Few would argue the fact that Citizens United has been a major player in the Republican primary...and many if not most would concede that none of it has been healthy ...
As if you needed another reason to not vote Romney.
Celebrity business magnate Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president Thursday, telling reporters he will not mount an independent campaign if ...
In a perfect world, the Republican contest to find a nominee to face Barack Obama would go on forever...or at least until August. You cannot attach a number to the ...
I suspect there are a ton of conservatives secretly agreeing with Begala and while it's too early in the game for Dems to get cocky, it's difficult to not smile ...
Quotes don't get much better than this one by Bob Dole.
"Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly ...
After the beating Gingrich took last night, it's hard to imagine under what scenario he can make a comeback. Florida is going to Romney and for Gingrich to regain the ...
There's a lot out there on the President's SOTU, so I'll keep my thoughts short and sweet.
The speech did what it had to do which was target liberals and independents ...
The highlights from last night's debate.
- Newt Gingrich can't wait to become president so he can revisit the early 60s and overthrow Castro in Cuba. War, baby, war.
- Santorum, who ...
It appears that the South Carolina verdict is forcing Romney to start taking Gingrich seriously.
“We’re not choosing a talk show host, we’re choosing a leader,” Romney said, saying that their ...
Mike Huckabee offers advice to Mitt Romney concerning his unreleased tax returns.
Let him [Romney] make this challenge: "I'll release my tax returns when Barack Obama releases his college transcripts and ...
Via Political Humor...
"Mitt Romney is coming under fire because even though he is a multimillionaire, he only paid 15 percent in taxes. That's not a tax, that's barely a tip." ...
Good line.
My guess is that after Romney fails to beat Obama in the general, Huntsman will be back in 2016. The most electable guy in the field and he could ...
I found this pretty funny...and accurate. It comes from a reader over at Balloon Juice.
So, let’s review. The contenders for the GOP nomination are
A vulture capitalist who believes that any ...
Lively little debate going on at one of last week's posts with Libertarianism put under the microscope.
ocLiberal:
I know I am in sketchy territory here, (start the indignant shouting now) but ...
In the contest to determine the winner of the Far-Right Politics gold medal, rack up a few more points for Newt Gingrich.
“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal ...
Via Political Humor...
"Congratulations to Mitt Romney. He won the New Hampshire primary last night. See, this is proof that even the multimillionaire son of a multimillionaire can beat the odds ...
Story 1:
North Korea punishing those who 'didn't display enough sadness over Kim Jong Il's death'
North Korean authorities are reportedly punishing citizens who did not display enough sadness over the death ...
In case you missed the story, Pope Benedict made headlines this week by doing what it is popes do best - putting the irrational fear of God into his followers.
The ...
Romney was asked whether questions dealing with distribution of wealth and power were a matter of jealousy or fairness.
You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class ...
With the recent talk over budgets, debt and credit rating, here is something we’re not hearing much of.
For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.
The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.
But the biggest adjustment will deal with revenues from the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system enacted in 1969 to prevent the wealthy from using tax shelters to avoid paying any income tax.
The above is from a story the NYT ran in February 2009 under the heading, Obama Bans Gimmiks, and Deficit Will Rise. Accounting practices under President Bush conveniently left war costs out of his budgets, opting instead for annual supplemental appropriations from Congress. The costs for disaster relief were also not included in Bush’s budgets (nor were they for most presidents before him). President Obama budgeted $273 billion for disaster responses.
While the Bush administration’s shady accounting practices were no secret, why are we not hearing more of it at a time when Obama is getting his head pounded into the wall over the size of debt and spending? It might be time to replace the PR staff in the West Wing. If they can’t get the word out, then they’re pretty much letting the right-wing noise machine control the story. And we all know what story that is.
How bad are Americans when it comes to knowledge of their own history and system of government? Well, going by a recent Newsweek poll, it’s not pretty.
They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
And when it comes to international affairs, Americans fall far behind Europeans in depth of knowledge. No surprise there. Unlike real news organizations like the BBC and CBC, American television news rarely reports on anything of international significance unless a 1000 or more locals (or at least 2 Americans) have died in an act of nature or unless the U.S. is waging a war in that country. Seriously, if one got all their news from Fox, they’d be hard-pressed to name a country in the world other than the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan. OK, and Japan. The same can be said of MSNBC, CNN and the major networks.
In the 17th century, Galileo did his best to enlighten the masses by informing them that Earth was not the center of the universe. If he was around today, he’d be trying to tell Americans that the U.S. is not the center of the universe. I have no doubt that he’d be treated no differently now for his heretic beliefs than he was by the Catholic Church 400 years ago. Getting the truth out is always a difficult matter when up against a lifetime of ignorance.
Newsweek gives a number of reasons as to why Americans do so poorly on a basic U.S. citizenship’s test – complexity of the American political system, “one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world” and the decentralized U.S. school system top the list. If poverty does indeed breed ignorance than one has every reason they need to be concerned by the widening gap between rich and poor. It should be pointed out that ignorance in turn breeds poverty which is demonstrated by the latest moves to reduce spending by slashing education budgets.
There is a real cause for concern in all of this which has serious implications for all Americans.
For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead.
So is all lost? No, of course it’s not. As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker notes:
“The problem is ignorance, not stupidity. We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”
There’s hope…but someone better get things moving in the right direction. Burying one’s head in the sand or living in denial won’t improve the situation. And while this phenomena does cross party lines, I don’t have to tell you which of the two is battling on the side of ignorance. As a matter of fact, their success is dependent on Americans being misinformed. Bill Maher explains. .
As you read this, you just know right-wing heads are exploding everywhere.
For a president under siege, maybe this could help.
In an episode of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel to be shown on Dec. 8, President Obama will help determine whether the Greek scientist Archimedes really set fire to an invading Roman fleet using only mirrors and the reflected rays of the sun.
Producers of the television series are not saying exactly how Mr. Obama will help prove — or disprove — that myth. But the first presidential appearance is intended to help spur interest in math and science as part of the White House effort to increase American competitiveness in those subjects.
The right is going to find much to criticize about the President appearing on Mythbusters. ‘Disrespectful to the office’, ‘demeaning’, blah, blah, blah. Let them. The following is from 2006 but I doubt much has changed.
The disappointing performance of U.S. teenagers in math and science on an international exam, in scores released yesterday, has sparked calls for improvement in public schools to help the country keep pace in the global economy.
The scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.
President Obama on Mythbusters? If it helps spark interest in science, then why not.
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What do the authors of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
The bigger problem here is less the mixup (no one bothered to perform a simple Google check) than the fact that educators think it a good idea to ban a book on Marxism. Should education not be about exposing students to ideas or should young people learn about Marxism from watching Glenn Beck’s hour of nonsense? I write that facetiously but I’d bet you that the people on the Texas Board of Education who banned the book would be thrilled if an hour of Beck was required viewing for all of its students.
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