primed primates believe climate change is happening, just not to them...,

slate |  On Monday, researchers from Yale and Utah State University unveiled a new statistical technique that allows an in-depth accounting of Americans’ attitudes toward global warming. The resulting maps—down to the county level—reveal some interesting takeaways.

First, Americans overwhelmingly agree that global warming is happening. Out of 3,143 total counties in the United States, majorities of just 39 counties disagree. That means nearly 99 percent of all counties in the country “believe in” global warming—with the holdouts confined to deeply conservative places like Limestone County, Alabama, or coal-producing Putnam County, West Virginia. That aligns broadly with a recent 98-1 Senate vote that global warming is real and “not a hoax.” The lone holdout in that vote was Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.

Looking at the science, perhaps climate denial in Mississippi and Alabama can be expected: According to the recent National Climate Assessment, they’re the only two states that haven’t warmed significantly over the last two decades.

But the basic fact of rising temperatures is about the only point where public opinion matches the science. The new data also show that a majority of U.S. counties remain unconvinced that global warming is caused “mostly by human activities.” Majorities in a whopping 2,717 of 3,143 counties (nearly 80 percent) disagree with that sentiment, among them the liberal bastions of Brooklyn, New York, and Prince George’s County, Maryland. (Technically, these county-level data are estimates of public opinion based on statistical extrapolation from demographic data and 12 national surveys over the last seven years. At the county level, the result has a margin of error of +/- 8 percentage points.)

why you pan-troglodytic deuterostems will get exactly what you deserve...,

sciencedaily |  Most partisans -- average Democratic and Republican voters -- act like fans in sports rivalries instead of making political choices based on issues, according to a new study with a University of Kansas researcher as the lead author.

"What is the consequence of today's polarized politics? What's motivating partisans to vote in this climate?" said Patrick Miller, a University of Kansas assistant professor of political science. "For too many of them, it's not high-minded, good-government, issue-based goals. It's, 'I hate the other party. I'm going to go out, and we're going to beat them.' That's troubling."

Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are co-authors of the study "Red and Blue States of Mind: Partisan Hostility and Voting in the United States," published recently in the journal Political Research Quarterly.

The researchers analyzed the attitudes of voters nationwide in survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. They found that many average voters with strong party commitments -- both Democrats and Republicans -- care more about their parties simply winning the election than they do either ideology or issues. Unlike previous research, the study found that loyalty to the party itself was the source of partisan rivalry and incivility, instead of a fundamental disagreement over issues.

The survey showed that 41 percent of partisans agreed that simply winning elections is more important to them than policy or ideological goals, while just 35 percent agreed that policy is a more important motivator for them to participate in politics. Only 24 percent valued both equally or expressed no opinion.

When it came to uncivil attitudes, 38 percent of partisans agreed that their parties should use any tactics necessary to "win elections and issue debates." When those who agreed with this view were asked what tactics they had in mind, the most common ones they offered were voter suppression, stealing or cheating in elections, physical violence and threats against the other party, lying, personal attacks on opponents, not allowing the other party to speak and using the filibuster to gridlock Congress. Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to express this opinion.

"This is the first research to show that strong partisans who are motivated by partisan conflict are endorsing uncivil attitudes about the political process," Miller said. "This comes to an important point. If our politicians are polarized and uncivil, maybe it's because many voters are polarized and uncivil."

conservatives quiet about ferguson because it exemplifies naked american conservatism in a nutshell

theatlantic |  Conservatives are typically eager to disparage politicians and bureaucrats who conspire to seize wealth. So you'd think that they'd be outraged to learn that officials in one municipality treat residents as revenue sources rather than citizens. In this city, policymakers have made maximizing the intake of money their number one priority. They urge police to cite residents as aggressively as possible and evaluate their municipal court judge based on the fines that he levies. Challenges to the city's system are thwarted by a deliberately complicated thicket of rules and red tape. And violations of the Constitution are frequent and unpunished.

This city's government does not solve problems. Its government is the problem. One illustration of many concerns a poor woman who got a single parking ticket there. "From 2007 to 2014, the woman was arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and paid $550 to the court for the events stemming from this single instance of illegal parking," federal investigators report. "Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. One of those payments was later accepted, but only after the court’s letter rejecting payment by money order was returned as undeliverable. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541."

What a burden the public sector has imposed on her life.

No city in America better illustrates government run amok than Ferguson, Missouri. Libertarians have long excoriated the city. Less so, movement conservatives. Most are ambivalent about the abuses. Some have even defended Ferguson officials. Why haven't conservatives seized this opportunity to highlight government-caused damage and to show blacks, Ferguson's most frequently abused demographic, that the right is intent on protecting everyone's civil rights?

why do some controversies persist - despite evidence?

physorg |  If you believe in evolution, then everything can be explained in evolutionary terms, whereas if you believe in creation, then everything is understood using different assumptions about how the world works.

In many controversies, the two sides operate from different assumptions and worldviews that are analogous to scientific paradigms. Any fact that doesn't fit into the standard picture is dismissed as an anomaly.

For example, pro-fluoridationists dismiss studies suggesting a link between water fluoridation and the crippling disease skeletal fluorosis.

Group dynamics

Campaigning groups can develop a sense of solidarity and community. They are advocating for a worthy cause, after all, and it feels good to be among like-minded people.

Most campaigners interact mainly with others on the same side, and seldom have dinner with bitter opponents.

Many years ago, when I interviewed leading scientists, doctors and dentists who were active and prominent in the fluoridation debate, it was obvious they identified with those on the same side and interacted with their opponents only in antagonistic forums such as debates.

Public scientific controversies are not just about the science. They invariably involve differences in values concerning ethics and social choices. Partisans will come at the issue with differing assessments of fairness, care, authority and sacredness.

In the fluoridation debate, the morality of caring for others is present on both sides. Proponents say fluoridation potentially benefits everyone, especially those who are too poor to afford good dental care.

Opponents care more about those who might be damaged by fluoridation, arguing against putting a medication in the water supply to treat the population, using an uncontrolled dose.

If
In many controversies, the two sides operate from different assumptions and worldviews that are analogous to scientific paradigms. Any fact that doesn't fit into the standard picture is dismissed as an anomaly.
For example, pro-fluoridationists dismiss studies suggesting a link between water fluoridation and the crippling disease skeletal fluorosis.
Group dynamics
Campaigning groups can develop a sense of solidarity and community. They are advocating for a worthy cause, after all, and it feels good to be among like-minded people.
Most campaigners interact mainly with others on the same side, and seldom have dinner with bitter opponents.
Many years ago, when I interviewed leading scientists, doctors and dentists who were active and prominent in the fluoridation debate, it was obvious they identified with those on the same side and interacted with their opponents only in antagonistic forums such as debates.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-controversies-persist-evidence.html#jCp

the principal of hierarchical coincidence is conspicuously obvious to the casual observer...,

theatlantic | The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis—progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, communist to fascist, socialist to capitalist, or Democrat to Republican—is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. And any position anywhere along it is infested by contradictions.

Transcending partisanship is going to require what seems beyond the capacities of either side: thinking about the left-right spectrum rather than from it. The terminology arose in revolutionary France in 1789, where it referred to the seating of royalists and anti-royalists in the Assembly. It is plausible to think of the concept (if not the vocabulary) as emerging in pre-revolutionary figures such as Rousseau and Burke. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of “left” and “right” used in the political sense in English is in Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution in 1837, but the idea only crystallized fully with the emergence and under the aegis of Marxism, in the middle of the 19th century. It was not fully current in English-speaking countries until early in the 20th.

Before that, and outside of the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. To take one example, the radical and egalitarian reform movements of the early and mid-19th century in the U.S.—such as abolitionism, feminism, and pacifism—were by and large evangelical Christian, and were radically individualist and anti-statist. I have in mind such figures as Lucretia Mott, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison, who articulated perfectly coherent positions that cannot possibly be characterized as on the left or the right.

The most common way that the left-right spectrum is conceived—and the basic way it is characterized in the Pew survey—is as state against capital.* Democrats insist that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might pit Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand in a cage match of state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let's call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing. 

I'd say it's obvious that PHC is true, and that everyone knows it to be true. A white-supremacist polity in which black people were wealthier than white people, for example, would be extremely surprising. It would be no less surprising if regulatory capture were not pervasive. You could keep trying to institute reforms to pull economic and political power apart, but this would be counter-productive, because when you beef up the state to control capital, you only succeed in making capital more monolithic, more concentrated, and more able to exercise a wider variety of powers. (Consider the relation of Goldman Sachs to the Treasury Department over the last several decades, or Halliburton and the Pentagon, or various communications and Internet concerns and NSA. The distinction between "public" and "private" is rather abstract in relation to the on-the-ground overlap.)

the .000001% at home...,

NYTimes |  In national politics, playing in Charles Koch’s arena can mean saturation advertising against vulnerable Democrats, calls for tax cuts, demands to roll back government regulation and bitter clashes over climate change.

Here in the windswept hometown of the Koch family and Koch Industries, playing in Charles Koch Arena means something else entirely.

“I would be hard-pressed to find two things that are more important to this community than Koch Industries and Shocker basketball,” said Gregg Marshall, coach of the Wichita State University men’s team, which packs the arena, a house that Mr. Koch restored with his donations. “They put a nice chunk of change into this building.”

Welcome to Kochville, where the family name conjures up something decidedly different from the specter raised by Democrats of secretive political operations funded by tens of millions of dollars in anonymous campaign money. For many living here in Wichita along the Arkansas River, it stands instead for well-paying jobs, extensive philanthropy like the $6 million for the arena renovation, and Kansas pride in being the headquarters of Koch Industries, the nation’s second-largest privately held company, which produces oil, fertilizer and common household items.

Outside of Kochville, the brothers Charles and David Koch, whose worth is estimated at more than $50 billion each, are ready villains. Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, regularly skewers them on the Senate floor. Others have proposed a constitutional amendment aimed at diluting their influence. The two are even the subject of an updated documentary titled “Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition.”

But the charged atmosphere surrounding the Kochs elsewhere dissipates markedly in the city where their father, Fred Koch, started his business in 1925, even though the positive sentiment toward the Kochs is hardly universally shared.

the memo that spawned right-wing think tanks, lobbies, and the contemporary "corporations as persons" movement...,

reclaimdemocracy | Introduction - In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell’s nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell’s legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell “might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice…in behalf of business interests.”

Though Powell’s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration’s “hands-off business” philosophy.

Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building — a focus we share, though often with sharply contrasting goals.*  (See our endnote for more on this.)

So did Powell’s political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.

lying without opposition: reagan's veto of the fairness doctrine laid the groundwork for the partisan peasant right wing...,

latimes |  President Reagan, intensifying the debate over whether the nation's broadcasters must present opposing views of controversial issues, has vetoed legislation to turn into law the 38-year-old "fairness doctrine," the White House announced Saturday.

The doctrine, instituted by the Federal Communications Commission as public policy in 1949, requires the nation's radio and television stations to "afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance."

"This type of content-based regulation by the federal government is, in my judgment, antagonistic to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment," Reagan said in his veto message. "In any other medium besides broadcasting, such federal policing of the editorial judgment of journalists would be unthinkable."

Staunch Opposition

The legislation had been staunchly opposed not only by the Administration, but also by the nation's broadcasters, who maintain that the FCC policy is an unconstitutional intrusion that has a chilling effect on their operations.

Opponents also contend that the explosive growth of the telecommunications industry in recent years makes the fairness doctrine obsolete. In his veto message, Reagan noted that the FCC has concluded "that the doctrine is an unnecessary and detrimental regulatory mechanism."

The legislation containing the doctrine passed the House on a 302-102 vote on June 3 and had been approved by the Senate in April on a 59-31 vote.

If the measure does not become law, the fairness doctrine and its obligations still will remain in effect as FCC policy. However, supporters have been seeking to codify the regulation for fear that the FCC could act to repeal it--particularly in light of a federal appeals court ruling last year that concluded that the doctrine was not a law, leaving its enforcement up to the FCC.

Former FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler had pressed for repeal of the fairness doctrine and, the June 22 issue of Broadcasting magazine said, helped to write Reagan's veto message.

In 1985 the FCC, under Fowler's leadership, issued a report on the doctrine calling it constitutionally "suspect" and said that "if it were up to the commission, it would hold the doctrine unconstitutional."

a little living-memory, partisan, political dot-connecting to get you through the hump...,

Why the Republican National Debt is $12 Trillion

post-gazette |  OK, the beast is starving. Now what? That's the question confronting Republicans. But they're refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don't know what I'm talking about: Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending -- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed "starving the beast" during the Reagan years. The idea -- propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol -- was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year's budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and unfunded wars. In addition, the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

internet bully stopped and frisked in tahnussy's comment section

So, feeling "in the know" about this particular subject, I opted to stick my toe into the supremely shallow and very heavily policed waters over at what passes for black public intellectual output over at the atlantic. It didn't take long for me to piss off the extremely partisan toddlers and get put in check. My question, did I "argue" in bad faith - as I was accused of doing by the hyperactive moderator Sandy - who also happens to profess to be a "master teacher" in various and sundry of the humanities and whose primary instrumentality is chalk?

In my estimation, the severe and excessive levels of thought policing that take place in the cathedral's "safe places" has nothing whatsoever to do with trolling, but are instead hallmarks of the profound discursive and political weakness of feminized progressive politics. Emotions prevail in these contexts, and if your position is unpopular - no matter how it's presented - you will be ostracized because they are incapable of a fact-based or reasoned counter-argument.  You're either with us, or you're against us - is.all.they've.got.  This is why I believe nobody will step up and overcome the malicious narrative mischief being worked by Nicholas Wade and amplified by the Establishment.

trickydonut KlugerRD • 2 days ago

I actually don't think tenure is the biggest issue, I think supervision is. In most schools, the principal or other administrator might only stop by a classroom 4 or 5 times a year, with maybe only two of those being actual evaluations. What rarely happens: observation, identification of issues teachers need help with (#1: classroom management), and then sustained support until the issue is resolved. Yes, there are bad teachers out there, but usually problems just fester because no one knows about them or takes the time to fix them.

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  AptiDude trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Yes, and how many inner-city high administrators actually could advise a French teacher, music teacher, art teacher, special education teacher or an AP physics teacher effectively about how best to instruct their students? All they can do is make sure the teacher is in the room and the students are mostly paying attention and order is being maintained.

  
  
  
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  CNu trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Bingo!!! Education is not rocket science. Take attendance, perform instruction, issue grades. Supervise for consistency and quality in all of the above. Simple.
  Parental priorities in high-performing public school districts:
  1. Safety
  2. Children have fun in school
  3. Children served good food that they enjoy.
  4. Academics
  5. College/Vocational preparation
  In that order
  If you take care of the first three, four and five have a marvelous way of taking care of themselves. The first three are of course bellweathers of a competently managed school environment.
  The invisible 800lb gorilla that no one EVER explicitly articulates - is that the past three generations of urban public school graduates / attendees - a majority have had such an atrocious experience in school, such an abject failure and deviation from priorities one through three - that they not only have zero warm and fuzzy feelings about the enterprise, they actually have a deeply imprinted and visceral aversion to contact with the school of any kind.
  These are generations whose compulsory attendance at schools stripped of cultural enrichment and starved for resources at the business-end of education delivery - was miserable. Their experience was rendered miserable because bloated, overpaid, incompetent administrations were engaged in various and sundry modes of parasitic extraction and self-aggrandizement that had nothing whatsoever to do with the needs and wants of their core constituents.
  Until the 19th century education model is fully reformed (and it can't be due to deeply conflicting institutional interests) and urban public schools are remade predominantly safe, fun, and nourishing - then the problem of failed performance will persist.
  Off the top, somewhere between 50-70% of the existing teacher cadres have got to go. In addition, 10-12% of students who are irretrievably pre-jail and make life miserable for the other kids, teachers, and school leadership - they've also got to go. I believe they used to call it "reform" school.
  Finally, parents and grandparents have to be brought back into active communal engagement with the institution despite the ill-will they may bear toward it because of their own miserable experiences therein. Cultural enrichment activities are the path down which this bridge and community rebuilding can be achieved. Again, those programs require reallocation of resources away from the central office and out to the locations where education and community are delivered.
  The political will and audacity to effect these kinds of institutional changes is not present in sufficient quantity to make anything like this happen anywhere in the U.S.

  
  
  
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    Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

    
    

    Yes, firing 50-70% of people who do the work is clearly the place to start if we want to improve education outcomes. Why didn't I think of that?

    
    
    

    
    
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      CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

      
      

      Teachers get certified at the age of 21-22, and don't have to update that at regular intervals like most professionals. Consequently, we have 48 year old teachers who haven't updated their pedagogical methods since prior to the advent of the world wide web, facing kids with Googol in their pockets and the answer to nearly any question those kids want to pose. It's a grotesque understatement to call such an obsolete and out of touch skill set "doing the work". More like "occupying the position", "waiting on a pension" and "categorically failing to manage the classroom".
      There's a reason that kids don't want to listen to these out of date and irrelevant throwbacks.

      
      
      
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        monknomo CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        It varies by state, but even in backwater Alaska teachers have to take a couple credits of continuing education courses every year to maintain their credentials. The courses general cover new pedagogical methods and is not dissimilar from what lawyers and other professionals with a certificate do.

        
        
        

        
        
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          CNu monknomo • 2 days ago

          
          

          They seem to have missed that in Missouri http://dese.mo.gov/governmenta...

          
          
          
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            Sandy Young (Corkingiron) Mod CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            None of what you've posted contradicts the comment you are responding to - nor does it support your generalization that teachers aren't motivated and often required to update their credentials.
            You are simply not arguing in good faith. Don't post again.

            
            
            
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        Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        I'm not at all sure you know what your are talking about. I doubt that anyone has taught a quarter of a century without "updating" their pedagogical methods - at least not in any major school district. Teachers have been forced to cope with and adapt to curriculum changes. And I don't believe that their resistance is always because they are incompetent, but might be because they have experience that outside consultants and "reformers" don't value.

        
        
        
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          CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

          
          

          I've watched it first hand for five years now and have been absolutely shocked and appalled at the lack of professional development, the lack of self-motivated continuing education, and the profound lack of basic operational technology skills. Technology is now a primary content and curriculum delivery modality in the classroom, part and parcel of what you do to boost both individual and collaborative student engagement - but an overwhelming percentage of teachers are technology illiterate.
          Concrete examples; in the large urban district it's been my privilege to observe, we rolled out a new student information system. Fewer than 15% of teachers participated in mandatory training for the SIS - with the consequent failures of basic data entry in the non rocket science aspects of school business, i.e., entering attendance and issuing grades.
          So also for training in the use of the short-throw projector systems and blue-tooth pens and controls for using these systems to interactively display their lessons.
          Finally, the actual computer classes for children have suffered from a 9 year old pathetic excuse for a curriculum focused on "digital citizenship" rather than actual functional skills.
          On their own, the children tend to be exponentially more technology literate and technology aware than the adults purported to function as their instructors.

          
          
          
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            Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            I don't believe that your experience with issues like short throw projectors comes close to supporting the suggestion that 2/3 or so of teachers are incompetent and should be terminated. Sorry. You come off like a wack job full of extreme opinions based on a pocket full of anecdotes.

            
            
            
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              CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

              
              

              lol, the writing on the wall has you petrified. That's a very good thing indeed!

on climate, republicans and democrats are from different continents

NYTimes | Americans are less worried about climate change than the residents of any other high-income country, as my colleague Megan Thee-Brennan wrote Tuesday. When you look at the details of these polls, you see that American exceptionalism on the climate stems almost entirely from Republicans. Democrats and independents don’t look so different from people in Japan, Australia, Canada and across Europe.

According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted last year, 25 percent of self-identified Republicans said they considered global climate change to be “a major threat.” The only countries with such low levels of climate concern are Egypt, where 16 percent of respondents called climate change a major threat, and Pakistan, where 15 percent did.

By comparison, 65 percent of Democrats in the United States gave that answer, putting them in the same range as Brazilians (76 percent), Japanese (72 percent), Chileans (68 percent) or Italians and Spaniards (64 percent). If you combine Democrats and independents into one group, 52 percent called climate change a major threat, according to Pew. That’s the same broad range of concern as in Germany (56 percent), Canada and France (54 percent), Australia (52 percent) or Britain (48 percent).

Over all, between 40 percent and 45 percent of Americans in recent Pew polls have called climate change a major concern (with a similar share of independents giving that answer).

The Republican skepticism about climate change extends across the party, though it’s strongest among those who consider themselves part of the Tea Party. Ten percent of those aligned with the Tea Party called climate change a major threat, compared with 35 percent of Republicans who did not identify with the Tea Party.

Not surprisingly, these patterns match recent political events. In international negotiations, the United States has been less interested in taking steps to slow global warming than many other rich countries. President Obama and a majority of Democrats favored a bill that would have raised the cost of emitting carbon, and such a bill passed the House of Representatives in 2009. Strong opposition from Republicans in the Senate, as well as some Democrats from coal-producing states, defeated the bill there.

what was the legal issue again? dickishness takes on a life of its own...,

theblaze |  During a contentious congressional hearing on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder disdainfully told Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) “good luck with your asparagus.”

Many, including TheBlaze, assumed Holder was mocking Gohmert for seemingly fumbling his words back in 2013 when he said, “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!”

Gohmert was ridiculed at the time by Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” the Washington Post, the U.K. Guardian and more for the “famously embarrassing” moment.

But Gohmert told Glenn Beck on Wednesday that he did not fumble his words back in 2013, and was in fact using a quote that goes back decades.

“Percy Foreman was a very, very liberal criminal defense attorney, but he was incredible in the courtroom,” Gohmert said on Beck’s radio show. “When somebody started attacking his integrity, he stood up and said, ‘I object, he’s casting aspersions on my asparagus!’ And people would scratch their heads, but it brought down the level of the rancor. I was using a Percy Foreman line from criminal trials back probably 50 years ago.”

Other research confirms that the line was used in decades past. A 1973 book by John Dos Passos includes a letter where an individual says, “don’t think that I’m ‘casting asparagus’…”

the teatards are working to consolidate control of school district revenue streams and enrich their cronies, period

kcstar | Some lawmakers and teachers’ union leaders on Monday called for Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro’s resignation, citing a report in The Star of emails showing a questionable bid process and development of plans for Kansas City Public Schools without the district’s knowledge.

But state school board President Peter Herschend said people are reacting to a planning process for Kansas City that is still evolving and has been — and will be — the responsibility of the state board.

The board has urged the commissioner and the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to bring swift change to the state’s unaccredited school districts, including Kansas City, Herschend said in a prepared statement. This is a time for conversation, he said.

“Some groups are fighting even suggestions of change,” he said. “We ask you that you reserve judgment before any plan has been formulated or even ideas discussed.”

The emails showed a collaboration among Nicastro, the Kauffman and Hall Family foundations and the Indianapolis-based CEE-Trust research group starting in April to prepare a proposal for a new school system for Kansas City.

The records also described a bidding process that gave the work contract to CEE-Trust in August after it had already been working with the state and the foundations.

Eight Democratic lawmakers in a written statement accused Nicastro of abusing her power and asked the state school board to open an internal investigation of the bidding process.

State Sen. Paul LeVota and state Rep. Genise Montecillo of St. Louis County, who have challenged Nicastro previously, were joined Monday by state representatives Reps. Bonnaye Mims of Kansas City, Judy Morgan of Kansas City, Ira Anders of Independence, John Mayfield of Independence and Joe Runions of Grandview, and state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal of St. Louis County.

“It is imperative that she resign immediately as state education commissioner or, if she fails to do so, be removed from her post by the Missouri State Board of Education,” the statement read.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, who was asked about Nicastro during a news conference Monday in Fulton, Mo., said that it was a good time for the state Board of Education to “monitor and evaluate” concerns raised about her, The Associated Press reported.

In his statement, Herschend said the board ultimately chose CEE-Trust, agreeing with the department that CEE-Trust was “the clear choice for conducting analyses and making recommendations for transforming Kansas City Public Schools.”

The process was “open and competitive,” he said.

indiana-style, teatard corruption caught by sunshine law disclosures in kansas city...,

kcstar | Backed by two of the most influential foundations in Kansas City, Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro and a state-hired consultant are planning the future of Kansas City Public Schools as a slate wiped clean.

Revelations in emails obtained by The Star and dating to April show a state education department eager to create a new school system, even as the long-beleaguered but stabilized district was preparing to celebrate its best academic improvement in years.

The electronic trail exposes a rushed bidding process, now criticized, that ultimately landed Indianapolis-based CEE-Trust a $385,000 contract to develop a long-range overhaul for the district’s failing schools.

Summer discussions in emails reveal Nicastro’s wish for a statewide district to gather poor-performing schools under new leadership, with an office for innovation and charter school expansion.

In mid-August, days before the state’s district report cards were to be released to the public showing a surprisingly high score for Kansas City, a CEE-Trust partner shared his talking points with Nicastro and staff debunking the performance of a district where 70 percent of the students still perform below proficiency.

“It suggests a conspiracy against our success,” said Kansas City Superintendent Steve Green.

Even as Green and his cabinet gathered in Jefferson City on Sept. 4 with Nicastro and staff to plead Kansas City’s case for provisional accreditation and a reprieve from state intervention, emails show Nicastro had other plans.

Three weeks earlier at the Kauffman Foundation, unknown to Green, Nicastro had introduced her planning team to the person she selected to lead a potential statewide district — Norman Ridder, who is retiring as superintendent of Springfield’s public schools.

Such a district typically would operate many of the state’s low-performing schools, many of them likely in Kansas City.

indiana is a hub of teatard strategery on public education...,

NYTimes | For Glenda Ritz, who took office as Indiana’s top education official this year, the awkward reality of being the lone statewide elected Democrat here did not take long to blossom into all-out combat. 

Now her conflict with Gov. Mike Pence, a conservative former congressman, has become one of the most public and combative political fights to face his new administration. 

Ms. Ritz has accused the governor of creating a new education agency to undermine her office. Mr. Pence says that was not his aim. But the tension, months in the making, has boiled over at monthly State Board of Education meetings, where Ms. Ritz and board members, who are appointed by the governor, continue to wrestle for control over the state’s education policies. 

In recent weeks, Ms. Ritz, the state superintendent of public instruction, has sued the board, walked out of a meeting to prevent a vote and accused Mr. Pence of orchestrating a subversive “power grab” against the Department of Education. 

“I feel he wants to have one agency for education, and that’s going to be the agency,” she said in a recent interview about the governor’s new agency, the Center for Education and Career Innovation, known as C.E.C.I. She added, “It is interfering with how I’m operating and how I’m going about making decisions.” 

The center, with fewer than 20 staff members, was created by Mr. Pence’s executive order with the broad mission of better aligning the state’s K-12, higher education and work force development strategies, according to Claire Fiddian-Green, a co-director of the center and a special assistant to the governor. The center also provides staffing for the Board of Education, which previously relied on Ms. Ritz’s 228 employees at the Department of Education for legal counsel and administrative support.

the tedium of building, rallying, and serving a permanent mass-membership is indispensable...,

NYTimes | Part of the appeal of plutocratic politics is their power to liberate policy making from the messiness and the deal making of grass-roots and retail politics. In the postwar era, civic engagement was built through a network of community organizations with thousands of monthly-dues-paying members and through the often unseemly patronage networks of old-fashioned party machines, sometimes serving only particular ethnic communities or groups of workers. 

The age of plutocracy made it possible to liberate public policy from all of that, and to professionalize it. Instead of going to work as community organizers, or simply taking part in the civic life of their own communities, smart, publicly minded technocrats go to work for plutocrats whose values they share. The technocrats get to focus full time on the policy issues they love, without the tedium of building, rallying — and serving — a permanent mass membership. They can be pretty well paid to boot. 

The Democratic political advisers who went from working on behalf of the president or his party to advising the San Francisco billionaire Thomas F. Steyer on his campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline provide a telling example. Twenty years ago, they might have gone to work for the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy or run for public office themselves. Today, they are helping to build a pop-up political movement for a plutocrat. 

Plutocratic politics have much to recommend them. They are pure, smart and focused. But at a time when society as a whole is riven by an ever widening economic chasm, policy delivered from on high can get you only so far. Voters on both the right and the left are suspicious of whether the plutocrats and the technocrats they employ understand their real needs, and whether they truly have their best interests at heart. That rift means we should all brace ourselves for more extremist politics and a more rancorous political debate. 

Where does that leave smart centrists with their clever, fact-based policies designed to fine-tune 21st century capitalism and make it work better for everyone? 

Part of the problem is that no one has yet come up with a fully convincing answer to the question of how you harness the power of the technology revolution and globalization without hollowing out middle-class jobs. Liberal nanny-state paternalism, as it has been brilliantly described and practiced by Cass R. Sunstein and like-minded thinkers, can help, as can shoring up the welfare state. But neither is enough, and voters are smart enough to appreciate that. Even multiple nudges won’t make 21st-century capitalism work for everyone. Plutocrats, as well as the rest of us, need to rise to this larger challenge, to find solutions that work on the global scale at which business already operates. 

The other task is to fully engage in retail, bottom-up politics — not just to sell those carefully thought-through, data-based technocratic solutions but to figure out what they should be in the first place. The Tea Party was able to steer the Republican Party away from its traditional country-club base because its anti-establishment rage resonated better with all of the grass-roots Republican voters who are part of the squeezed middle class. Mr. de Blasio will be the next mayor of New York because he built a constituency among those who are losing out and those who sympathize with them. Politics in the winner-take-all economy don’t have to be extremist and nasty, but they have to grow out of, and speak for, the 99 percent. The pop-up political movements that come so naturally to the plutocrats won’t be enough.

the most corrupt political system in the world...,

NYTimes | WE have long assumed that the infestation of special interest money in Washington is at the root of so much that ails our politics. But what if we’ve had it wrong? What if instead of being bribed by wealthy interests, politicians are engaged in a form of legal extortion designed to extract campaign contributions? 

Consider this: of the thousands of bills introduced in Congress each year, only roughly 5 percent become law. Why do legislators bother proposing so many bills? What if many of those bills are written not to be passed but to pressure people into forking over cash? 

This is exactly what is happening. Politicians have developed a dizzying array of legislative tactics to bring in money. 

Take the maneuver known inside the Beltway as the “tollbooth.” Here the speaker of the House or a powerful committee chairperson will create a procedural obstruction or postponement on the eve of an important vote. Campaign contributions are then implicitly solicited. If the tribute offered by those in favor of the bill’s passage is too small (or if the money from opponents is sufficiently high), the bill is delayed and does not proceed down the legislative highway. 

House Speaker John A. Boehner appears to be a master of the tollbooth. In 2011, he collected a total of over $200,000 in donations from executives and companies in the days before holding votes on just three bills. He delayed scheduling a vote for months on the widely supported Wireless Tax Fairness Act, and after he finally announced a vote, 37 checks from wireless-industry executives totaling nearly $40,000 rolled in. He also delayed votes on the Access to Capital for Job Creators Act and the Small Company Capital Formation Act, scoring $91,000 from investment banks and private equity firms, $32,450 from bank holding companies and $46,500 from self-described investors — all in the 48 hours between scheduling the vote and the vote’s actually being held on the House floor. 

Another tactic that politicians use is something beltway insiders call “milker bills.” These are bills designed to “milk” donations from threatened individuals or businesses. The real trick is to pit two industries against each other and pump both for donations, thereby creating a “double milker” bill. 

President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. seemed to score big in 2011 using the milker tactic in connection with two bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. By pitting their supporters in Silicon Valley who opposed the bills against their allies in Hollywood who supported the measures, Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden were able to create a sort of fund-raising arms race. 

In the first half of 2011, Silicon Valley had chipped in only $1.7 million to Mr. Obama’s political campaign. The president announced that he would “probably” sign antipiracy legislation — a stance that pleased Hollywood and incensed Silicon Valley. The tech industry then poured millions into Mr. Obama’s coffers in the second half of 2011. By January of 2012, Hollywood had donated $4.1 million to Mr. Obama. 

Then, suddenly, on Jan. 14, 2012, the White House announced that it had problems with the antipiracy bills and neither passed. “He didn’t just throw us under the bus,” one film executive and longtime supporter of Mr. Obama anonymously told The Financial Times, “he ran us down, reversed the bus and ran over us again.”

jeb bush to the wattles: propose an alternative and show a little self-restraint...,

RCP | JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: But I just spoke to Ted Cruz and he was the guy who said, hey, let's not agree to a funding resolution unless ObamaCare is defunded. That was the strategy that really kicked it off and he told me that he will now do anything he can to stop ObamaCare and he does not rule out pushing to the brink once again.

What would your message be to Ted Cruz?

JEB BUSH: Well, frankly, I think the best way to repeal ObamaCare is to have an alternative. We never hear the alternative. We could do this in a much lower cost with improved quality based on our principles, free market principles, and two, show how ObamaCare, flawed to its core, doesn't work.

So have a little bit of self-restraint. It might actually be a politically better approach to see the massive dysfunction. But we don't even hear about that because we've stepped on that message. And I think Republicans need to just take a step back and allow -- show a little self-restraint and let this happen a little more organically.

nutty baggers rigged parliamentary rules and suspended democracy in order to enact the shutdown...,

Late in the evening on September 30, 2013, the House Rules Committee Republicans changed the Rules of the House so that the ONLY Member allowed to call up the Senate's clean CR for a vote was Majority Leader Eric Cantor or his designee -- all but guaranteeing the government would shut down a few hours later and would stay shut down. Previously, any Member would have had the right to bring the CR up for a vote. Democracy has been suspended in the House of Representatives.

feces-flinging, circus clown college in congress...,

RT | Is the drama in Washington, a comedy or a tragedy? What's a better term for American democracy? When will the debt time bomb detonate? Who can stand up against American exceptionalism? We discuss this and more with National Security whistleblower, Mark Novitsky 

.Sophie Shevardnadze: Our guest today is another national security whistleblower, and no it’s not Edward Snowden – his name is Mark Novitsky and he joins us from the American city of Minneapolis.

 

So the drama in Washington – what was it? Is it a comedy or a tragedy?

 

Mark Novitsky: It’s really disturbing to refer to what’s happening in Washington as a joke, and on behalf of all critical, clear-thinking Americans I want to apologize to the rest of the world for our Circus Clown College in Congress, and only the American Congress could pat themselves on the back and break their elbows for kicking the can down the road instead of actually doing their job, and delaying this for another three months on an issue that they should have handled couple years ago.

 

SS: There is no default this time, but only for now, the root causes aren’t really going away, be they political or economic, don’t you think?

 

MN: The situation is that actually there was a default, we went into default in May, and the Treasury department actually started dipping into US government pension funds to make up for that deficit. All of these things are really scary and I think that we would have to take a look at these issues as if what would be the consequences for the average person if they were to pile up their credit card debt to the point where they can’t afford to pay their mortgage and going to get another credit card – there has to be some type of resolution to all of this nonsense from an economic perspective. I think the first thing you do when you’re in the bottom of the hole is stop digging.

 

SS: Why is it that every draft bill turns into existential crisis for Congress? I mean, beforehandCongress was somewhat able to make more pragmatic decisions, come to an accord – but now it’s all about life and death struggle..

 

MN: Because the concept of social control being best managed through fear predates Christ from a political perspective, and in order for there to be fear so that one may have social control have to have a crisis. People often tend to refer to me, saying “Mark, you’re so negative!” That’s because we have a new crisis every week that we need to deal with and the way that we end up dealing with this crises is piling them on top of each other and nothing ever gets resolved. We need to hold our government officials accountable to the rule of law, to the Constitution, and I want to thank Russia Today for having me on, because the media is such a big component of that – and, tragically, Americans find themselves the best-entertained people on the planet and the least informed. But I think that that tide is turning, people are starting to understand the use propaganda, and being a little bit more selective.

I’ll be honest with you – when I told people that I was going to do a program on Russia Today people were saying “why would you do that? You’re going to look like a Commie!” And I said, “Listen, you need to broaden your perspective. You need to find a news source or news service that doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear.” You have to be critical, you have to think about what they are trying to sell you, when you’re talking about the news. What becomes news here in America is when a teen actress named Miley Cyrus sticks her tongue out and gets more naked and there’s three hours’ programmed on CNN.

 

SS: Well, thank you very much for being so positive about Russia Today, but talking about narrowing things down or broadening them – American Democracy is narrowed down to two parties and even then the Congress fails to agree on things. Is there a better term than “democracy” to describe it?

 

MN: Feudalism, I guess. Pseudo-democracy. We are in the United States of America and we ended up coming down to having a choice between two pre-selected candidates who spend the most money. A look at what just transpired with our country and our government with regards to this “every six month debt limit increase” or it’s a fiscal cliff, or it’s austerity – there’s always something to be afraid of, but at this point in time if we look at the television and see these two idiot teams bickering and fighting back and forth.

I’ll be candid with you, when I have a mental image of American politics I see two warring factions of chimpanzees baring their teeth and screaming at each other and waving and flailing their hands above them and throwing feces at each other. That’s where we are at. We got to get back to being the beacon of freedom, the beacon of democracy, the beacon of common sense.