Diane Ravitch has a link up to the discussion on the Washington Post. You can’t let President Obama off the hook, as is discussed–he picked Arne Duncan and actually praised No Child Left a Mind while slobbering over Bush at the dedication to the *cough* library.
No one who cares about public education and children can endorse No Child Left a Mind. Only someone with a narrow view and narrow mind can believe it is a success. Those with $$ in their eyes, that is….
…at what they have done to our schools….
Little ones who are now exposed to the constant fear of some bad person coming into their school and killing them or their teacher…
Schools being locked down every day instead of just when there is a possible suspect in the area…
…and No Child left a Mind continuing to be regarded as some sort of successful program, when all arrows point in the opposite direction…
…and the ones that care, the teachers and principals who give a rat’s behind about the children and not just earning a paycheck, well…they’re the ones that are leaving the profession.
I just want to cry.
(As I first started reading this, I thought of a pun with the title: “Something’s fishy” but PR Watch beat me to it in their write up. Heh.)
(So…I’ll have to settle for the boring title of FDA drops the ball…so what else is new?)
Note in the comments section the paid flack who attacks the article not based on facts, but wild accusations….um-hmmm…
There are a million souls who do not want frankenfish. (and probably millions more would be protesting if they only knew what was going on) .
What does it take for American citizens to be heard? And why is this garbage science of Genetically Modified organisms released without a) thorough testing by independent research labs with no financial/political gain; b) without follow-up by independent research to investigate the damage that they have caused; and c) why isn’t the entire ecological system considered when making these decisions…?
Center for Media and Democracy has this up at PR Watch.org.
From the site:
These banks enjoy an implicit government guarantee that has been quantified by economists as a hidden taxpayer subsidy that disadvantages smaller banks. Bloomberg recently pegged this subsidy at some $84 billion,
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The Brown-Vitter bill wants the banks to be ready to give themselves a bailout when there is another shock to the financial system. The bill significantly raises the amount of high-quality (equity) capital that the big banks must hold – foreign banks operating in the United States included. Community banks would stay under the current rules, mid-sized and regional banks would be required to hold eight percent in capital to cover their assets, and megabanks – institutions with more than $500 billion in assets – would be required to meet a new 15 percent capital requirement, virtually double their current requirements.
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Ab-so-freaking-lutely.
If you click on the Bloomberg link, the question of the year: Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion Per Year?
From Bloomberg:
The top five banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – – account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits (see tables for data on individual banks)
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Now, these banks wouldn’t be getting these NICE dividends because of campaign donations and lobbying, now would they…? Nah, we *know* they are too honest, too upstanding, too ethical to do that…right…? Pfft.
When I clicked on the massive bailouts to foreign banks, as well link, the site wasn’t that informative, and that is something I would reeeeallly like to know…how much are we paying out for other countries’ banks??
The bill is supposed to force the banks’ hand: they either come up with the capital to cover their assets or they start divesting their mega corporations into smaller banks, which is what they should have done immediately after the crash in ’08.
Firedoglake has this up on the *cough* research of Rogoff and Reinhart.
From one of the commenters, letsgetitdone at 16:
I think, finally, that the RR study is an example of the corruption of social science in modern times. I believe that one can show that the study was not just guilty of calculation errors and errors of omission, but that these must be seen as part of a pattern of systematic bias that permeated their whole process of inquiry beginning with their selection of the problem, moving through every decision point in implementing the study, and ending with their evaluation of their evidence and their writing of the result. They made no attempt to do a scientific study maximizing fair comparison of alternative theories having policy relevance, but instead prepared what was essentially a legal brief supporting austerity policies and the Pete Peterson line. The social costs of what they did are strewn all over the globe. See this recent post at DailyKos.
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This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.~~~~~~~~~~
…disaster waiting to happen: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/26-1
Disease clusters around nuclear power plants (PDF) here: http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/091116Thyroidcancer.pdf
Map on disease clusters here: http://clusteralliance.org/clusters/
More posts on nuclear here: https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/theres-no-climate-change/
And here: https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/nuclear-disaster/
Pictures say a thousand words….this one speaks as no words can: http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/28
…apparently is Pete Peterson. He is behind the curtain to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s seriously flawed work that advocated austerity measures: http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12065
From the article:
Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as “the most influential female economist in the world,” was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.
Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, “A Decade of Debt,” where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a “debt burden” stretching into 2017 that “will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come.” (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)
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Reinhart, a senior fellow at Peterson’s Institute and married to an economist also funded by Peterson. Um-hmmm….
Rogoff, on the advisory board for Peterson. (things that make your head spin…)
Yep.
(Stephen Colbert covered this, too. He had Herndon on the show to explain how they discovered the errors. Herndon is an econ student who was assigned to replicate someone’s study. He chose Rogoff and Reinhart’s work, and to his surprise, could not replicate it. Previously, they refused to share their data with others asking to see it, but gave it to Herndon, who found the flawed research that omitted countries that were against the Rogoff and Reinhart hypothesis.)
Diane Ravitch has this up on the debate on Common Core education standards in Michigan. It’s odd that they are debating it after they had accepted it….jumped the gun, maybe? That seems to be all to common in the education world–some *expert* claims to have the magic bullet for *fixing* education, but that never seems to pan out….
Eagle 
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