but first up the chances of peace in the middle east after the latest round of speeches by prime minister netanyahu and president obama. i ll be joined by tom friedman of the new york times who is just back from the middle east. now, here s my take for this week. we ve just gone through an arcane debate about whether barack obama said anything new when he called for an israeli/palestinian settlement based on 1967 borders with mutually agreed upon land swaps. in fact, that has been the working assumption of all negotiating parties, america, israel and the palestinian authority, for over 20 years. it is what the camp david talks of 2000 were based on. it s what elmerit s talks were based on. the real shift in u.s. policy was president obama publicly condemning the palestinian strategy to seek recognition as a state from the u.n. general assembly in september. instead of thanking obama for this, prime minister netanyahu chose to stage, in the words of the former israeli di
but first up the chances of peace in the middle east after the latest round of speeches by prime minister netanyahu and president obama. i ll be joined by tom friedman of the new york times who is just back from the middle east. now, here s my take for this week. we ve just gone through an arcane debate about whether barack obama said anything new when he called for an israeli/palestinian settlement based on 1967 borders with mutually agreed upon land swaps. in fact, that has been the working assumption of all negotiating parties, america, israel and the palestinian authority, for over 20 years. it is what the camp david talks of 2000 were based on, it s what elmert s talks were based on. the real shift in u.s. policy was president obama publicly condemning the palestinian strategy to seek recognition as a state from the u.n. general assembly in september. instead of thanking obama for this, prime minister netanyahu chose to stage, in the words of the former israeli dip
about your state not our country and i think, my senior senator is a wonderful senator and he represents oklahoma fantastically but we have a disagreement on this because i think we can make sure the money is spent right by doing the proper oversight. neil: why isn t anyone saying permanently get rid of them? i hear about a moratorium. why not permanent? guest: i m happy to get a moratorium. i have been fighting this for six years and fighting it all the time i was in the congress and the house of representatives. i m happy to get a moratorium. the american people are way ahead of congress and washington, dc, as usual, they know this is in the something they want. if it affects them individually. remember, most earmarks are not competitively bid and there are a lot of problems with earmarks beaferredz the focus on the parochial besides the focus on parochial benefit. neil: you were way ahead of your party on this. president obama will go out as a great president as long as he
them because they let them take a test over and over and over again until they pass. and i m sure with many of the viewers and you all, that didn t happen to us. we failed. we failed and we had to learn how to fix it. how dare they use a red pen. here s something that confuses me. mindy, hang on. the kids that you see getting into colleges today have to do so much more to get into colleges than when i had to. i mean, they have to have extracurricular activities all over the board and volunteer and their time, i mean, is carefully scheduled out so are we dumbing it down because the requirements are so much more for students to get into college today? you know, that s a really good question. and i could not answer that question but yes, they do have to do a lot more. they have to do a lot more extracurricular and volunteer work but i ve noticed there seems to be a difference between the parochial and private schools vs. the public schools,
too. what is going on with the difference for those children to get into the schools? because the parochial and private schools are doing just as much if not more but yet, those students seem to be grasping the concept much greater. what is it they re doing? this is something that a lot of we at the collegiate level seem to be discussing amongst ourselves wondering why is this happening because we have to seem to go a little further in trying to explain the critical thinking skills of what is lacking. that s our problem. what do we do about it? personally, i think that we need to start backing off of some of the focus on the testing and start going back to the ground level like a lot of us have when we are in school. and we need to get that critical thinking back to the students. stop focusing so much on the standardized test. stop focusing so much on i m going to make you feel bad if i give you an f focusing more on you got this wrong, what do we