yurbud
yurbud's JournalPIC: this is the stupidest reason Jeb Bush shouldn't be presiden, but I hope it does the trick
Please post this where your religious right friends can see it.
I myself am not prejudiced against Chang-ists, but since fundamentalist Christians are, they need to know this about the GOP's next golden boy.
PIC: Obama DID offer Mitt Romney a job (this wasn't supposed to get out).
He didn't pass the audition though.
PROJECT CENSORED: Education “Reform” a Trojan Horse for Privatization
The title sums it up perfectly: education "reform" isn't about reform at all, but diverting tax dollars away from the classroom and into the pockets of hedge fund managers and the other scammers who broke our and the world economy.
Wouldn't it be nice if our Democratic president we just re-elected dropped these conservative, profoundly corrupt and destructive policies?
Censored News Cluster: From Bankster Bailout to Blessed Unrest: News We Can Use to Create a US Economy for the 99 Percent
Paul Rosenberg, Education Reform Vs. the 99%, Random Lengths News, February 1023, 2012, http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/images/IssuePDFs/2012-feb/rl_02-09-12.pdf.
Paul Thomas, Testing and Poverty in Education, TheDaily Censored (blog), August 8, 2011, http://www.dailycensored.com/2011/08/08/poverty-and-testing-in-education-the-present-scientifico-legal-complex.
http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2012/04/13/education-reform-a-trojan-horse-for-privatization/
http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/11/07/testing-continues-poverty-and-limited-education/
PIC: Krugman on jobs "Americans won't do"
There is NO job Americans won't do--there are only jobs we can't afford to do because some employer is trying to pad his profits by screwing his workers out of a fair day's wages.
I am an American citizen and I personally have climbed in the back of trucks full of garbage to act as a human compactor, cleaned toilets, and shoveled shit out from under an outhouse with a garden trowel without being able to take a bath for a couple of days after. I have even worked as a substitute teacher in sixth grade through high school for a while.
I'm sure there are worse things you've done you can add in the replies.
TOON: Tom Tomorrow on the fiscal cliff
The real question is in the last panel: why do we let conservatives set the agenda?
How small do their numbers have to become in congress before Dems in congress and Obama treat them like the shriveling, dying, crank party they are?
TOON: the deaths Republicans DON'T investigate
Great toon though it leaves out the teens of thousands of civilian dead in Afghanistan and roughly a million dead in Iraq.
The same people who are demanding answers now were not too eager to investigate what went wrong before 9/11 either.
The last time Republicans had a laser-like focus like this was when they spent a decade looking at who Bill Clinton dropped his trousers with.
TOM FRIEDMAN's new level of stupid: Arne Duncan for Secretary of State
Obama is better than anyone the Republicans put up for president any issue I can think of even education FUNDING, but when it comes to education "REFORM," he is so wrong that Republicans applauded the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
Republicans and corporate Democrats love the current version of education "reform" because Wall Street hedge fund managers have figured out how to financialize educating our kids and skimming yet more tax dollars into their own pockets instead of putting them in the classroom, and they will pay top dollar, both in campaign donations and after office high paying jobs, to the politicians who will put them in the driver's seat and our money in their pockets.
I doubt that the problem with our foreign policy is that we kowtow to business interests TOO LITTLE.
You just have to read the Wikileaks on State Department cables about say Haiti, Levi Strauss, and the minimum wage to see how our current foreign policy already puts corporate profits over any hope of the poorest people in the world climbing out of poverty.
About the only way a corporate tool like Arne Duncan could improve on that is a "Race to the Top" to see which country can donate the most organs of those who die from our other foreign policies.
Finally, theres a reason that since the end of the cold war our secretaries of state have racked up more miles than theyve made history. Before 1995, the job involved ending or avoiding superpower conflicts and signing big arms control treaties. Those were the stuff of heroic diplomacy. Fortunately, today there are fewer big wars to end, and the big treaties now focus more on trade and the environment than nukes and theyre very hard to achieve. Also, todays secretary of state has to deal with so many more failed or failing states. Secretary Hillary Clinton practically had to forge the Syrian opposition groups into a coherent collective, as a necessary precursor to persuading them to do the right things. Today, to make history as a secretary of state, you have to make the countries to deal with first.
In short, were still indispensable, but the problems are much more intractable. Our allies are not what they used to be and neither are our enemies, who are less superpowers and more superempowered angry men and women. A lot of countries will need to go back to the blackboard, back to the basics of human capacity building, before they can partner with us on anything. So while were not likely to shift our secretary of education to secretary of state, lets at least understand why it is not such a preposterous idea.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/opinion/friedman-my-secretary-of-state.html?ref=thomaslfriedman
How Obama could destroy decades of GOP work to undermine Social Security
The GOP keeps insisting Social Security is part of the deficit even though it has it's own separate tax and an accumulated surplus that will last until 2037.
Obama's Social Security tax cut seemed to play into the Republicans hands by making that depletion of the trust fund date sooner.
But he could turn that apparent weakness into a strength by keeping the low rate and raising the cap on income subject to Social Security tax (currently $110,000) so that the program remains solvent for the next 100 years, and require that the cap be indexed so that the tax rate NEVER has to be raised again.
How exactly could the Republicans oppose permanent NO TAX INCREASES on Social Security? Even Grover Norquist would have a hard time pretending there's a problem with that.
Expose of Charter School Corruption in The New Republic
Noah bases his observations about Arizona's Wild West of charters on investigative reporting by Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic.
He quotes from Ryman's article:
The schools purchases from their own officials, Ryman writes, range from curriculum and business consulting to land leases and transportation services. A handful of non-profit schools outsource most of their operations to a board members for-profit company. A nonprofit called Great Hearts Academies runs 15 Arizona charter schools. Since 2009, according to Ryman, the schools have purchased $987,995 in books from Educational Sales Co., whose chairman, Daniel Sauer, is a Great Hearts officer. And that doesnt count additional book purchases made directly by parents. Six of the Great Hearts schools have links on their Web sites for parents who wish to make such purchases. The links are, of course, to Educational Sales Co. Since 2007 Sauer has donated $50,400 to Great Hearts. You can call that philanthropy, or you can call that an investment on which Sauers company received a return of more than 1800 percent. Im not sure even Russian oligarchs typically get that much on the back end.
http://wp.me/p2odLa-32Z
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