Failing Upward: Bush aide who wrote Dow 36,000 to host PBS series

As President, George W. Bush waged war on PBS. Kenneth Tomlinson, who Bush appointed to chair the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, launched a campaign to tilt PBS to the right, including an inept “study” that attempted to demonstrate PBS's alleged leftward tilt by labeling Republican Senator Charles Grassley a “liberal.” And Bush wanted to slash funding for public broadcasting.

Now comes the announcement that PBS will air a new television series hosted by the Executive Director of the George W. Bush institute:

James K. Glassman, Executive Director of the George W. Bush Institute, is the host of a a new half-hour television series on ideas and their consequences which will air on public television stations and non-commercial cable stations nationwide.

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“Our goal with this program is to explore how new ideas, research and technologies affect our world with a balanced panel of the best thinkers we can find,” says Glassman.

“For example,” explains Glassman, in addition to the “twitter revolution” in Iran, “we've already taped programs that look at what the latest research on pay-for-performance for teachers might mean for public education. We're planning programs on global health, domestic economic policy, and the future of journalism, just to name a few of the topics we hope to address.”

Glassman served in Bush's State Department, but he may be best-known as the author of Dow 36,000, a 1999 book that predicted the stock market, then at about 10,000, would reach 36,000 within three to five years. Three years later, the Dow was at 7,200.

I'm sure those who followed Glassman's 1999 guidance that “Stocks are in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground -- to the neighborhood of 36,000” can't wait to see what he as to say about “ideas and their consequences.”