Weekend Quotables

D.C. Shootout

Teacher unions and school activists around the country will be watching closely as D.C. school boss Michelle Rhee tries to outgun AFT prez, Randi Weingarten.

According to WaPo:

The 14-month struggle between Rhee and the 4,000-member Washington Teachers' Union, AFT's local affiliate, is a potential watershed for Weingarten. She wants to protect her 1.4 million-strong national membership from the spread of what she calls Rhee's "scorched earth" approach and roll back the broad public perception that teachers unions are an impediment to reform because they harbor mediocre or incompetent instructors.

Obama:

“I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem,” Mr. Obama said. “To me, it’s part of the solution.”

(N.Y. Times)

Rhee:

"People tell me the unions are an inevitable part of this [school reform]. My thing is, what has that gotten us so far? All the collaboration and holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya'?"

(Washington Post)

Frank Rich on the Limbaugh Party

“It’s up to me to hijack the Obama honeymoon,” Limbaugh soon gloated, “and I’ve done it.” In his dreams. He has hijacked what’s left of the Republican Party; the Obama honeymoon remains intact. The nightmare is that we have so irrelevant, clownish and childish an opposition party at a moment when America is in an all-hands-on-deck emergency that’s as trying as war.