Scab for America is Coming to Nevada

thanks to Governor Sandoval wanting to waste taxpayer money on scab labor that is only to undermine what few protections teachers there even have.

The person writing the column is a member of the scab outfit that delights in trashing career educators while stealing taxpayer money in the process.

*--I should note TFA has been in Clark County for a number of years, but now it appears it will be polluting the state in a big way.

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This Blackballing Goes on in Every School District in the U.S.

At least at Denver Public Schools, teachers are not sitting back and taking it.

The only time a "do not rehire" should occur is if there is an offense worthy of a license revocation.

Of course in more and more states like Florida, a teacher can have his or her license revoked if he or she has a couple of bad evaluations. THAT should NEVER be allowed given the power imbalance inherent between principals and teachers.

The blackballing continues even on employment applications under threat of license sanctions for "dishonesty." Again, it isn't the same in private industry since just one person, an unaccountable principal, can literally kill your career.

From the linked article:

Henry Roman, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, said DPS is the only school district in Colorado that has a system in which it labels teachers ineligible to be rehired by the district.
"Before making these career-ending decisions, I suggest you make sure you have a clear understanding of the cause behind each of these non-renewals and whether this cause rises to the level of 'you will never work again in this district in any capacity,'" Roman said.

There is even a petition to stop the practice.

Washoe County School District, my old dirtbag district, has at least two lawsuits pending against it for this very thing.

The devil, however, is in the details. Even if you are eligible for rehire, that will never guarantee you a job with the district, as the principal who sacked you can blackball you from ever working for the district again.

This comment following the article sums up the situation nicely:

I was in the DPS system for 4.5 years and, to me at least, DPS is a neo-feudal bureaucracy. Principals' individual power is akin to a medieval lord's authority over an entire village, in that it is rarely checked by the higher ups, and ultimately leads to corruption. This corruption includes principal aligned cliques ('helpers') ratting out "undesirables"(i.e. those who don't bow down to the principal), cronyism, principals bullying teachers (in one of my schools, every teacher who went into the principals' office came out crying), and widespread discrimination (sexism, racism, ageism, etc.).

While life is rarely fair, and we all take our knocks from life, what goes on in poorly run public school systems is downright criminal. It has nothing to do with poor teachers (my overall teacher rating was 4.67/5 or Superior) and everything to do with power, control, and money.

Whether it is the entire Frank Roti scandal, the class-action law suit filed by 200+ former DPS teachers alleging ageism in 2011/12 (including my best friend), or the numerous sexual harassment cases involving principals harassing teachers (including mine), DPS is structurally broken and in dire need of a fix. DPS shows that the age-old adage, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" is true. The fact that something like the recent teacher purge happens every year is very ominous indeed.

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How Are People Going to be Able to Defend Public Education?

Especially given the onslaught of the movement to privatize it as a matter of political ideology, facts and how horrible it is be damned?

Barack Obama is directly responsible for this. Nobody else:

This points to a basic fact about contemporary society: working people, students and educators are opposed to the drive to dismantle public education. Struggles by educators to defend their jobs and wages receive, despite the best efforts of the media and unions to isolate them, overwhelming public support.

However, the attempt to defend education through the unions and the Democratic Party is impossible. The claims by the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association that a Democratic president would reverse the reactionary attacks of George Bush have been left in tatters, as Obama has gone even further than his Republican predecessor in attacking teachers and public education.

The destruction of public education is a bipartisan policy. Its source is the immense growth of social inequality and the rise of a corporate and financial elite that controls every lever of government. Drunk in their pursuit of ever-greater personal wealth, the ruling class is instinctively hostile to the egalitarian and democratic principles embodied in public education. Having concluded that they require a relatively small number of skilled and educated workers, they see public education largely as a waste of money and its looting as another source of profit.

That is what the World Bank believes about public education, that it is a waste of money because there aren't enough skilled jobs worldwide for all of the people available, but the purpose of public education is NOT job training. It is to create an informed citzenry for any society to be able to function.

The neoliberals are total scum.

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Etc.

Priest and best-selling author and columnist Rev. Andrew Greeley, 85, has died. Tragically, he had suffered from a fall some five years ago and never fully recovered from the traumatic brain injury resulting from it. He was highly critical of the Catholic Church's handling of the sex abuse scandals.

Greeley was a sociology professor at the University of Arizona and a researcher at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. He earned post-graduate degrees from the University of Chicago in the 1960s.

The priest became often quoted and interviewed in the media. In a biography published on his website, Greeley described himself as having "unflinchingly urged his beloved church to become more responsive to evolving concerns of Catholics everywhere."

The same biography noted he was a Chicago sports fan and cheered for the Bulls, Bears and the Cubs, "while praying for them to improve."

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To Hell With That

I changed the URL back to what it was.

It was more trouble than it was worth.

If employers don't hire me on the basis of what I write, well, screw it.

I have only about three and a half years before I get early SS if Obama doesn't decide to do away with it.

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Changed the Name for the URL

After 11 years with the old one, which had my real name in it, I decided to change the URL address for this blog:

ontheedgeblogger.blogspot.com


Given how employers these days like to check on your online presence, I decided to change things here.

Not that I am ashamed or embarrassed, but that will also reduce any kind of online harassment.

I am doing the same thing to my links blog.

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News Roundup

Obituary: Dr. Henry Morgentaler, one of the leading supporters of legalized abortion in Canada, has died at the age of 90:

Dr. Morgentaler, a Polish-born socialist who survived Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau and emigrated to Canada after World War II, basically founded the Canadian abortion-rights movement in the late 1960s. Over the years he opened abortion clinics in major cities across the country, trained hundreds of doctors to perform abortions and said that he personally performed tens of thousands of them.

He was threatened with death, attacked with garden shears, roughed up by a mob, caricatured as a baby butcher, splashed with ketchup and accused of fomenting violence. He escaped injury when one of his clinics was firebombed. After several abortion doctors were shot, he began wearing bulletproof vests and installed bulletproof windows at home.

From his perspective, anti-abortion laws violated a woman’s right to control her body and imposed untold suffering on unwanted children to assuage the sensibilities of religious moralists, and he refused to shut up or be discreet.

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Women typically don't have a choice about being the primary or sole breadwinners, traditional propaganda be damned.

Single mothers are also less likely to have a college degree, tend to be younger and are more likely to be black or Hispanic, whereas the married moms tend to be older, disproportionally white and college educated.

Can you say "racism" for a lot of the disapproval?

I seriously doubt that 80k a year for women who outearn husbands will hold, since wages and salaries are going down further, and unemployment remains scandalously high.

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Ed Etc.

There is a reason why these people hate public education, and it is they don't want to pay taxes for "other people's kids." It's really that simple.

It is selfishness at its core. It is shortsighted, since the kids of today are the taxpayers of tomorrow.

Demonizing teachers and unions is part of it as well.
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Teacher Mistreatment as "Reform"

Thanks to a YouTube that has been spread all over the place, more and more people are becoming aware of teachers being kicked to the curb or forced out one way or the other as part of "reform."

It's no longer about the kids; it's all about the almighty dollar:

After being publicly humiliated, she felt like she had no choice but to resign in protest. “This inhumane, insensitive transfer is an attempt to silence my voice, but I cannot and will not remain mute where my students and fellow colleagues are concerned.”

She added that her involuntary transfer was part of the continuous attacks on her fellow teachers. “This year alone I have been a helpless witness as half a dozen dedicated, hardworking teachers were reduced to tears, shame, and desperation after they were handed concern forms filled with false accusations,” which formed the grounds for not renewing their contracts.

Later in the video, she denounced the stripping of funding for public education and the dismantling of high-quality curriculum. “Many exciting learning opportunities have been cut by our district, field trips, guest speakers, exciting events, in-class simulations are no longer allowed,” Rubenstein said.

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Miscellaneous News

Obituary: Journalist and political writer Haynes Johnson, 81, has died of a heart attack:

Johnson was awarded a Pulitzer in 1966 for national reporting on the civil rights struggle in Selma, Ala., while with the Washington Evening Star. He spent about 12 years at the Star before joining its chief rival, The Washington Post, in 1969. Johnson was a columnist for the Post from 1977 to 1994.

Dan Balz, the Post's senior political reporter, said Johnson was already a legend before they got to work together at the newspaper.

"I don't say this lightly. He was a great journalist," Balz said Friday. "He had everything a good reporter should have, which was a love of going to find the story, a commitment to thorough reporting and then kind of an understanding of history and the importance of giving every story kind of the broadest possible sweep and context."

In other words, he was an old school journalist before tabloidism creeped into the field.
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No surprise at all about Muskegon's all-charter school "district." Of course they aren't in compliance with special education laws.

Muskegon Heights Public School Academy System (MHPSA), America’s first all-charter public school district, has been found out of compliance on over a dozen issues relating to its special education program. The educational crisis of the entire district is a resounding condemnation of the emergency manager system.

In investigating two complaints filed by parents, the Michigan Department of Education determined that MHPSA failed to deliver a host of services. In just 1 of 14 points it was found noncompliant in providing speech, occupational, and physical therapy.

It won't stop them, however.
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When it comes to the Arias trial, if you go against the mob mentality, expect to pay the consequences.

Speaking of which, that autopsy report should prove to all the world this was actually a self-defense case, yet the obvious was lost on both the prosecution and the defense.
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Miscellaneous

Here is a series of beautiful photos about abandoned places from all over the world.
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Meanwhile, poverty is creeping upwards of 99 percent if people don't do something about that useless piece of shit Washington politicians, including the president.

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Gotta Somehow Make Lemonade Out of Lemons

The Reno Gazette-Journal had a big article today about all of the lemons--er, principals--who are being promoted or moved around because either the incumbents were failures or new ones are taking the failed ones' places. The failures meanwhile get moved into the central office where they are never heard from again instead of fired.

The myth is that it is bad teachers who are moved from place to place when they screw up, but it is far easier to get rid of them entirely--and they don't have to be "bad" to "get it"--than to get rid of a worthless principal.

The first wave of principal changes started earlier this month when the district announced a grouping of 10 elementary schools and one high school into what Martinez named an “acceleration zone.” The 11 low-performing schools have high numbers of students living in poverty and learning English, and received one or two stars out of five on a district ranking.

Martinez removed six of the 11 principals in the new zone, but said they were eligible to apply for other jobs in the district. To date, two of the six have jobs at other schools, and two have taken newly created district positions that oversee performance evaluations and the Signature Academies, niche programs in high schools.

Replacements at six of the acceleration zone schools were made with some of the district’s best-performing principals, who either succeeded with similar student populations or had backgrounds that made them a good fit for understanding some of the hardest-to-reach students.

Of course even good principals can't do much of anything to overcome transience and poverty.

What a shocking admission:

David Fullenwider, president of the Washoe County Principal Association, said the district had six active investigations involving principals during the year — what he called a shocking number. In his 23 years with the district, he said he only recalls the district firing two employees for “egregious things.” He said he could not remember the circumstances.

This year, Fullenwider said there was only one case — involving a principal put on administrative leave because of a past incident — that seemed valid enough to warrant an investigation.

In other words, this superintendent may not feel he has to save face and is not beyond firing these assholes if necessary.

Unfortunately, too few are. "Jobs" are still being created for people who should be let go from the district.

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The Truth About Teaching in the 21st Century

It ain't about the kids, and administrators are the absolute shits, worse than ever.

Somebody in Illinois finally had her bellyful of this "reform" nonsense:

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Etc.

No surprise mental disorders among children are on the rise thanks to widespread poverty.

I also expect it to rise as more outfits decide most children should get "online education" rather than real teachers and be with peers, which will almost certainly turn them into people who are without empathy.

There are already too many of those in the real world now.
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Since the Democratic Party is filled with fakers like Obama, they can't be trusted to do the right thing and go after the Wall Street crooks.

After all, they are tools of Wall Street.
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This is what happens when billionaires call the shots in public ed, using astroturf outfits to do the dirty work.
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For fun, here is an interactive map showing just where Mormons tend to live in the U.S. Few of them live east of the Rockies, and a relatively small percentage live on the West Coast.

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Miscellaneous Reads and News

Of course Jodi Arias shouldn't plea bargain for life in prison (with or without parole) in exchange for the death penalty.

Especially when it is extremely likely she will prevail on appeal anyway.
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Obituary: Actor Steve Forrest, one of those people who was seen everywhere on movies and television from the fifties onward, has died at the age of 87. Among other things, he was a younger brother of actor Dana Andrews:

Freed from his MGM contract, Forrest portrayed a New York reporter falling for a rural Doris Day in It Happened to Jane (1959), and in Heller in Pink Tights (1960) he played a gunfighter who wins blonde dancer Sophia Loren in a poker game, but loses her to Anthony Quinn. The latter role gave the often stolid Forrest an opportunity to show more ebullience.

In the meantime, he had established a parallel career on television, appearing notably in westerns such as Bonanza, Death Valley Days, The Virginian and Rawhide. In 1965, he and his family moved to London, where he starred in 30 episodes of the ATV series The Baron. Forrest was rugged and charming in the title role, the nickname given to John Mannering, a Texas-born, London-based antique dealer who is really a secret agent.

On the big screen, Forrest would have a key role as the lawyer boyfriend of Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) in Mommie Dearest (1981), a rather trashy melodrama in which he looked plainly uncomfortable, nor was he in his element as a heavy in the unfunny spoof Spies Like Us (1985).

He then returned to television, notably with 15 episodes of Dallas in 1986, playing Wes Parmalee, an impostor pretending to be Jock Ewing, and in several episodes of Murder She Wrote.

Here is a Twilight Zone episode where he was the star. It is called The Parallel.
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Another familiar face on television, actress Christine White, 86, died in a nursing home on April 14.

She is best known for co-starring with William Shatner in the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."
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Jodi Arias Verdict Replay

In case you didn't see it:




She should get credit for time served and walk free. This wasn't a capital case in the first place.

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I Guess Bill Montgomery's Career is on the Line

That explains why the state is going to try and impanel a second jury to try and give Jodi Arias death or life in prison.

Same thing is going to happen as with this stupid jury that gave an illegitimate verdict.

We will have to wait a month for the "status conference."

Supposedly a retrial for the penalty phase is set for July 18.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Hung Jury

Update 4:25 PDT: It was a hung jury today. The jury decided it was going to wash its hands of the whole farce after they damned well realized they totally fucked up with the verdict. It should have been either manslaughter or acquittal instead of this Murder One bullshit.

Now they can't bring themselves to execute her. Not even the Chris Hughes-Mormon-HLN mob could force them to do it.

Now yet another jury panel with have to be put together IF they can ever find anybody in Arizona who hasn't heard of this trial.

It should be pleaded down to manslaughter and she be released with time served, since this was obviously a self-defense case.

They probably can't do that, but this is such a slam dunk for the defense to overturn on appeal, it would be the smart thing for the state to do.
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On the same subject of Jodi Arias, a podcast featuring Arias acquaintance Gus Searcy is available. He notes other Mormon women had sex with Travis Alexander or knew he was mistreating Jodi Arias but they were too scared to come forward. It seems the pressure put on some Mormons by others is too hard to overcome.




The Farce in Phoenix will continue today at around 10:30 PDT with jury deliberations. They probably have all decided on death for Jodi Arias so that it will be thrown out on appeal in a case that should have resulted in acquittal for the defendant, but who knows? Maybe one or two of them is willing to stand up for what is right. I doubt it.


Saw this post that sums up not only Travis Alexander's own conflicted feelings, but actually the mentality of the Mormon-influenced lynch mob which sees Jodi Arias as a "whore," which was the furthest thing she was.

With the "friends" of Travis, it's all about the coverup. Mormons are notorious for groupthink and will lie and ruin others to preserve the reputation of one of "their own," even a Jack Mormon like Travis was.

Video in case the jury makes a decision or in case there is a hung jury which then means another jury is impaneled:

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Miscellaneous News

Clark County School District, stung from the debacle of hiring a superintendent who didn't stay in the job, hired from within last night when acting superintendent Pat Skorkowsky was appointed to the top job permanently or however long it lasts.

He has been with the district for some 25 years.

Video:

8 News NOW
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WCSD Gossip

For fun, Transparent Nevada has the list of salaries and benefits for 2012 for public employees throughout Nevada including my old employer Washoe County School District.

The salary and benefits listings for school districts are for calendar years, not school years.

I took a look at some of my least favorite administrators there to see how they fared in their salaries. ANY pay is way too much for these idiots.

I won't give their names out, but it was interesting.

My next-to-last principal, the one who got demoted for sexual misconduct, went from $113,998.48 in 2009 to $73,082.41 last year, a $40,000 pay cut in four years not to mention being knocked down several rungs on the career ladder.

The last idiot principal I had at WCSD had her pay docked from $101,843.10 in 2010 to $98,062.10 last year, but that includes pay from her stint as a principal. She is no longer an administrator with the school district as of August 2012 but is a TIF grant "coordinator" and working for human resources. I expect her salary will be lower next year.

She basically got demoted though not as drastically as the other principal.

And finally I want to note that jerkwad who put her up to firing me, the former human resources chief officer, saw his pay go down from a high of $126,099.52 in 2010 to $95,819.10 last year, a cut of over $30,000. He was demoted by former superintendent Heath Morrison to "housekeeping supervisor," or janitorial supervisor. Not that there is anything wrong with being a custodian, but it was certainly a humiliation for somebody who spent his entire career at WCSD in human resources.

Of course all three of these assholes should have been fired instead of being allowed to remain with the district.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Jury Deliberations/Verdict

The deliberations by the jury in the penalty phase of the Farce in Phoenix will resume at around 10 a.m. or 10:30 a.m. PDT.

I expect a death verdict because that will be the only way the Mormon "friends" of Travis Alexander will be happy.

Yours truly will again be gone for most of the day.

Update: No decision reached. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this jury passes the buck and is "hung." Then another jury will be impaneled to decide on Jodi Arias's fate. The jury fucked up with the verdict, and now the ball is in their court.

Another interview with Jodi Arias by local media is here.





Video:

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Etc.

The New York Times seems to have backpeddled a bit on education "reform" efforts.
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Dance of the Lemons

Of course I am referring to my old and not beloved Washoe County School District. For next year, some 21 principal jobs will be filled in the district in an attempt to improve test scores or cover senior administrators' asses for having promoted a group of dolts who later got into trouble:

In May, the district announced it was taking six principals from schools that were performing well and moving them to schools that received low marks on English, math and science tests. Most of the moves were to district elementary schools that received 1- and 2-star rankings under an evaluation system released in January.

Superintendent Pedro Martinez said that, in some cases, principals being removed from certain schools were “just not the right fit” and they had the option to apply for other jobs in the district.

At least two principals moved from underperforming schools have taken new principal jobs at other low-performing schools.

Two principals moved from underperforming schools have been given newly created jobs that don’t involve specific schools. Wanda Shakeenab, the principal at Sparks High School, was named the principal of career and technical education. Melissa Olsen, principal at Mathews Elementary, has been named a principal of student learning objectives.

Translated, these principals are being given make-work jobs in the central office. They never are let go--ever--if they screw up.

They ought to be fired, but they, like my last two principals at WCSD, are protected to the hilt and are given one desk job after another, such as the incompetent asshole who was given a "TIF Grant coordinator" job as a reward for being a complete failure as principal.

And note in the article there will be an increase in the area of "area superintendents." These are the people who "supervise" the principals.

There were four of them, but now there will be seven.

From this little blurb it appears there will be a neverending supply of principals to screw up things.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Mitigation Phase

Today at around 9:30 PDT or whenever they get around to it, the Farce in Phoenix is supposed to resume with the mitigation phase.

I have no idea whether Jodi Arias will give a statement or just say, in effect, fuck it, because that simply stirs up more of the mob mentality.

She really made the mistake of her life ever getting involved with a cult.

As we know, a couple of people who were supposed to give statements in support of Jodi not getting death were themselves being threatened by the so-called Travis brigade in complete violation of the law. Defense attorney Kirk Nurmi tried to get a mistrial on this basis, and of course the judge denied it.

The judge, Sherry K. Stephens, is trying to pass the buck. She got way in over her head with this trial.

Since I am gone again for almost the entire day, I will miss the deal.

Update: Jodi Arias gave her statement "pleading" for her life today:



The judge actually lifted a ban on her giving interviews, but her mouth has always been her biggest problem.

The "verdict" of life or death has now gone to the jury. I expect her to receive the death penalty, and that would be her best chance to have the ridiculous murder one overturned on appeal.

Here is her interview in a series of clips.


Video:

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Obituaries

Original member of the sixties group The Doors, Ray Manzarek, 74, has died in Germany after a long bout with cancer:

The Doors formed in 1965 after Manzarek happened to meet Jim Morrison on California's Venice Beach. The legendary rock group went on to sell 100 million albums worldwide, establishing five multiplatinum discs in the U.S.

Morrison died in 1971, but Manzarek carried on The Doors' legacy, continuing to work as a musician and also as an author.

"I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today," said Doors guitarist Robby Krieger. "I'm just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him."

Sad news, and it goes to show how quickly time passes.
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Outrages All Over the Country

In some miscellaneous news:

Some 50 Michigan school districts are now on the brink of insolvency in a deliberate attempt to destroy public education in that state.
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Buffalo's school superintendent is waging open warfare on public schools there.

The right-wing forces that garnered seats in Buffalo and hundreds of other districts are not a reflection of popular support for their policies, which are deeply opposed by the majority of residents. It is an expression of the lack of any progressive alternative in these elections. The teachers unions offer no genuine opposition to privatization, and instead promote the Democratic Party because it generally uses the services of the unions to impose “school reform.”

The Obama administration is carrying out an all-out assault on public education in cities and states across the country, through reactionary programs such as Race to the Top, which force districts to compete for desperately needed funds through the implementation of punitive testing regimes and attacks on teachers.

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Barack Obama has been a disaster for American democracy thanks to his being a tool for the economic elites:

The chief base of support for the abrogation of democratic rights and the lurch towards a police state lies in the financial aristocracy, i.e., the tiny layer of multimillionaires and billionaires who have made spectacular fortunes by means of speculation, theft, criminality and corruption. This layer has grown even richer since the eruption of the global economic crisis in 2008, subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars by the state, while the working class has been devastated by mass unemployment and austerity policies.

Democratic rights and historic reforms mean nothing to these kleptomaniacs, who view the broad mass of the population with extreme fear and hostility. Jealous of its ill-gotten gains, this layer supports police-state measures to violently suppress social opposition.

Behind Obama, and next to the financial aristocracy, stands a privileged middle class layer—approximately the top 90th to 99th percentile. Some within this layer maintain minor differences with the financial aristocrats on lifestyle, race, culture and identity issues. However, they depend on the existing setup for their privileged status, income and respectable positions in corporate management, university departments, law firms, the entertainment industry, the trade unions, NGOs, the media and so forth. On board for imperialist war and the defense of the capitalist system in general, this layer is prepared to go along with a police state if the alternative is a revolutionary overthrow of the system by the working class.

In other words, our country is being run by gangsters.
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Jodi Arias Trial: Mitigation Phase

I apologize to readers when I mislabeled Thursday's impact statements by Travis Alexander's siblings Steven and Samantha as part of the mitigation phase because I titled that post as such.

I corrected it.

I haven't posted much at all the past two weeks because I have actually been working at a short-term assignment.

Today should be the mitigation phase of the trial, and then the jury will recommend her fate (probably death, which would be the best outcome for the appeals process since the verdict will almost certainly be overturned). I don't know if anybody is actually going to speak for Jodi Arias. I certainly hope she won't talk to the jury because that jury has its mind made up, and there is no point at all in doing it. It just further gives the likes of HLN and the Chris and Sky Hughes-influenced social media lynch mob more reason to spew more vitriol directed at her.

This is utterly unique, this hatred for a murder defendant, in the history of American justice. Not even O.J. Simpson had an organized lynch mob out to ruin him and affect public opinion. That is because Jodi Arias was unlucky enough to get herself involved in a quasi-religious denomination which many people regard as a cult, Mormonism, and the tendency of many of its members to cover up the sins of one of their own in order to save face. Beginning in 2009 with 48 Hours with its report that was utterly slanted and full of lies about the relationship between Jodi Aria and Travis Alexander by Travis's alleged friends like the Hugheses, Jodi Arias never had a chance, at least not in the short-term. Then CBS compounded it by committing journalistic malpractice by interviewing her when she had no attorney present and it was obvious she was suffering from trauma. I noticed it YEARS ago; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see she had PTSD. CBS had NO right to do the interview knowing full well her statements would be used in court.

Yet the despicable Maureen Maher and her producers are actually proud of their "work" on behalf of a segment of the LDS, while ignoring that 800-pound gorilla in the cutting room floor. They had yet another slanted "report" the other night on the "lies" of Jodi Arias rather than on the LIES they spewed on behalf of Travis Alexander's Mormon friends and business associates. They did not act like journalists but like a p.r. firm and should have been FIRED for their malpractice. They allowed themselves to be completely manipulated by a lying, devious group of "friends" who have proven to be even worse now that many of them are literally cashing in on Travis Alexander's death.

Update: This circus has been delayed until tomorrow at around 9:30 PDT, but the defense today gave its best shot at trying to get this incompetent judge to declare a mistrial thanks to the lynch mob activity surrounding the case and witness intimidation.

Jodi Arias's ex-boyfriend, Darryl Brewer talked briefly about her in these series of clips. Tragically she changed when she got involved in something that was little more than a cult, and it destroyed her life. Part one of several:

Video:

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Fed Up

With more and more phony "accountability" standards which give administrators more reason to get rid of teachers they don't like, more teachers are getting out.

Which is the whole point of the "reforms." Then, when there are no real experienced teachers left except perhaps the cronies of somebody already employed by districts, just shut the schools down and turn them into online schools or just lower the standards so that any idiot off the street can read from a script and call the person a "teacher."

The standardized testing and lousy working conditions play a role:

Others insist that financial concerns are only the tip of the iceberg. Philip Kovacs, an associate professor of education at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, surveyed 600 local K-8 teachers to gage their morale. While half of his respondents said they wouldn’t encourage others to become teachers, “Maybe only ten of them talked about pay,” says Kovacs. In contrast, “most of the individuals who said not to head into the field felt very strongly about the negative impacts of high stakes testing.”

Kovacs points to research that shows that mastery, autonomy, and sense of purpose—all threatened by recent reforms—are also central to human motivation. “A lot of people come into my teacher ed program with these wide eyed dreams of being a change agent for kids. But that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re finding it’s much more of a grind.” As a result, he himself has taken to actively discouraging his students from teaching.

That's only part of the problem. The REAL problem is the quality of the principals who have absolute control over teachers, and they are getting worse, not better.

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Etc.

There was just one jackpot winner in last night's $590 million Powerball jackpot, so this person, who bought the winning ticket in Florida, must be the biggest winner in American lottery history:

The single winner was sold at a supermarket in Zephyrhills, Fla., according to Florida Lottery executive Cindy O'Connell. She told The Associated Press by telephone that more details would be released later.

"This would be the sixth Florida Powerball winner and right now, it's the sole winner of the largest ever Powerball jackpot," O'Connell told AP. "We're delighted right now that we have the sole winner."

She said Florida has had more Powerball winners than any other state.

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Obituary: Golfing great and sportscaster Ken Venturi, 82, has died following a series of illnesses:

Venturi was CBS’s color commentator and lead golf analyst for a record 35 years, following a playing career during which he won 14 PGA Tour events, including the 1964 U.S. Open.

“This is not an easy one,” CBS color commentator Jim Nantz told listeners. “And it’s not going to be an easy one, quite honestly, to get through, to try to be detached about someone you really love.

“And I think I can speak on behalf of everybody at CBS right now. We’re all feeling a heavy heart.”

Nantz shared 18th towers with Venturi for 17 years, for roughly 20 tournaments per season. Venturi joined CBS when his playing career ended in 1967 and remained until 2002, leaving with a tearful farewell after the final round of the Kemper Open.

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Preakness 2013

The winner of this year's Preakness Stakes is 15-1 longshot Oxbow, with "elderly jockey" Gary Stevens aboard. Favorite Orb finished fourth. This win was the third for Stevens, and the sixth for trainer D. Wayne Lukas. It is the eighth Preakness win for Calumet Farm, which has new black and gold silks instead of the famous devil's red and blue silks because Calumet was sold last year.

Oxbow lead from start to finish, the first horse to do so since Aloma's Ruler did it in 1982.

The time was 1:57.2, way off Secretariat's record.

ItsMyLuckyDay finished second, while MyLute finished third.

Orb came into the race in good shape, but he didn't like his position in the field. He was boxed in and lost momentum.

No Triple Crown winner for another year at least.

The video (we will see how long it stays up on YouTube):








Earlier: Kentucky Derby winner Orb is the favorite for today's race.

The record time for the Preakness is 1:53 set by Secretariat in 1973, just as he set the records in the Derby and Belmont. He wasn't awarded the time until 39 years later, after decades of controversy, when forensic analysis proved beyond all doubt he broke the record set by Canonero II in 1971.

Farma Way continues to hold the track record.

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Education Miscellaneous

You bet those school closings are racist, and I am glad the CTU is doing something about it.
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Etc.

Paul Krugman writes about the folly of those leaders and economists who don't follow economic theory, or, to put it more bluntly, common common sense.
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One good thing for the financial elites is the unemployment rate spiked up.
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Color me skeptical about the state of Obama's health:

On April 2, as the White House and Congress flexed their
muscles over cuts to Social Security and Medicare, sequestration,
austerity, Obama shocked the press and Congress by unveiling
the $100 million Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project to map the human brain.
As Obama was putting the finishing touches on cuts to Social
Security and Medicare for Americans already experiencing
sequestration cuts for cancer treatment, he pulls brain
mapping literally out of a hat to the bewilderment of many.

In proposing the BRAIN project, Obama said, "As humans,
we can identify galaxies light years away. We can study
particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t
unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter
that sits between our ears."

However, the rumor of a tumor is wafting around Washington.
That is, the incredibly vain Obama wants to find a cure for
brain cancer because he has been diagnosed with a malignant
tumor. The evidence mainly cited involves the president's
faltering basketball game.

I'll just consider the source.

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Some Good News for a Change

Leave it to Portland, Oregon, to come up with a progressive paid sick leave law or ordinance. This idea is also catching on in other cities and other states around the country.

There is nothing worse than having colleagues come to work sick. Being the way that I am, I am very vulnerable to getting sick.

I was even illegally fired for being ill back in early 2008.

In each location, the movement for paid sick days is backed by a broad coalition that includes dozens of partners from labor (including unions like UFCW and AFSCME, and Working America and the Working Families Party) together with small-business owners and groups that advocate for women, children, seniors, public health, racial justice and LGBT rights (Portland’s coalition is a member of the Family Values @ Work Consortium, a network of 21 state coalitions working for policies like paid sick days, of which I serve as executive director). But what’s most notable is how these groups have engaged new activists like Lund, who hadn’t been politically active before, but who share the common experience of fearing for their jobs if they or their child gets sick.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Aggravation Phase

The end is near for this farce in Phoenix. Today's display of whatever begins at 10:30 PDT.

Yours truly will be gone all day today and will miss out listening to the impact statements by the Alexander family continuing to display denial about their brother.

Then I fully expect a death penalty verdict, but given how tainted this jury is, they might recommend LWOP or life with parole after 25 years just to make it harder for Jodi Arias to appeal the sentence.

In the event the likely death verdict is handed down, it will be overturned by a higher court.



Video:

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Etc.

More proof Detroit is being run by a dictatorship:

With the release of his Financial and Operating Plan on Monday, Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has thrown down the gauntlet to the working class. Employing the threat of bankruptcy as leverage, Orr is calling for a savage attack on a population already plagued by unemployment, declining wages and poverty.

Detroit is on the front lines of a national and international strategy of the corporate and financial elite, in which increasingly dictatorial methods are being employed to force through deeply unpopular measures.

If you can't persuade people of your point of view, game the system to force it down everybody's throats.
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A major teacher lawsuit has been settled between the school district of Montgomery County, Maryland, and a group of teachers accusing an elementary school principal of harassment and retaliation:

Both sides signed a confidentiality agreement that bars release of the terms of the settlement, which The Washington Post confirmed late Thursday. A joint statement from attorneys in the case said only: “This case has been settled to the satisfaction of all parties.”

Five teachers and an attendance secretary who used to work at Kemp Mill accused Floyd D. Starnes, who started in 2007, of violating numerous laws and school system policies. They charged that Starnes denied services to special education students and advised a young teacher not to report suspicions of abuse to Child Protective Services. The teacher reported it anyway and alleged that Starnes retaliated after investigators visited the school.

Starnes, who remains in the position, did not return an e-mail seeking comment and was not available at the school. School officials who said they were speaking on his behalf said he would not comment.

So why is he still employed by the district?

Of course. School districts never get rid of principals unless forced to do so.

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O.J. Simpson Takes the Stand

I don't think he is ever getting out of prison.

Live video:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Jodi Arias Trial: Aggravation Phase

The aggravation phase of this utterly aggravating trial is supposed to begin around 10 a.m. PDT today.

It's a given she will get the death penalty and thus make it much easier for the verdict to be overturned on appeal thanks to oodles of instances of judicial error and prosecutorial hanky-panky. If she gets less than death, it will be harder to overturn it because at least she will be "allowed" to live.

3:10 PDT: As expected, this jury decided to take the easy way out and give "death" to Jodi at this stage or at least put it on the table, which means that she will prevail upon appeal, which is automatic, if the mitigation phase is unsuccessful, which it will be.



Video:

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The Only Way He Gets Out of Prison is in a Pine Box

Of course I am talking about O.J. Simpson:

US News
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Syria News
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FUBAR Economics

While I am suffering the effects of yet another sinus infection, I thought I would post this article by Paul Krugman, who takes apart the nonsense peddled by the austerity crowd and was actually debunked a few weeks ago.

It never had any validity anyway; it was another phony intellectual "cover" for the unbridled greed of the economic elites, nothing more and nothing less.

Reinhart-Rogoff lasted longer, even though serious questions about their work were raised early on. As early as July 2010 Josh Bivens and John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute had identified both a clear mistake—a misinterpretation of US data immediately after World War II—and a severe conceptual problem. Reinhart and Rogoff, as they pointed out, offered no evidence that the correlation ran from high debt to low growth rather than the other way around, and other evidence suggested that the latter was more likely. But such criticisms had little impact; for austerians, one might say, Reinhart-Rogoff was a story too good to check.

So the revelations in April 2013 of the errors of Reinhart and Rogoff came as a shock. Despite their paper’s influence, Reinhart and Rogoff had not made their data widely available—and researchers working with seemingly comparable data hadn’t been able to reproduce their results. Finally, they made their spreadsheet available to Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—and he found it very odd indeed. There was one actual coding error, although that made only a small contribution to their conclusions. More important, their data set failed to include the experience of several Allied nations—Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—that emerged from World War II with high debt but nonetheless posted solid growth. And they had used an odd weighting scheme in which each “episode” of high debt counted the same, whether it occurred during one year of bad growth or seventeen years of good growth.

Without these errors and oddities, there was still a negative correlation between debt and growth—but this could be, and probably was, mostly a matter of low growth leading to high debt, not the other way around. And the “threshold” at 90 percent vanished, undermining the scare stories being used to sell austerity.

The austerity crowd is trying to cover it all up, but to them it is more about ideology than fact anyway.

Too bad Obama still believes in that nonsense.

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Obituary: Dr. Joyce Brothers

A media icon of sorts, psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, died today at the age of 85, according to her daughter. Brothers was an important figure in the history of the media because she helped bridge the two areas of advice columnist and psychologist (without the diagnosing, of course).

A very smart individual, Brothers owed her career to mastering the media. She enjoyed the life of relative obscurity as a former college instructor-turned-full-time wife and mother when she decided to try her hand at the popular big-money game shows that were all the rage in the late 1950s. The most famous of these game shows was The $64,000 Question. However, she couldn't just get on the show and show off her expertise in something like psychology. That would have been too dull and wouldn't have been impressive. She was told by producers she needed to find some interesting juxtaposition of what she did for a living and what topic she was an expert. There were numerous examples of this contrast such as jockey Billy Pearson being an expert in art, or a cobbler named Gino Prato who was an expert in opera, or very young contestants who mastered college-level subjects, and so forth. Brothers decided on boxing because it was a fairly narrow topic, and, reportedly obtaining a boxing encyclopedia, spent weeks boning up on it. Born with a photographic memory, Brothers memorized what must have been every single obscure amount of information about boxing.

Brothers appeared on the show, and she did very well. Unlike many contestants of these shows, she was honest and was never coached. Unfortunately for the producers, she wasn't seen as popular by the sponsors or good for ratings, so they decided she had to be bounced off. They tried to stump her, but they failed. Brothers eventually won the grand prize of $64,000, the first woman to have won it. She went on to rake in another $64,000 on Question's spinoff series The $64,000 Challenge. From there she became a major media figure dispensing advice in newspapers and books, and on radio and television.

But in an era when few women managed to have high-profile public careers, Dr. Brothers was able to transform a single night — Dec. 6, 1955, the night of her $64,000 question — into five decades of celebrity.

The question was a multipart interrogation that caused the show to run 30 seconds long. Her responses, given from an isolation booth, conveyed the agility of her mind, the capacity of her memory and the ferocity of her determination.

That night Dr. Brothers supplied, among other impeccable answers, the name of the glove Roman gladiators wore (cestus), Primo Carnera’s opponent in his heavyweight title defense of 1933 (Paolino Uzcudun) and the name of the essayist (William Hazlitt) who wrote about having seen Bill Neat defeat Thomas Hickman on Dec. 11, 1821.

Here are a couple of clips from both quiz shows, just uploaded:

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Ed Etc.

It's nice work if you can get it: Some 17 major school districts from around the country have job openings for superintendent.
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Even though Common Core is likely to be a failure, that hasn't stopped the Gates Foundation for sinking some $150 million in grants to shove it down school districts.
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Austerity Policies Equal Mass Murder

That's no joke, as our federal government, which could do so much to alleviate the suffering of millions of people, prefers to listen to the banksters and not do one goddamned thing about this DEPRESSION out here.

Even though austerity policies are failures and cause all of this suffering, our politicians in D.C. that we supposedly "elect" are embarking on a deliberate policy to force this country into a third world status in some bullshit globalist fantasy that has long since been discredited and debunked:

If suicides were an unavoidable consequence of economic downturns, this would just be another story about the human toll of the Great Recession. But it isn’t so. Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity. (Germany preaches the virtues of austerity — for others.)

As scholars of public health and political economy, we have watched aghast as politicians endlessly debate debts and deficits with little regard for the human costs of their decisions. Over the past decade, we mined huge data sets from across the globe to understand how economic shocks — from the Great Depression to the end of the Soviet Union to the Asian financial crisis to the Great Recession — affect our health. What we’ve found is that people do not inevitably get sick or die because the economy has faltered. Fiscal policy, it turns out, can be a matter of life or death.

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The New Debt Slavery

Student loan debts will be the death of the American Dream once and for all.

It's all deliberate, of course, to keep both higher education and a middle-class lifestyle out of the reach of the masses.

Education is one of the two ways the vast majority of people have for upward mobility. The other is the existence of labor unions, and those are pretty much gone with the exception of public employment.

Our privatizers are steadily working on that angle.

Everyone recognizes that education is the only way up, but as a college degree becomes increasingly essential to making one’s way in a 21st-century economy, education for those not to the manner born is increasingly unaffordable. Student debt for graduating seniors now exceeds $26,000, about a 40 percent increase in just seven years. But an “average” like this masks huge variations.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000. These debts are beyond students’ ability to repay, (especially in our nearly jobless recovery); this is demonstrated by the fact that delinquency and default rates are soaring. Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind. For federal loans taken out in the 2009 fiscal year, three-year default rates exceeded 13 percent.

America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.

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For This Mother's Day

this piece about how women are really treated in this country, especially mothers and would-be mothers.

We've got a long way to go to treat women like they truly own their bodies:

While the rights and dignity of pregnant women are further eroded, forced sterilization and laws that cap the number of children a woman can have if she uses public assistance continue a shameful history in this country of dictating who gets to add to their family. Indeed, lawmakers play a dangerous game when they think they should decide whether a woman becomes a parent, instead of ensuring that every woman can make her own decision based on what is best for her and her family. This is especially true when it comes to the decision to seek an abortion.

In recent years, hundreds of laws were introduced with the goal of making it harder and more expensive to get an abortion or closing clinics to shut off availability of care. Many of these restrictions make the news (hello, North Dakota) and cause a big uproar among advocates (think Virginia's mandatory ultrasound law) and rightly so, but there are efforts that are just as widespread, but simply do not get the same attention - legislation that effectively withholds abortion care altogether.

Those politicians who don't want abortion to be legal at all push bans that deny health care coverage of abortion in order to make it unaffordable. At the federal level, politicians have cut off care for women who use Medicaid or Medicare, as well as Medicare beneficiaries, federal employees and their dependents, Peace Corps volunteers, service members and their families, Native American women utilizing Indian Health Services, and women in federal prisons.

I am glad I don't have to worry about pregnancy and all, but now I have to worry about health care and approaching my so-called "golden years."

It's a bitch.

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"Misconduct" = Makes Too Much Money

Phony Ph.D. John Deasy of LAUSD, who should be fired himself for lying on his resume, among many of his sins, is waging open warfare on senior, tenured teachers by falsely calling the vast majority of them guilty of sexual or other misconduct, when in fact this is nothing but getting around the union contract in order to save money on salaries and benefits.

Take a look at what he is doing to teachers even if they "win" their rigged hearings:

But United Teachers Los Angeles leaders have characterized Deasy's actions as a "witch hunt," saying he's using misconduct allegations to get rid of troublesome teachers and those on the upper rungs of the experience and pay scale.

Richard Schwab, a partner in Trygstad, Schwab & Trystad, the law firm that represents UTLA in labor issues, said he's seen a significant shift in the types of allegations being used to dismiss teachers.

"Every case must be judged on its own merits," Schwab said. "But in a number of cases, the nature of the charges haven't been appropriately investigated or have been too vigorously pursued and the evidence never supported such allegations. "

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Far Right Scumbag Thinks Homeownership is a Bad Idea

When will this 86-year-old fucker die and his bogus "foundations" die with him?

This asshole's bought-and-paid-for outfit thinks homeownership, long a foundation for a stable society, is a bad idea for the most part:

The study, by David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, does not argue that homeowners are more likely to lose jobs than are renters. But it does argue that areas with high and rising levels of homeownership are more likely to be inhospitable to innovation and job creation and to have less labor mobility and longer commutes to work.

“We find that a high rate of homeownership slowly decimates the labor market,” Professor Oswald said.

At the simplest level, the authors of the study, released by the Peterson Institute of International Economics, point to the fact that the five states with the largest increase in homeownership from 1950 to 2010 — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia — had a 2010 unemployment rate that was 6.3 percentage points higher than in 1950. The unemployment rates in the five states where homeownership went up the least — California, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin — rose 3.5 percentage points during the period.

What the assholes like Peterson really want is for everybody to be renters, and the way to do this is to keep wages and salaries low and homeownership out of the reach of people by making houses unaffordable.

I am convinced this was what was underlying the outrageous increase in home prices, something that far outstripped people's ability to pay for them.

If you are a masochist, the "report" is here.

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Ed Etc.

College dropout Bill Gates is truly beyond the pale:

In an April Washington Post op-ed, Bill Gates added his voice to this chorus. Achievement scores, he argues, should not be the primary basis for determining which teachers get fired and which get rewarded. "I'm all for accountability," Gates wrote, "but I understand teachers' concerns and frustrations. . . . If we aren't careful to build a system that provides feedback and that teachers trust, this opportunity to dramatically improve the U.S. education system will be wasted."

Gates held up for special ridicule a "Physical Education Evaluation Instrument," used by the Ohio Department of Education, to assess gym teachers on (among other measures) how fluidly students can skip and how accurately they can throw a ball underhand. While this looks like a perfect shooting-fish-in-a-barrel example of test mania, his criticism is more than a little hypocritical, since Gates himself has been a driving force in promoting such metrics in every dimension of teaching.

In 2009, Gates announced a $290 million donation to the Tampa, Memphis and Pittsburgh school systems, along with a charter consortium in Los Angeles, to implement a system that relies heavily on test scores in rewarding and punishing teachers. These districts were expected to devise quantitative measures for every subject--including phys ed. What's more, Gates has poured millions into organizations like the Data Quality Campaign, the National Council on Teacher Quality and groups like Teach Plus, which advocate such hyper-accountability. The educators Gates lambasts were doing precisely what he was demanding.

Add to the fact he has tainted the AFT.

He can talk out of both sides of his mouth, but he has long discredited himself.

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Etc, Etc.

The Jodi Arias verdict sure as hell wasn't about justice by any stretch of the imagination.

It was seen as payback for Casey Anthony, just as O.J. Simpson's acquittal was seen as payback for Rodney King.

The whole Arias trial was a travesty.

I place the blame squarely on CBS for having covered the case in the beginning, peddling talking points that were almost out of the LDS and not critically examine the claims of so-called "friends" of Travis Alexander.

Worse than that, CBS's Maureen Maher interviewed Jodi Arias, a clear ethical breach, when it was obvious Arias had no lawyer to represent her and anything she said could be used in open court.

Maher and her producers should be fired for that.
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Detroit is under assault by a dictatorship.
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Ed Etc.

A soon-to-be retired Washoe County School District administrator, Rick Harris, who I have dealt with personally, will be principal of a Reno Catholic high school, Bishop Manogue, beginning next year.

He was one of the few ethical administrators I dealt with during my time at WCSD.
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Bill Gates is an evil, evil man.

His filthy tentacles are everywhere in the area of education "reform."

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If You Aspire to be a Fascist, You Might as Well BE One

Oh, isn't THIS lovely?

The proposed law would force social networks and other communications companies to provide government access or face fines that, according to the Washington Post, would multiply exponentially and threaten companies with bankruptcy.

While keeping silent on the unconstitutional nature of the US government’s vast domestic spying apparatus, groups representing major Silicon Valley corporations have raised concerns about the difficulty of implementing the proposed government wiretapping capabilities, particularly for start-ups and small companies, which behemoths like Facebook and Apple rely on for developing new technologies.

According to the Times, officials are working to reformulate the law to satisfy these concerns while forcing the most widely used services to allow wiretapping.

Remember, this is a "Democrat" who supports this sort of thing.

And then, on an unrelated note, Wall Street is doing better than ever during this depression. Meanwhile, there are few jobs being created, let alone many that pay worth a shit, and demand is still in the ditch.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Dow has gained over 8,500 points, surging nearly 130 percent since it bottomed at 6,547 on March 9, 2009. That period of three years and two months has been an unmitigated disaster for the bulk of humanity, including the broad mass of working people in the United States.

The social disaster has worsened this year even as stock markets in the US and around the world continued their manic rise. Economic growth and job creation in the US have slowed from their already anemic pace, condemning millions of workers and youth to permanent unemployment or sweatshop jobs at poverty-level wages.

Ten-buck-an-hour "jobs," part-time, and no benefits.

Thank God I am near retirement age despite being completely impoverished now. I don't have many years left before collecting Social Security, as long as the D.C. bastards don't take THAT away from me.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Penalty Phase

Since Jodi Arias has continued to do what she shouldn't do, and that's open her mouth to the media, this tainted jury will likely give her the death penalty.

The good news, however, is since there is so much reversible error in this trial, any verdict and sentence will be overturned on appeal.

Since there is no way she can ever get a fair trial in Arizona, thanks to the Mormon mob and the media sensationalism, she could very well get freedom like Debra Milke eventually did. That's assuming she doesn't let her depression overwhelm her and she commits suicide.

It may take a long time, as long as a dozen years, for the case to be resolved. HLN might not even be around that long; hell, Nancy Grace, Drew Pinsky, and Jane Velez-Mitchell will likely be long retired before this is over with.

It's a disgrace, that verdict. They can't ever tell me this wasn't a result of the fallout from Casey Anthony. The media-instigated mob mentality is truly unseemly.


Here is a graphic about the death penalty appeals process, should that be necessary in this case:




Update: Trial has been canceled until May 15. No reason was given.

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Jodi Arias Trial: Verdict

Verdict is to be announced at 1:30 PDT.

Clearly there is no a hung jury here.

If it is M1 or M2, but especially M1, we know the jury has been tainted thanks to not being sequestered.

I suspect the verdict is either for manslaughter or for acquittal, which is the only correct verdict, but given the media frenzy, death threats, and the like, it may not happen. It would take a lot of moral courage to acquit, but I doubt the jury is that courageous.

I could be wrong.


The bottom line is this: Anything short of Murder One is a huge victory for the defense and a crushing defeat to the prosecution.

Update: Well, it is time for appeals, and I hope top notch attorneys in the United States take this case to have it thrown out by the higher courts.

The state did NOT prove its case. It doesn't matter what a jury personally believes--the state did NOT prove it AT ALL plus witnesses were tainted. Not sequestering the jury was a bad idea.

Either that jury was made up of a bunch of Mormon morons or else they were afraid of what would happen if they had any other verdict besides M1. I vote for the latter although I was always skeptical of the jury makeup.

I suppose she will get death, which will please the greedheaded Alexander family, which is saying through their lawyer they will file a wrongful death suit although I have heard the statute of limitations has passed on that.

What a bunch of stupid, crooked idiots in this case, but even so, it's obvious the verdict and any sentence will be overturned on appeal.

I just wonder how long it will take.

Video:

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Etc.

Ethics charges against two administrators of a southern Oregon charter school were dismissed by the state licensing board.

It's no surprise since the complaints originated with parents and the principal is resigning at the end of the 2013-2014 school year.
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More details continue to emerge from that outrageous Cleveland kidnapping and rape case.

I guess one shouldn't be shocked about anything anymore, especially after cases like Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, and Elisabeth Fritzl, but here we have three brothers who were allegedly involved in this:

Elsie Cintron, who lives three houses away from Castro, said her daughter saw a naked woman crawling on her hands and knees in Castro's backyard several years ago. Cintron said she called police, "but they didn't take it seriously," Cintron said.

Another neighbor, Israel Lugo, said that in November 2011, his sister, Annita, heard pounding on an upper-floor window at Castro's house. When Annita Lugo looked up, she saw a woman and a baby at a window half-blocked by a wooden plank. Lugo called police. He said officers knocked on the front door, but no one answered.

"They walked to the side of the house and then left," Lugo said.

Lugo said that about a year later, his mother, Elsie Cintron, called police because Castro would park his school bus in front of their home and bring bags full of McDonald's fast food to his home. They wondered why he needed so much food, Lugo said. Police again responded but didn't enter the home.

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Obituary: Ray Harryhausen

Special effects great Ray Harryhausen, 92, has died in London:

Often working alone or with a small crew, Mr. Harryhausen created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure sequences in movie history: the atomically awakened dinosaur that lays waste to Coney Island in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”; the sword fight between Greek heroes and skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts”; the swooping pterodactyl that carries off Raquel Welch in “One Million Years B.C.”

Perhaps his most famous special effects sequence:



And here he talks about his work in Jason and the Argonauts:



This was difficult to pull off. These days, computers do all of the work.

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Etc.

Here is more about that unbelievable tale out of Cleveland.

It sounds like three brothers were involved in this kidnapping case, one girl/woman for each of these assholes.

Cleveland police today praised kidnapping victim Amanda Berry for escaping the home of her captor and alerting authorities to the two other missing women being held against their will inside.

'The real hero here is Amanda,' Cleveland Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said at a press conference on Tuesday morning. 'She came out of that house and that started it all.'

Berry, who went missing a day before her 17th birthday in 2003, climbed through a screen door on Monday afternoon while her alleged captor was out and fled to a neighbor's home to call 911.

When police arrived minutes later, they found Gina DeJesus, 23, and Michele Knight, 32, who had also been missing for a decade, along with a six-year-old girl born to Berry while inside the home.

The praise for Amanda came as police revealed that Child Protective Services had been sent to the home in 2004, but left without speaking to the homeowner, Ariel Castro, after there was no answer.

Castro, 52, has been arrested along with his two brothers, Pedro, 54, and Oneil, 50. At the press conference, authorities said they believe they have the three men responsible, who will face charges.

If guilty, I'd say life without parole for that trio.

You just never know about your neighbors, friends, or even family.


The details are getting more disgusting by the hour:

The women found safe last night on Seymour Avenue were forced to have sex with their captors, resulting in up to five pregnancies, several police sources tell Channel 3 News.

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Some good news has come out of Louisiana with regard to vouchers:

The vote was 6-1, with Justice Greg Guidry dissenting. The plaintiffs in the case include the Louisiana Association of Educators, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana School Boards Association.

The ruling states that the per-pupil allocation, called the minimum foundation program or MFP, must go to public schools. Justice John Weimer writes, "The state funds approved through the unique MFP process cannot be diverted to nonpublic schools or other nonpublic course providers according to the clear, specific and unambiguous language of the constitution."

Furthermore, the court found that the instrument Jindal used to pass the MFP for the 2012-13 school year violated proper procedure and was therefore void from the start.

Time to boot Jindal and White out of Louisiana.

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Destroying Public Education is a Bipartisan Affair

Just take a look at what education secretary Arne Duncan is doing, for example. He is gallivanting around Michigan hobnobbing with far right governor Rick Snyder to wage war on teachers and public schools in that state.

The state is on the verge of disaster. Detroit is being used as a guinea pig for wholesale privatization in that state.

Now tell me again Obama and Duncan are "Democrats," please.

The decision of the White House to send Duncan on a photo-op tour with Snyder was aimed at demonstrating bipartisan unity when it comes to dismantling public education and funneling public assets to private corporations.

Just last month, the Detroit News revealed a secret plot by top Snyder officials, right-wing think tank operatives and politically connected technology executives to circumvent the state’s ban on school vouchers and channel public money to privately operated schools. Under the scheme, technology firms—including those which donated to the governor’s election—would pocket public money by operating cut-rate “value schools” that replaced teachers with long distance video conferencing. (See, “Snyder administration plot to privatize Michigan schools exposed”)

In an answer to this reporter’s question about the conspiracy at a press conference following their appearance in Detroit, Duncan, looking visibly upset, claimed not to have “followed the story closely.” He said he had never supported vouchers but “we are not going to agree on every issue. I love my wife dearly, but my wife and I don’t agree on everything.”

So, Arne, you are admitting you are in bed with Snyder?

It sure sounds like it.

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Bend Over Barry Strikes Again

It's always been about patronage, especially when it comes to somebody from the Chicago School of corrupt politics:

But don’t sell the lady short; she wasn’t swept along on some kind of celebrity joyride. Pritzker, the billionaire heir to part of the Hyatt Hotels fortune, has long been first off an avaricious capitalist, and if she backed Obama, it wasn’t for his looks. Never one to rest on the laurels of her immense inherited wealth, Pritzker has always wanted more. That’s what drove her to run Superior Bank into the subprime housing swamp that drowned the institution’s homeowners and depositors alike before she emerged richer than before.

Pritzker and her family had acquired the savings and loan with the help of $600 million in tax credits. She became the new bank’s chairwoman and ended up as a director of the holding company that owned it. Under her leadership, Superior specialized in subprime lending, hustling folks with meager means and poor credit into high interest loans that were bundled into the toxic securities that wrecked the U.S. economy.

As federal regulators began to move in on her bank after it had dangerously inflated the value of its toxic assets, Pritzker assured its employees: “Our commitment to subprime has never been stronger.” Two months later, the bank was pronounced insolvent. At the time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.‘s inspector general report concluded, “The failure of Superior Bank was directly attributable to the board of directors and executive management ignoring sound risk diversification principles, as evidenced by excessive concentration in residual assets related to subprime lending. ..."

It's so blatant what he is. It will be a miracle the Democratic Party ever survives from this debacle.

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