PPS review of Hamlet's credentials details 'inaccuracies' in his resume, lacks recommendations; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7/2/16

Molly Born, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; PPS review of Hamlet's credentials details 'inaccuracies' in his resume, lacks recommendations:

"Anthony Hamlet was sworn in Friday as superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and in conversations with reporters, he began outlining his vision of the district’s future. But he also had to weather one last review of his past: an independent look at his credentials that detailed several “inaccuracies” in his resume.

Laurel Brandstetter, a former state prosecutor, conducted the review in June after the resume raised questions concerning Mr. Hamlet’s claims about school performance and for wording taken without attribution from other sources. Her report confirmed those discrepancies, but did not include recommendations about whether the school board should take any action.

School district solicitor Ira Weiss’ office on Friday released the 30-page report, plus appendices, via a Right To Know request by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...

More than half of the report included details of the investigation, a list of relevant policies and a line-by-line “factual summary.” In her 9 1/2-page analysis of the data, Ms. Brandstetter found a resume “fraught with errors” relating to Mr. Hamlet’s employment dates and inaccuracies in school grades, graduation rates and suspension rates at one Florida school he led. She said the problems were “primarily the result of typos, inaccurate verbiage, and lack of clarity or precision.”"

Clinton's comments on the Reagans and Aids demand more than apology; Guardian, 3/11/16

Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian; Clinton's comments on the Reagans and Aids demand more than apology:

"Aids historians, LGBT activists and anyone who cares about little things like the truth were immediately enraged at Clinton’s false claims. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were no more leaders discussing Aids in the 1980s than Republicans are at championing abortion access today.

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember,” Clinton said, “how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/Aids back in the 1980s.”

She didn’t lie there. Indeed, it was difficult to talk about Aids throughout the 1980s – largely because of the silence from the White House. In April 1987, activists unveiled a poster that said “Silence = Death” – a month before Reagan would finally devote a speech to the years-long epidemic. That slogan would become the motto of the group Aids Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP), and according to their website, the slogan was asking “Why is Reagan silent about Aids? What is really going on at the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Vatican?”...

But for those of us who care about Aids and LGBT people, it is much harder and important to criticize the frontrunner of the Democratic party, who takes the support of gay voters for granted. Why, in 2016, did the Democratic frontrunner engage so blithely in the erasure of the people who actually did start the “national conversation” about Aids? Was it because they were gay men of the in-your-face variety of activism – many of whom died of the virus?

When Clinton said the Reagans led the way on Aids when “nobody wanted to do anything about it”, she is erasing these people from history in an ugly and dismissive fashion. People initially got HIV in this country through IV drug use, blood transfusions and sex. But while the Reagans looked the other way – even when a friend asked for help – it was was queer activists who were loud as hell in New York and San Francisco who forced the nation to face the plague...

I have been frightened for some time that the crisis of AIDS is not over, especially for black America, and yet it has again largely been erased from our national political consciousness. Aids, which is projected to infect one in two black gay American men, is almost invisible from the presidential race. And now even the Democratic frontrunner has diminished Aids history herself."