Huntsman Makes Sense Again

This Republican Wants Obamacare To Go Forward, Mandate GOP Idea(VIDEO):

Back in 2012 Jon Huntsman was likely the only Republican Democrats feared as being able to beat President Obama. The reason is that he is a pragmatic moral Conservative that does care about the working middle class.

During the 2012 election he simply did not fit in with the irresponsible candidates running for the Republican nomination. They were all running for President as if they were in an alternate state of reality. Remember these were the characters whose audience booed a gay soldier defending the country and cheered when Rick Perry was acknowledged as the governor of the state that executes the most. Most importantly were the intrinsic beliefs of Republicans towards those unable to purchase insurance. They cheered when asked if they should be allowed to die...

Beaver's Boehner

Jim Beaver

I cannot think of a better put-down nickname I've ever heard than the one I just heard for John Boehner: The Weeping Cheeto.

GOPers Will Get The Blame

From The Can't Fool Everybody Every Time Department:
CNN Poll: Republicans would bear the brunt of shutdown blame - CNN.com:

...A CNN/ORC International poll released Monday morning, hours before funding for the government is scheduled to run out, also indicates that most Americans think Republicans in Congress are acting like spoiled children in this fiscal fight, with the public divided on whether the president is acting like a spoiled child or a responsible adult...

Feds Vs. NC ID

Feds challenge N.C.'s new voter ID law:
The Obama administration is going to court Monday to challenge what it described as "highly restrictive" voting laws in North Carolina that limit early balloting and require voters to present photo identification.

The move is an extension of the Justice Department campaign to rein in new statutes in wake of a Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to strike down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act...

Truth From Bob

Wisdom From Bill

B. Clinton: Hillary's next campaign would be different:

...The former president added: "The main thing you can't do, the great trick in any human endeavor, including politics, is you must learn the lessons of your mistakes and your failures without becoming a general who fights the last war, because every new encounter will be shaped by different forces..."

The Daily Flashback: Lunacy Raygun Edition

Ronald Reagan’s shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illness - Salon.com:

...President Reagan never understood mental illness. Like Richard Nixon, he was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism. Two months after taking office, Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, a young man with untreated schizophrenia. Two years later, Reagan called Dr. Roger Peele, then director of St. Elizabeths Hospital, where Hinckley was being treated, and tried to arrange to meet with Hinckley, so that Reagan could forgive him. Peele tactfully told the president that this was not a good idea. Reagan was also exposed to the consequences of untreated mental illness through the two sons of Roy Miller, his personal tax advisor. Both sons developed schizophrenia; one committed suicide in 1981, and the other killed his mother in 1983. Despite such personal exposure, Reagan never exhibited any interest in the need for research or better treatment for serious mental illness...

The Democratic Error

Government Shutdown Not A Good Idea - A Stupid Argument Made By Smart People - Esquire:

...Moreover, have the Democrats ever shown any inclination to make a meal of the simple, self-evident fact that the other party has gone completely out of its mind? It's not enough to decry the ongoing vandalism. The nihilism behind it has to be brought out and hammered home, day after day, election after election. Letting the crazy people work their crazy will while the rest of us suffer in the vain hope that voters will figure out on their own what happened to them, and why, is a fool's errand.

Blitzer Has A Backbone?

For the first time in ages, a major media figure has challenged a GOPer over facts, or rather the lack thereof. Could this signal a media turn back toward actual journalism?
 
Must Watch: Wolf Blitzer and Michele Bachmann Brawl Over the Benefits of Obamacare | Mediaite:

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer engaged in a tense and heated exchange with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Friday over a House GOP effort to defund the Affordable Care Act or force the government into a shutdown. The argument became animated over a variety of assertions Bachmann made, at one point prompting Blitzer to insist that what she asserted was flatly “not true...”

 

Shutting Off Comments

Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments | Popular Science:

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off...

And I don't blame them.

O Pitches ACA

Modern Slave Labor

Will Work for Free: How Unpaid Internships Cheapen Workers of All Ages | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS:

...But increasingly, what interns face now is that there are no jobs, and no prospects of a job waiting at the end, no matter how well they do. Indeed, they're going to have to do multiple internships, become serial interns, and even at the end of that, they may be in a very precarious position. So it's really something that sounds good for a lot of people but increasingly is not working out. Since 2008, rising college tuition, record levels of student debt and high levels of youth unemployment have exacerbated the dismal prospects for unpaid internships. Unpaid internships have become a straw that breaks the camel's back for many people....

One of the reasons I got out of the degree-earning business and one of the reasons I discourage undergraduate students from seeking advanced degrees. Several good undergraduate programs have ruined their recruitment prospects via internships and "clinical" hours.

Ph.Ds In Public Schools

Why Aren’t More Ph.D.s Teaching in Public Schools? - Laura McKenna - The Atlantic:

...American universities award more than 60,000 doctoral degrees every year. However, there are not enough academic jobs for all those graduates. One study asserts that only 41 percent of Ph.D.s will find tenure-track positions. Some studies are slightly more optimistic. In a report for the academic journal PS, Jennifer Seagal Diascro reported that 49 percent of the 816 Ph.D.s who graduated from political science programs between 2009 and 2010 found permanent academic positions.

I'll offer a reason not mentioned in the article: lack of respect. People who earn terminal degrees typically are highly motivated and very intelligent, thus they are less likely to develop the patience and philosophical inclination that teachers need to thrive in K-12 and far less likely to suffer fools kindly-- they expect people to listen to them.

A Reporting Celebrity Visit

I wonder if he heard the banjos...

The Joys of North Carolina - Dan Rather's Official Website:

Finished a reporting and interviewing trip to Charlotte, Asheville, Franklin and a few other places in North Carolina. Is there a friendlier place in the country than the Smoky Mountain area? Doubt it. Texas is the only place I can think of that might--just might--edge it. But if so, only by a tad. The Smoky Mountain region is well known for its beauty, and rightly so. But anyone who goes there and doesn't recognize the just plain decency and exceptionally warm friendliness of the folks has to be either not paying attention or brain-dead...

Who's Where On ACA

The Morning Plum: Ted Cruz’s stance on Obamacare is the GOP’s stance on Obamacare:

...* Eighty percent of Americans, including 82 percent of independents and 75 percent of Republicans, say threatening a government shutdown is not an acceptable way to negotiate.

* Americans say overwhelmingly that Republicans are not trying to work with Obama by 70-23. By contrast, 51 percent say Obama is trying to work with Republicans...

GOPers Continue Extortion

House Republicans open two-front war on ObamaCare | Fox News:

House Republicans are poised to open a two-front war on ObamaCare, pushing for a vote this weekend on a bill that would delay the health care law in exchange for raising the debt ceiling -- a week after handing the Senate a separate bill that would defund the law...

The Daily Flashback: Iran Hostage Edition

October Surprise News Coverage(House of Representatives - February 05, 1992):

Suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran over the hostages have circulated since the day of President Reagan's inaugural, when Iran agreed to release the 52 American hostages exactly five minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. Later, as it became known that arms started to flow to Iran via Israel only a few days after the inauguration, suspicions deepened that a secret arms-for-hostages deal had been concluded.

Five years later, when the Iran-contra affair revealed what seemed to be a similar swap of hostages for arms delivered through Israel, questions were revived about the 1980 election. In a nice, ironic twist, the phrase `October surprise,' which Vice Presidential candidate George Bush had coined to warn of possible political manipulation of the hostages by Jimmy Carter, began to be applied to the suspected secret activities of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign...

The Double Fake Secession

It's a Great Media Stunt to Try to Secede from Colorado | Jason Salzman:
...But don't take it seriously, except as a novel way right-wingers are manipulating the media to promote their unpopular attacks on common-sense gun-safety, clean-energy laws, and other progressive legislation at the state level.

Murderers Targets Non-Muslims

Al-Shabab: Foreigners in Kenya were a 'legitimate target':

Al-Shabab, the armed Somali Islamic extremist group that attacked a shopping mall in Kenya, said Wednesday that foreigners were a "legitimate target" and confirmed witness accounts that gunmen tried to let Muslims go free while killing or taking the others captive.

In an email exchange Wednesday with The Associated Press, al-Shabab said the jihadis "carried out a meticulous vetting process" so the Muslims would not be harmed. According to published accounts, witnesses have said the gunmen rounded up people, asked questions about Islam that a Muslim would know and told the Muslims to leave the mall...

The Management Underbelly

Some people will make much of this as a failing in education, but these two nabods were not in education, though that's what their paycheck says. They were in management. I have observed that when you hire a teacher you are going to get one of two kinds of people: those who will have their markers pried from their cold, dead fingers, and those who discover that teaching is work and immediately start scheming to escape the classroom by getting into management. Don't by surprised when these frustrated 1%ers turnout to be bullies, liars, and hypocrites

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A school official’s unbelievably racist texts - Salon.com:

...There is so much that’s contemptible about the exchanges between Como and Donato – the simmering, near constant anger they display, the grotesque, dehumanizing way they view pretty much anybody who isn’t a white man (to their credit, though, I didn’t notice any gay slurs in the lot) and the jaw-dropping amount of arrogance and privilege it takes to speak that hatefully, that freely. But what stinks most is the betrayal it represents, the lie that their jobs were. The disgust they had for their own kids. “They were friendly to our faces,” Zhaqweyza Armstrong, a 16 year-old Coatesville High junior, told the Inquirer Monday, “and then they talked about us behind our backs.”

Right on cue to back me up, Salon posts another essay on teaching: