Rick Santorum @RickSantorum
7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges. As president I will work to protect marriage
Kenneth Bernstein @teacherken
.@RickSantorum u mean bigots like u lost their ability to interfere with the rights of other people
Kenneth Bernstein @teacherken
.@RickSantorum if yr marriage threatened b/c gays can get married 1-u have very weak marriage; 2- is it because u r repressing b/c of fear
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed.
Spoken by a former railroad lawyer named A. Lincoln, to the National Union League on June 9, 1864.
Wonder what he would say today? I don't. He, the first Republican President, would rightly be appalled.
1. He won Nevada big, but with significantly fewer votes than 4 years ago, demonstrating a clear lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy even among Republican voters.
2. As a result of primary contests, Romney now trails Obama in New Hampshire, even before the recent positive news on jobs. For a while, Romney was a stand-inm for a generic Republican in polling versus Obama. Now the reality of Romney is known, and Obama looks better in comparison.
3. Just got daily email blast from Mike Allen's Political Playbook on Politico, from which I note the following:
TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel, on today's "The Chris Matthews Show": "You know that famous story about that guy in overalls in a West Virginia town when the FDR cortege came by, and he was weeping and a reporter said to him, 'Did you know him?' And he said, 'No, but he knew me.' ... FDR was a wealthy man, but people felt that he understood them. I don't think people feel that way about Mitt Romney."
Make of all this whatever you want, but it seems to me that the more people see Romney, the better Obama looks in comparison.
It originally appeared in Rolling Stone. i just read it at Reader Supported News. The title is simple, One Town's War on Gay Teens. It is about the Anoka-Hennepin School District near Minneapolis. It is in the 6th Congressional District, and the Congresswoman Michele Bachmann graduated from Anoka High School, although she no longer lives in the district.
As a teacher and as a human being I am shocked and enraged by what I read. As a teacher I need to be able to support ALL of my students, while modeling for them respect for others. In this district that is impossible. For 14 years it had a "No Homo Promo" policy that prevented faculty and staff from in any way discussing homosexuality in a way that might be perceived as promoting homosexuality. After suicides and law suits the district apparently moved towards a "neutrality" policy that is no better. Consider:
English teachers worried they'd get in trouble for teaching books by gay authors, or books with gay characters. Social-studies teachers wondered what to do if a student wrote a term paper on gay rights, or how to address current events like "don't ask, don't tell." Health teachers were faced with the impossible task of teaching about AIDS awareness and safe sex without mentioning homosexuality. Many teachers decided once again to keep gay issues from the curriculum altogether, rather than chance saying something that could be interpreted as anything other than neutral.
"There has been widespread confusion," says Anoka-Hennepin teachers' union president Julie Blaha. "You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers." Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. "I was told by teachers, 'You have to be careful, it's really not safe for you to come out,'" says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. "I felt like I couldn't have a picture of my family on my desk." When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an "open homosexual," he didn't feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, "Are you gay?" he panicked. "I was terrified to answer that question," Fietek says. "I thought, 'If I violate the policy, what's going to happen to me?'"
that tells us all too much about what is wrong in our nation/society
just heard as part of the intro to a fascinating discussion on Up With Chris Hayes
Were California to close all of its prisons and send all of the inmates to the the University of California paying their costs it would save $7 billion a year.
Report cards went out yesterday. For some students whose average for last quarter is below 2.0, they are now ineligible for extra-curricular activities. A few who were ineligible perhaps just became eligible. Some basketball teams may have lost key players.
For the last few years we had been trying a different standard - if you failed even a sinle course you were ineligible, even if your average was above 2.0 and you were on track for enough credits to be able to graduate. Too many "key players" were becoming ineligible, especially in football just before the playoffs and in basketball in mid-season, so the school system went back to this older standard. I have to wonder what message it gives to some of our students. But that is not my reason for writing about it.
This Saturday reflection is on grades, test scores, and learning, what I think of them, what it means for me a teacher.
And then there is Jxxx - he is the only one of my students this quarter who did not pass my course. Of course, he has not shown up to school now for four weeks. His family has been notified, other students see him near the school immediately afterward. He was officially repeating 9th grade. Had he even shown up for his midterm and gotten 30% (well below his normal performance for me) he still would have passed even with zeros for all the missing homework and classwork.
On one hand, I'm angry because this would have been my first quarter ever in this school with all students passing. On the other, I'm saddened because none of us seem to be able to reach him about what he is doing to himself.
That is the first line of tomorrow's New York Times column by Charles Blow, titled Romney, the Rich and the Rest, about which Blow has already tweeted this evening, seeking feedback (which you can give him via @CharlesMBlow).
He reminds us of a number of the Mittster's 'greatest hits' such as this:
This is the same man who in November claimed that federal employees are making “a lot more money than we are.” What?! We? What we? Please direct me to the federal employees with the $20 million paychecks. In fact, The Washington Post pointed out in November that federal employees on average “are underpaid by 26.3 percent when compared with similar nonfederal jobs, a ‘pay gap’ that increased by about 2 percentage points over the last year while federal salary rates were frozen.”
You can read the column for a lot more examples.
For example, after reminding us that Romney supported the Ryan budget, Blow informs us of some of the impact of that budget (keep reading below the squiggle):
I am surprised that I could not find a post on it.
It totally takes apart Romney's claim that his words were taken out of context. As Krugman notes
he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
For example, on Romney's assertion that if the safety net is broken he would fix it, Krugman reminds us
On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”
That statement is, as Krugman points out, dishonest, since poverty programs have nothing like the overhead of private insurance companies, spending 90 to 95% of their funding on services, while insurance companies are, might I remind people, balking at the provision of the Affordable Care Act that 85% of premiums be returned in benefits. But to put it simply, as does Krugman,
But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?
It is not easy to abstract, and in a sense I will not.
Rather than the official poverty level of 22,314 - which gives 15.1% of our population, or 46.2 million people, of whom approximately 20 million are non-Hispanic whites, 13 million Hispanic and almost11 million Black - Robinson argues to use a figure of the poverty level plus 25%, which results in approximately 1 in 5 Americans. Robinson writes
Romney says that we have a safety net. That’s still true, despite the best efforts of his party to rip it to shreds.
Robinson reminds us that the figures he is using are from 2010, resulting from a sharp rise beginning 2007. The last 2 years of the Bush administration created the beginning of the crisis, regardless of in whose presidency the greatest number of people went on to foodstamps, a major portion of the social safety net. Another major portion is unemployment insurance, and we all here remember that Romney's part has fought against extending benefits for those with long periods without a job, and as of yet we have done nothing for the 99ers, those who cannot get a job even beyond the extended benefits (which are not offered in all states).
My Dear Lord Bishop X.
(I just assume you prefer the medieval title)
I sat in the pew on Sunday morning recently and listened with interest to your letter warning of the threat to religious ...
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It's crazy, but it's true: I could not afford to go to work today.
I have a 45-minute commute to and from work, which costs me about ten dollars in gas each day. I'm down to six whole dollars, ...
