The Detroit Free Press has the scoop in today's sports section: "Tribe, Tigers rivalry already intense." Sure, Hugh will do a lot of blustering between now and September that his Cleveland Indians will repeat their American League Central crown. But faced with the harsh specter of reality, he may well find himself hoping and praying for his team to stay competitive with the offensive juggernaut coming out of Motown. Jim Leyland's Detroit Tigers are hungry for payback, with a bolstered lineup that can deliver ... and then some. … [Read more...]
$10,000 Apiece Awaits America’s 10 Worst Teachers … What a Deal!
The Center for Union Facts (which brought us such memorable 30-second video gems as this and this) hasn't made a name for itself by being bland, demure, or run-of-the-mill. Therefore, it was hardly surprising to see them unveil the new Teachers Union Exposed website, complete with a sponsored contest that promises "to pay the ten worst union-protected teachers in America $10,000 apiece to get out of the classroom." Of course, $10,000 is a bargain compared to the princely sums sometimes paid to dismiss the worst-offending or poorest-performing tenured teachers. I have many, many friends who currently are teachers - traditional public school, charter school, private school - and I know plenty more who have spent time in the teaching … [Read more...]
Serious Climate Science without the Socialist Scare Agenda
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a group of expert scientists came together to analyze climate change, without the vested interest of socialist governments driving the agenda? Well, wonder no more. It was past time to take a closer look at the oft-touted but seldom-scrutinized "findings" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If you can wade through the figures, graphs, charts, acronyms, and scholarly references embedded in the vast new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), you'll get the answer to three basic questions:The central problems for policymakers in the debate over global warming are (a) is the reported warming trend real and how significant is it? (b) how … [Read more...]
Denver’s School Autonomy Push Reaches New York Times Opinion Page
The local story that has grown out of the Bruce Randolph School's quest for autonomy from Denver's red tape and union work rules reached the op-ed pages of the New York Times yesterday. Andrew Rotherham, a center-left Democrat reformer who co-runs Education Sector and famously blogs as Eduwonk, writes in the column:While laws like No Child Left Behind take the rhetorical punches for being a straitjacket on schools, it is actually union contracts that have the greatest effect over what teachers can and cannot do. These contracts can cover everything from big-ticket items like pay and health care coverage to the amount of time that teachers can spend on various activities. Reformers have long argued that this is an impediment to effective … [Read more...]
Random Bits o’ Spitzer
Spent a few minutes surfing the Web, and found this collection of tidbits on New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, the frenzied media's scandal du jour. From the sublime to the ridiculous ... first, Mickey Kaus notes that a Spitzer resignation (unless he's brazen enough to stick it out) would put school choice supporter Lt. Governor David Paterson at the helm of the Empire State. That's good news. And on the lighter side, Scrapple Face's Scott Ott notes the chief clue that tipped off investigators to Spitzer's illicit behavior:A spokesman from the prosecutor’s office said, “Typically, when a Democrat Governor comes to the nation’s capital, he’s got his hat in hand and winds up leaving town with a bunch of money. The fact that Spitzer … [Read more...]
Iowahawk Attacks Negative Political Campaign Tactics
The master satirist Iowahawk speaks out against negative campaigning in the Democratic presidential primary with zingers like this one:As participants in the American democratic process, both sides of this increasingly bitter intra-party feud should know better. Just because someone associated with your opponent's campaign might at this very minute be circulating a story that your candidate is a white supremacist lesbian child molester, does that mean you automatically have to counter it with stories about their candidate running a Chicago sex slave-for-crack ring with R. Kelly and the Syrian mafia? Come on folks, your campaigns are better than that, even if it is clear to everybody that the other guys started it. A little word for the … [Read more...]
Jeffco GOP Assembly: Recap & Reflection on Renewed Hopes
At Saturday's Jefferson County Republican Assembly, the person who got the biggest ovation was a self-proclaimed Democrat. A bad sign? Not at all. The Democrat was Rose Moniak, a courageous elderly lady who seconded the nomination of Scott Storey for a second term as District Attorney. The victim of a heinous crime that nearly took her life, Moniak had the highest praise for Storey's personal diligence and compassion as a prosecutor. Storey was emotionally touched by the introduction, and Moniak was emotionally touched by the warm, prolonged standing ovation from the Assembly crowd. Moniak was also one of the personal stories from the crowd that U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer addressed from the podium. Schaffer has really honed the … [Read more...]
Why Democrats Are Saying TGIF
If you're a Democrat, Friday has to be feeling really good right about now. Maybe for the weekend, at least, you can take your thoughts off what seems increasingly likely to lie ahead:So it will come down in Denver to the Party's super delegates, a mechanism reeking of rule by elites, adopted by the party which proclaims its devotion to the common man and woman, and which has made huge amounts of noise about making every vote count. Thanks to its convoluted primary process, with proportional arrangements frustrating the desire to have a decisive winner to allow the party to get on with hammering the GOP nominee, the edge in pledged delegates that belongs to Barack Obama will be difficult to overcome among the super delegates, who have been … [Read more...]
Liberal Activist Judge Threatens to Criminalize Homeschool Parents
Update: Richie D at exvigilare has more Out in California, an activist judge has all but put the kibosh on educational freedom - apparently generating law from whole cloth that says parents who school at home have to be credentialed by the state. At least a higher court will have something to say about it:A "breathtaking" ruling from a California appeals court that could subject the parents of 166,000 students in the state to criminal sanctions will be taken to the state Supreme Court. The announcement comes today from the Pacific Justice Institute, whose president, Brad Dacus, described the impact of the decision as "stunning." "The scope of this decision by the appellate court is breathtaking," he said. "It not only attacks … [Read more...]
The Reports of Common Sense’s Death May Not be Exaggerated After All
Eminent UCLA law professor and blogger extraordinaire Eugene Volokh exposes a case of political correctness run amok, to the point of absurdity. "Harassment by reading"? Oh, it's worse than that. University administrators in Indiana came down hard on an employee reading during breaktime a scholarly book that included "Ku Klux Klan" in the title. (You can learn more about the incident, and the book's clearly anti-Klan theme here.) Here's the key excerpt from a university Affirmative Action Office letter, reprinted on Volokh's site:Upon review of this matter, we conclude that your conduct constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 161
- 162
- 163
- 164
- 165
- …
- 256
- Next Page »