Wow you read the book? If you suggested for me to read something I might not do it but I sure as hell wouldn't act like I knew what you were talking about. Read the book and we can debate. Don't read the book if you don't want to.

It should have said read a book about Austrian economics but here comes DaddyTorgo persecution complex. Throw out a few more fuck's it really drives home your point.

What will it take for both of you to see how smug you both are?

.

SI

A third person who decides to get involved in our discussion?

You're welcome. :)

$20B is alot of money. BP stock price is down < 1% from the news.
BP agrees to place $20 billion in escrow for spill costs - Jun. 16, 2010

This may be my go to reply from now on:

"Sorry sir, the chef ran out of fish." Well what do you expect...

"This guy is tailgating me" Well...

"Shiloh Labuff can't act" Well...

"The weatherman said it would be sunny today" Well...

It's also completely irrelevant and actually destructive to high-performing and well-run schools in good communities. At various times prominent and consistently top-ranked high schools in Illinois like New Trier, Highland Park, Northside Prep, and Lane Tech have been cited as "failing" by NCLB tests, which is ridiculous. Both Highland Park and New Trier, for instance, average ACT composites over 25 and 26 respectively, and graduate over 95% of their senior class.

In my school district, which is also one of the top-performing ones in the country, there is yearly talk of having to "game" the system because of the existence of a particular minority and transient community in one part of our catchment area, which is ridiculous. We've also seen a massive shift in funding away from curriculum for top-performers to curriculum for the lowest performers (it used to be balanced, now it's not).

I'm really surprised, Jon, that you would be OK with a policy that drags down high-performers to mediocrity in order to coax better performance out of poor performers.

I've seen so few "high performing" public schools in my lifetime that such a thing simply doesn't compute. Most, frankly, aren't worth the cost of the explosives it'd take to demolish them. Their primary purpose around here is to provide government subsidized daycare & anything other than that is the equivalent of a unicorn for me, I've heard stories about them but have never actually seen one.

The schools aren't really the big problem, the parents are. Sure teachers and resources are better at schools with more funding from property taxes, but the gap shouldn't be this wide based on it. Parents need to give a shit about their kids education and make sure they are doing well.

I'm not saying the schools are off the hook, but the education they receive doesn't matter if the parents don't give a shit what their kid does.

As Jon said, schools are turning into daycare centers. That's not on the schools, that's on the parents.

That's not really that much. The fishing industry is billions a year I believe and that is shot for who knows how long. Tourism is huge and not only does money not come down to those areas, but people will lose a lot of jobs. Some estimates in Florida alone are showing the potential for 200,000 jobs being lost and they aren't even getting the brunt of this oil.

So when you add up all the businesses that will be destroyed, jobs lost, as well as cleanup costs, $20 billion seems kind of low to me. Especially when you consider that this thing is still spewing a shit-ton of oil into the Gulf as we speak.

Major review of No Child Left Behind. Kids moved ahead in math, but in little else. | Get Schooled

Rand Paul is not a libertarian. Call it "pragmatic" to make it sound better all you want, but he's a Republican.

Move to somewhere that's less of a "welfare" state then. Unfortunately that'd mean it was too blue for you.

Well you are JoninMiddle GEORGIA. Of course you haven't seen "high performing" public schools.

That's kinda what I said, but, yeah.

FOXNews.com - Poll: On Disaster Clean-Ups, Louisiana Voters Give Poorer Marks to Obama Than Bush

Louisiana voters think President George W. Bush did a better job handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina than President Obama has done in the wake of the BP oil spill, according to a new poll.

The Public Policy Polling survey showed 50 percent of state voters rated Bush's performance in 2005 as better than Obama's. Just 35 percent picked Obama.

The survey by PPP, a Democratic-owned firm, comes as the president tries to inspire confidence in his administration's response to the BP oil spill. ... Louisiana voters by no means are happy with the way the Bush administration handled the flooding in 2005. But while the PPP poll showed just a third of voters approved of the way Bush handled Katrina, the numbers were generally worse for Obama. Sixty-two percent said they disapproved of Obama's handling of the crisis, compared with 58 percent for Bush.

The poll of 492 Louisiana voters was taken June 12-13. It had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen Reports released a new poll Wednesday showing Obama's approval rating hitting a new low -- 42 percent. The daily tracking poll puts a 20-point spread between Obama's strong approval and disapproval, 24 and 44 percent respectively.

While I certainly get the overall disapproval part, the oil spill thing baffles me more than a little. What exactly was he supposed to do, wave a magic wand at it? I'm all for criticizing the guy, I could go on for hours at a time, but this strikes me as pretty irrational unless you're pissed that they didn't start on the relief well a little sooner.

BP is fresher in their minds. If in a few years, the big problem is people not picking up after their dogs' shit, that'd be the biggest failure of the current president.

Obviously, neither have been terrific leaders during these times, but I'm not sure what peoples' expectations are.

So keep NCLB in Georgia and leave my schools alone.


And just to be clear, I am fully behind the idea that the majority of public schooling in this country is failing its students and needs to be overhauled. I have claimed before, and I continue to claim (and am increasingly backed up by the evidence) that NCLB was an overly-simplistic, overly-expensive-for-what-it-was/is, misguided attempt to deal with this issue.

I do agree 100% with Jon that in certain areas so-called "Education cabals" need to be broken up for real change to happen, and I agree with others that local communities need to take more of an interest in their schools. But NCLB was not the right way to try and do this.

Further reading:

NY Times Advertisement

Diane Ravitch: Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform - WSJ.com

:+1: - to both points.

I think it underscores one of the problems of having Presidents with very little experience running anything other than government offices or bureaucracies. They spend so much of their life cajoling people to do things that when they need to be directive, they have a hard time making the switch.

I mean, imagine if Steve Jobs or Jack Welch or Jamie Dimon had been President during Katrina or the Oil Spill.

Yet another member of the liberal media elite subjects Sarah Palin to a hostile interview:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...lesias-aw.html

News Hounds: O’Reilly Demolishes Palin By Asking For Her Solution To The BP Oil Disaster

That just isn't fair that they did that to Palin.

Right, but NCLB is federal legislation. What Georgia needs is very different then what Connecticut needs. For that matter what Hartford CT needs and what West Hartford CT needs are very different.

I don't mind federal funding on education as I do believe that income disparities in states should be lessened when it comes to education.

I generally agree with lynchjm, but Jon's point does emphasize that local doesn't always mean better. The jackass from the block is still a jackass.

Somebody needs to sig this post.

I'm fine with federal funding and I could certainly support federal standards if they made a hell of a lot more sense then NCLB.

Rahm going to quit later this year.

Rahm Emanuel expected to quit White House - Telegraph

He's going to end up taking over for Daley someday in Chicago I think.

Joe. My. God.: Texas GOP Platform Calls For Making It A Felony To Perform Gay Marriages


http://static.texastribune.org/media...Y_PLATFORM.pdf

I mean, this isn't a fringe group here. Or even the Tea Party. This is the official Republican Party Platform of one of the most populous states in the Union.

Now, I know the response here will be that we shouldn't look to party platforms to see what parties actually believe or something like that. We should instead just assume that the GOP is actually what people here want it to be instead of what it actually is. Whatever. How does that kind of denial help anything?

Really, I can understand how people might hate the President and the Democrats. But how are we not closer to a third party here? What does the GOP have left to offer serious intellectual conservatives and libertarians anymore? Don't y'all still outnumber the "Kill the faggots and the Mexicans!" wing of the party? Why are they still driving the ship?

Nobody asked me if I wanted a turn.

If same sex marriage is illegal, than the state can certainly enforce that. It seems a misdemeanor would be more appropriate than a felony, but you have to leave yourself some room for negotiation.

I don't think we've reached the point where opposition to gay marriage is a "fringe idea".

The rest of their platform:

• Banning the use of red light cameras.
• Making American English the official language of Texas and the United States.
• Passing legislation requiring a sonogram for each pregnant woman seeking an abortion.
• Opposing legislation allowing stem cell research involving the creation of killing of human embryos for medical research.
• Calling for the immediate transition to a system of private pensions and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax.
• Calling for the repeal of the state lottery and opposing any further legalization of any type of gambling.
• Urging Congress to “repeal and reject the national healthcare takeover, also known as ‘ObamaCare.' ”
• Calling for the repeal of the No Child Left Behind law and the U.S. Department of Education.
• Removing the tenure system for Texas state colleges and universities.
• Opposing all bailouts of businesses.
• Recommending a national sales tax to replace all other federal taxes.
• Urging Congress to evict the United Nations from the United States to rescind U.S. membership.



What a bunch of fucking whack-a-loons. Jeezus.


Texas Republicans also want to limit citizenship by birth to those born to a U.S. citizen “with no exceptions.”
--yeahhh...ummm...good luck with that. That'll take a Constitutional Amendment.

How bout this wacky gem:
• Protecting the right to access raw milk directly from the farmer.

WTF is wrong with red light cameras anyways??

With the explosive population growth of Texas in the last decade or two thanks to an influx of out-of-state people, I wonder how much the reputation Texas of being a religious right stronghold is true anymore. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, but it seems like the newer residents would be chipping away at that in both the polls and in society in general.

I really hope Bill White can replicate some the electoral success he had running for mayor of Houston to the Governor's race. In the last two races he got over 85% of the vote.

well put - i stole it for my facebook post. waiting for my texas-based relatives and other conservative friends to errupt...*cackles*

The problem is those people do not vote in primary elections.

They don't do what they have been marketed as to what they are supposed to do. Which is to reduce accidents at 'problem' intersections. They decreased certain accidents, but, increased other accidents. Cities have been caught reducing the time of the yellow to catch more people in the intersection to produce more red light tickets. Stuff like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera

Yeah, red light cameras suck. Anytime you have the government with a vested financial interest in people engaging in unsafe behavior, we've really gotten ourselves turned upside down.

The fact that governments can make money on fines is supposed to be a side effect of the fine, not the primary purpose of them.

Guess we've just had them all over my hometown for...years now. In fact, at this point I think every traffic light in town has them.

Seen them only at certain intersections in San Diego and in Cupertino and I think maybe 25% of them are actually in use in San Diego and none of them are in use in Cupertino.

While we're talking about red light cameras, does anyone have any good ideas for fighting one? I was cited for going through a red light. I was able to go to the web site and see it, and I was making a right turn on a red light, and it looked like I *might* have come to a full stop, but the boilerplate language on the ticket implies that they think I didn't. Will I be able to convince them?

Going off what you posted, I can actually get behind some of those things (other than the abortion, gambling, and stem cell ones). The education one...eh.

Not actually sure what the purpose of the access to raw milk is.

Supposedly, there is also a video that is taken for situations like yours, but, I'm not sure all cameras are equipped with that though. I think depending on the state, if the picture can't clearly identify the driver, then it's supposed to be tossed out. A friend of mine in Chicago got his picture taken, but, when you looked at the picture, you couldn't really see his face and the ticket was dismissed.

It's a small, but vigorous debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...aw_milk_debate

Thanks. Should be "access to" in my previous post.

You know, the raw milk folks that I know/know of seem to come to that place from a very free-earth/super-hippie kind of mindset. Not at all what I would think of as your typical Republican.

Which makes me think, (1) that someone with a personal economic interest in selling raw milk happens to have something to do with the Texas GOP platform, and (2) that--despite my earlier screed in this thread--maybe it is just a very very small handful of crazy people who wrote this thing. I hope so.

I'm pretty damn torn on the raw milk thing. I drank it when I was young but don't anymore. It can be pretty damn dangerous. One side of me wants to see some of these hippies drink raw milk and get dreadfully sick like will inevitably happen but then you'll get other hippies yelling about all milk being bad for you when that happens.

To put it in perspective, I won't even feed my baby calves raw milk, it gets pasteurized before we feed it to them because one bad batch with some nasty bacteria would wipe out a good chunk of my calves.

No mention of the Big 12 in the Texas GOP platform? :)

To put this to rest - the damn dairy farmer on the board won't even feed his COWS raw milk. And yet people want to drink it? That's some messed up shit.