Mr. Maher’s most recent string of vulgar comments has little to do with political party, and everything to do with his utter contempt for women.Mr. Maher’s use of the terms dumb twat, bimbos, and cunt hurts not only Rep. Bachmann and Gov. Palin, but each and every mother, daughter and wife.Mr. Maher’s statements reveal his belief that rather than criticizing or questioning a woman on her positions or ideas, it is acceptable and appropriate to demean and diminish her by sexualizing her or presuming that, because she’s a woman, she’s unintelligent.
That extremism required that the Bush years be filled with images of CODEPINK protesting on Capitol Hill, anti-war activists clogging the streets of New York City and left-wing commentators beating their chests with the self-righteous indignation of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.But in the morally murky afterglow of the Obama years, the certainty of these secular saints has melted away.President Barack Obama bowed to his generals’ demands by tripling troops in an unending war. CODEPINK did nothing.Obama backed down on Guantanamo Bay. Anti-war protesters stayed at home.America invaded its third Muslim country in a decade. The American left meekly went along. Without the slightest hint of irony, liberals defended the president’s indefensible position by returning again to a pose of moral certainty.Democrats streamed to the floors of the House and Senate to praise the president for invading Libya. It was, after all, a moral mission that would stop the slaughter of innocent civilians. Whether protesting for peace or calling for war, these liberals once again convinced themselves of the moral superiority of their positions.While one can make the moral argument that countries can be attacked strictly on humanitarian grounds, that argument is laughable when it comes to Libya.How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? During Saddam’s two decades in Iraq, he killed more Muslims than anyone in history and used chemical weapons against his own people and neighboring states.[snip]Katrina vanden Heuvel, one of the few liberals to take a principled stand against what America is doing in Libya, has written in The Nation that the anti-war left has been silent since Obama took office because they don’t want to hurt the president’s reelection chances.In defending Obama’s Libya offensive, they are compromising their own morals. The American left is also making it abundantly clear that it does not find all wars morally reprehensible — only those begun by Republicans.
Yes, Casey could have done a ‘50s-style duck-and-cover. Hey, kid, don't you know you should just cower and curl up into a ball? And, for sure, violence is never the answer...except with the Nazis, Mussolini, and Napoleon; during the American Revolution, the Barbary Wars, and the Battle of Tours; and when stopping the criminals during the North Hollywood Shootout, University of Texas Tower Shooting, and incidents every single day in which someone, somewhere uses physical force to thwart a crime. It's never the answer -- except, sometimes, when you actually have to deal with reality.
Perhaps he'll take the advice of another expert, child psychologist Susan Bartell, and find some other way to "manage" it. When analyzing Casey's response, she said, "A better course of action...would have been for him to walk away. Would have been for him to immediately take the power away from the bully, who was punching him in the face, and just run away, walk away...." "Take the power away from the bully...."
For two weeks, the administration was largely quiet about the unrest in Libya until the insurgents began taking entire cities and seemed on the verge of closing in on Gaddafi’s Tripoli. Then President Obama called on Gaddafi to step down and stop the “unacceptable” level of violence. But things then got worse, not better, once Gaddafi began to employ a level of violence that his ilk counts on to stay in power (cf. Assad in Syria or Ahmadinejad in Iran). So at last we announced a funny sort of no-fly-zone, inasmuch as Gaddafi can put down the rebellion without use of his planes and gunships.
Debt is now the father of us all. In some sense, every cruise missile fired, every Social Security check cashed, ever NPR show aired is done so in part with borrowed money. In response, the president saw the impending doom of insolvency, appointed a bipartisan commission to draft a solution, and then ignored his own appointees’ recommendations. So far the excuse is largely that George Bush ran up debt as well, although last month Obama’s red-ink exceeded the entire 2007 budget deficit under Bush — 30 days of Obama trumping 365 of Bush.
There is no longer a “war on terror,” and we are to understand that its former components — tribunals, renditions, preventative detention, Guantanamo, Predator assassinations, Iraq, the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and intercepts — were as subversive to the Constitution under Bush as they are essential to our security under Obama.
The thing is that despite being protective of my profession—teaching really does require unique knowledge and skill that few people outside of education actually understand—I’m ready for people to start questioning teacher preparation programs delivered by colleges of education.
Here’s why: I didn’t learn a darn thing in five years of higher education—including the graduate work that earns me a 10% annual salary stipend here in NC—that actually prepared me to be a classroom teacher.
In fact, I think I'd go as far as to say that outside of a course on Constructivism and an adolescent psychology class taught by a professor that I still quote to this day, my degrees were essentially exercises in professional hoop-jumping—an expensive prerequisite for employment that did little to help me once I was actually employed.I am 99% sure that most teachers feel the same way, but very few of them will ever admit it. For that reason alone, I admire Ferriter's honesty.
Easy: Start by requiring longer apprenticeships for pre-service educators. And---as Louise mentions in a particularly insightful comment below---require that at least a part of that apprenticeship be spent working in the field that a teacher is going to be certified in.
Do you know how much actual full-time teaching I did before becoming certified as a teacher?
About 8 weeks.
Sure—I went on a school visit here or there. I also spent another 6-8 weeks observing my cooperating teachers in the senior year of my education program.
But I only had about 8 weeks of full-time experience with students before I was licensed for life. The rest of my 5 YEARS of college preparation was spent strapped into seats in lecture halls listening to professors drone on about collaborative learning for hours on end.
And do you know how much time I spent working with other geographers, journalists or scientists---the fields that I'm supposedly qualified to prepare my students to enter?
Not one day.Can it really be that simple? Given my belief that Ferriter has spent some significant time thinking about this problem, I dare say--yes. To be it seems imminently logical. It is a two step process--learn the subject matter that you will teach and learn how to teach in a real environment with real students under the guidance of an experienced, effective and knowledgeable teacher.
That could be a challenge for some, however, as teachers surveyed said only about 63 percent of their students would be prepared for college without taking remedial coursework. Teachers estimated about half of their students would graduate from college.
Since society as a whole benefits from universal access to the “basic human right” of health care, the Left thinks it’s fair to total up the cost and spread it across the entire population.But now we’ve got over a thousand waivers to ObamaCare, including one that applies to an entire state. Everyone is not paying for government-run health insurance, at least not equally. Some corporate and union entities are granted permission to step outside the system. What kind of “universal” solution doesn’t apply to everyone?
In the context of federal spending that will total something like $3.8 trillion this year, $61 billion is a rounding error. Yet the Democrats resisting that amount in House-approved cuts say it will wreck the economy while leaving children unschooled, taking food from the mouths of the elderly, and casting disabled people into the streets.Yet, when we talking of a 1.6 percent reduction in spending, you would think the apocalypse is just around the corner. Want an example? Here is one from Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and this is pretty mild.
Laughter is the only appropriate response to such predictions. In these absurd times, when both parties quibble over crumbs while the layer cake of debt rises higher and higher, laughter is a mark of fiscal seriousness.
Since coming into power in 2009, Gov. Luis Fortuño (R-Puerto Rico) has cut government spending by 20 percent, lowered taxes and raised the territory’s bond status to its highest rating in 35 years – all during a punishing economic climate.Impressive, yes. Not getting a lot of play elsewhere.
Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”
For decades state officials have encouraged adults to believe in the financial equivalent of the Tooth Fairy: that state pensions can yield high returns while being risk-free. Now taxpayers are in for a serious toothache.Nearly every state offers defined-benefit pension plans for public employees. Financed through a mix of employee and employer contributions along with the investment returns on pension funds, a defined-benefit plan represents a contractual obligation to dole out a set amount in annual payments for as long as the recipient lives, regardless of whether there are sufficient assets in the fund at the time of the employee’s retirement.One would think this obligation to pay no matter what would have led states to invest conservatively and plan ahead. Instead, they have been following accounting rules that pretty much guarantee the funds will be unsustainable.First, by law, states are not required to pony up regular contributions to pension systems. Lawmakers generally jump on any opportunity to be fiscally irresponsible, so many states have deferred pension payments and used their share of the contribution to increase spending in other areas.
“During a hearing conducted on March 1, 2011, the District Court determined that L.K. is not competent to make her own medical decisions and directed that she undergo a radical hysterectomy on March 3, 2011, against her desires. L.K. objects to the surgery on religious grounds, and expert testimony admitted at the hearing indicated that her religious objections are delusional.” So states an order of the Montana Supreme Court, in Office of State Public Defender on Behalf of L.K. v. Montana Fourth Judicial District Court; the Montana Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order, and ordered an expedited appeal.
If, as seems likely, New York City must lay off thousands of teachers
because of budget problems, Mayor Michael Bloombergwould like a say in who goes
and who stays. Topping his list of those who should lose their jobs are
2,671 teachers who have been rated unsatisfactor over the past five years, 882
teachers who lack a teaching license, 291 whom an arbitrator found to be
incompetent or guilty of malfeasance and 183 with recrods of excessive lateness
or absenteeism. But state law enshrining the policy of "last in, first
out" doesnt' allow performance to be a factor and that means good teachers -
possibly even great teachers - are likely to be forced out of the
classroom.
The point being, I suppose, is that unionized teachers stand as a thin chalk-stained line keeping Wisconsin from descending into the dystopian non-union educational hellscape of Texas. Interesting, if it wasn't complete bullsh**.
We reject the argument that because “person” is defined for purposes of FOIA to include a corporation, the phrase “personal privacy” in Exemption 7(C) reaches corporations as well. The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.
