Slate has an article by an Egyptian activist pondering where the revolution went wrong.

The main enemy of the people has always been the security state—the police and the military. We will never get anywhere until they are dismantled entirely. There was a moment when that could have been achieved, when a civilian state could have been built. But Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood would have had to choose the challenge of working with the disparate and bickering forces of the left and the liberals over dealing with the organized certainty of the military.

So, basically, uncompromising extremists could not deal with the ambiguities and give-and-take of the liberal, democratic process. And they had control of the police and the military.

Does anyone doubt what will happen to most of us if the baggers ever got control of the police and the military? In a rational world I don’t see how they would do that, but in a rational world Ted Cruz would be running a dry cleaning store in Sugarland.

See also Aaron David Miller, “Obama’s Egypt Policy Makes Perfect Sense” (Foreign Policy) and Ed Kilgore, “Obama on Egypt Explained.”

It’s no secret that the Right wants to dismantle public education and replace it with a for-profit, private education system. They may not all admit that’s the plan, but the plan is too obvious to ignore.

At Salon, Aaron Kase writes about what the governor of Pennsylvania is doing to his state’s schools.

On Thursday the city of Philadelphia announced that it would be borrowing $50 million to give the district, just so it can open schools as planned on Sept. 9, after Superintendent William Hite threatened to keep the doors closed without a cash infusion. The schools may open without counselors, administrative staff, noon aids, nurses, librarians or even pens and paper, but hey, kids will have a place to go and sit.

The $50 million fix is just the latest band-aid for a district that is beginning to resemble a rotting bike tube, covered in old patches applied to keep it functioning just a little while longer. At some point, the entire system fails.

Things have gotten so bad that at least one school has asked parents to chip in $613 per student just so they can open with adequate services, which, if it becomes the norm, effectively defeats the purpose of equitable public education, and is entirely unreasonable to expect from the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

The needs of children are secondary, however, to a right-wing governor in Tom Corbett who remains fixated on breaking the district in order to crush the teachers union and divert money to unproven experiments like vouchers and privately run charters. If the city’s children are left uneducated and impoverished among the smoldering wreckage of a broken school system, so be it.

Do read the whole thing; it’s mind boggling. And, obviously, this boils down to (a) busting unions and (b) turning education over to profit-seeking interests. But there’s another reason, too.

Do read Bill Keller’s op ed, “War on the Core.” It’s about the right-wing backlash to the Core Curriculum.

The backlash began with a few of the usual right-wing suspects. Glenn Beck warned that under “this insidious menace to our children and to our families” students would be “indoctrinated with extreme leftist ideology.”

(Beck also appears to believe that the plan calls for children to be fitted with bio-wristbands and little cameras so they can be monitored at all times for corporate exploitation.)

Beck’s soul mate Michelle Malkin warned that the Common Core was “about top-down control engineered through government-administered tests and left-wing textbook monopolies.” Before long, FreedomWorks — the love child of Koch brothers cash and Tea Party passion — and the American Principles Project, a religious-right lobby, had joined the cause. Opponents have mobilized Tea Partyers to barnstorm in state capitals and boiled this complex issue down to an obvious slogan, “ObamaCore!”

(As I understand it, the Core was agreed upon by a consortium of educators in several states. Work began during the Bush administration. The Core does not prescribe what children are taught. Instead, it sets standards for what children ought to know, but leaves it to the states to decide how to get there. For example, it might say that third graders ought to be able to read a story and describe the characters, but it does not dictate what stories the children are supposed to read.)

Weighing in on Keller’s column, Paul Krugman says ,

Now, you might argue that the leaders are catering to their base. Brad DeLong likes to remind us of John Stuart Mill’s dictum:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

Even that, however, doesn’t get you all the way there, because there are many things one could pretend to be stupid about, so you need to have some notion of why certain subjects become the subject of dumb conspiracy theories, while others don’t. And I think that the best model is, as I said the other day, the Corey Robin notion that it’s about preserving hierarchy. The idea of a common core disturbs a lot of people on the right not because they fear that it will lead to left-wing indoctrination — it’s far too bland for that — but because it could get in the way of right-wing indoctrination, which is what they believe schools should be doing.

And Corey Robin says,

After decades of “compassionate conservatism,” “a thousand points of light,” and “Morning in America,” dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type.

Do read all of Corey Robin, too. The article explains a lot.

So Rick Santorum now is telling people that the U.S. is a classless society, and that to even speak of a middle class is “Marxism talk.” Which is a bit confusing, because I thought Marx was the one advocating for a classless society. Is Frothy confessing to being a closet Marxist? Weird.

See also Scott Lemieux, Steal a TV and They Throw You In Jail, Steal a Lot of Houses and They Give You a Golden Parachute. Well, the whole post is the title, plus a link to an article about mortgage fraud. But some classless society, huh?

See also Charles Pierce, Truth and Consequences.

Via Mistermix, do read this post by Kathleen Geier, “No, Walmart doesn’t create jobs.”

Guess what? Contrary to the happy talk, Walmart does not create jobs. Actually, it kills them.

Here’s why: first, at the local level, all Walmart does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business. The overwhelming body of evidence, including the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies, suggests that when Walmart enters a community, the most likely result is a net loss of jobs; at best, it’s a wash. In fact, the biggest, best scholarly study about the impact of Walmart on local employment was done by an economist at University of California at Irvine named David Neumark, who is not exactly a wild-eyed liberal. He’s the kind of economist, actually, who writes anti-minimum wage op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.

The devastating impact Walmart has had on jobs becomes most clear when you go macro, and look at its impact not just locally, but on the national economy. In its relentless quest for low prices, Walmart strong-arms its suppliers to cut labor costs to the bone. What this has meant in practice is that many suppliers have been forced to lay off workers and ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas. Because of Walmart, countless jobs in the U.S. have been lost, mostly in manufacturing.

Anyone of a certain age from just about any southern or midwestern small town can tell the story of how the old Main Street businesses died after the Walmart opened. The Walmart not only represented a net loss of jobs; it also changed the way money circulated in the community. It used to be that all the little stores and businesses were owned by local people who also shopped in the community, so the profits they made in their businesses went back into the local economy. The old home town seems poorer and shabbier now.

And, of course, to add insult to injury, taxpayers subsidize Walmart profits by providing government assistance to its employees, so they don’t starve on what Walmart pays them.

Walmart is to the U.S. economy what cancer is to a body.