more popular epithets emanating from present-day Republican apparatchiks and the other flacks associated with the 2008 McCain campaign are "terrorist," "Muslim," and "anti-American," but their intent is the same as the red scare labels used so effectively by their McCarthyite role models: to depict their political adversaries generally, and Barack Obama specifically, as somehow dangerous, subversive, even evil.