In Springfield, Illinois, thousands of teachers turned out to try to save their jobs and programs; music, art and sports activities all being threatened with elimination. Many school districts are hoping for federal stimulus help, but in the meantime are locked into longer teacher contracts and higher salaries for tenured teachers. Some experts predict that American education must adjust to a new reality.

This was followed by a quote from Michael Petrilli (who is identified as representing the Thomas Fordham Institute, which is not identified as a conservative education group): "Not only do our schools have to go on a diet, they need to adapt to a whole new way of life because I--this money is gone, and it's not coming back anytime soon."

Concludes Allen: "A crucial test now facing the nation, how to educate more than 50 million public school students with less."

"Less"--that's the key message here, that teachers, parents and children need to accept that "the money is not there" and "adapt to a whole new way of life"--one in which teachers get paid less and children get less education. Only, if the "money is gone," where did it go?

Here are some facts from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis: Between 1971, when I was entering my school-age years, and 2009, the U.S. per capita GDP doubled, from roughly $21,000 to $42,000 a year (in constant dollars).  Since 1984, a couple of years after I graduated from high school, it's risen by 50 percent--from about $28,000.  Just since 1996, the nation's income per person has increased by something like 20 percent.

Assuming that educating our children is at least as important as our other national priorities, we ought to be able to fund education twice as well as we did 40 years ago, and half again as well as we did 25 years ago.  Why is it, instead, that NBC is telling us that schools are going to have to get by with less? Because while the country as a whole has a lot more money, most of it has gone to making the rich richer--and they have no intention of getting by with less.

I think the logic here is that the Iranian government or some group associated with them took this guy out.   I mean, it's a sign of desperation to start killing your own nuclear scientists.

So who is Harman, that we should trust her sense of what the "logic" behind Middle East violence is? A military hawk, she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee until 2006; when Democrats retook the House, she was not named as the new Intelligence chair, in part because  Time magazine (10/20/06) had reported that Harman in 2005 had promised an Israeli agent that she would try to help pro-Israel lobbyists who had been accused of espionage; in return, the lobbyists' organization, AIPAC, would push Nancy Pelosi, then expected to become House speaker, to make Harman Intelligence chair.

Congressional Quarterly (4/19/09) later advanced the story by reporting that Harman's promise had been recorded by a Bush administration wiretap, and that the reason Harman was not prosecuted for what would seem to be illegal influence-peddling was that Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, wanted to use Harman to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the story that revealed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.  And Harman did, indeed, call the Times to try to get them to kill the piece (Who Runs Gov, 4/21/09).

What was it exactly about this background that suggested to MSNBC that Harman would be a trustworthy source on the question of which player in the Middle East, with Israel among the suspects, might have killed Mohammadi?  And what led NBC Nightly News (1/12/10) to take that quote from Harman's interview and use it as the last word in its January 12 report on the assassination? The answers to those questions may be as hard to discover as the identity of Mohammadi's killers.

Don't buy it.

The MSNBC headline-- sure to be repeated everywhere on Fox News today-- is straight-forward: "Tea Party More Popular Than Dems, GOP." The numbers tell you that Republicans are viewed positively by 28 percent of the public, the Democrats are at 35 percent, while the Tea Party is at 41 percent.

But look at the poll a little more closely. The first thing to know is that most people don't know what the Tea Party movement is--25 percent said they "know very little," 23 percent "know nothing at all." So the question that elicited the 41 percent approval mark had to give people some idea of what it's about. And NBC's poll question offered a remarkably upbeat description:

As you may know, this year saw the start of something known as the Tea Party movement. In this movement, citizens, most of whom are conservatives, participated in demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities, protesting government spending, the economic stimulus package and any type of tax increases. From what you know about this movement, is your opinion of it very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative? If you do not know enough to have an opinion, please say so.

In other words, the "no-tax-hike, responsible spending" party that you've never heard of is a little bit popular.

IGNATIUS: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is--he was going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed.

MITCHELL: Yes.

IGNATIUS: And, you know, I think this, you know, this is not going to....

MATTHEWS: So too much Chamberlain, not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much--too much college professor.