Category: Issues of the Day

From The Sports Economist —

Here are the facts. President Swinton of Benedict, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina, instituted a grading policy whereby 60% of a freshman’s grade was to be based on “effort,” and 40% on performance. Effort is a subjective basis on which to grade, but elements which could be factored in were “attendance, completion of assignments and class participation.” One of the professors refused to change an F for a “student whose highest exam score was less than 40 percent”, claiming he could not pass a student who had clearly demonstrated he did not learn what was taught in the course.

Makes sense to me. We pay doctors and auto mechanics for effort (by the visit or by the hour) and not for results. Why not grade students that way?

From AP via KTVU.com:

An 8-year-old girl who has a rare digestive disorder and cannot consume wheat has had her first Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained none.

Now, Haley Waldman’s mother is pushing the Diocese of Trenton and the Vatican to make an exception, saying the sacrament should be changed to accommodate the girl’s condition.

Roman Catholic doctrine holds that communion wafers must have at least some unleavened wheat, as did the bread served at the Last Supper of Jesus Christ before his crucifixion.

In May, the girl received her her first Holy Communion from a priest who offered her a wheat-free host. But last month, the diocese told the priest that Waldman’s sacrament would not be validated by the church because of the substitute wafer.

Link via Jesus’ General, who has written The Most Reverend John M. Smith, Bishop of Trenton.

From report in The New York Times:

The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration. …

They looked at low-income children in both settings, and broke down the results by race and ethnicity as well. In virtually all instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools.

The uproar for Fahrenheit 9/11 has pretty much settled down, so NewMexiKen was somewhat surprised today when a stranger — a woman who made it clear that both she and her husband were long-time Republicans — said she’d seen the film. What was unusual was that she just could not stop talking about it, even well after it was inappropriate for the situation. It had surely unsettled her world.

From WND books:

“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! A Small Lesson in Conservatism” is a wonderful way to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. In simple text, parents and children follow Tommy and Lou on their quest to earn money for a swing set their parents cannot afford. As their dream gets stuck in Liberaland, Tommy and Lou’s lemonade stand is hit with many obstacles.

Liberals keep appearing from behind their lemon tree, taking half of their money in taxes, forbidding them to hang a picture of Jesus atop their stand, and making them give broccoli with each glass sold.

Law after law instituted by the press-hungry liberals finally results in the liberals taking over Tommy and Lou’s stand and offering sour lemonade at astronomical prices to the customers.

You’ll probably want to pick up a copy of Conservatives are from Mars (Liberals are from San Francisco), too.

Link via pandagon.net.

Gail Sheehy, writing for the Los Angeles Times, asks the right question:

How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to defend the nation’s Capitol, yet the president had “communication problems” on Air Force One and the nation’s defense chief didn’t know what was going on until the horror was all over?

Read her whole column.

Attorney Benjamin Bycel suggests some unusual penalties for crime in the Los Angeles Times:

A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision this week has made these fantastical “what ifs” a little more realistic. It upheld a lower court’s decision to punish a convicted San Francisco mail thief by having him stand for one day outside a post office, wearing a sign that said, “I stole mail. This is my punishment.” He also received jail time.

In their appeal, the mail thief’s lawyers argued that wearing a sign in public amounted merely to “humiliation as an end in itself” and was unreasonable, a violation of sentencing guidelines. But two of the three judges on the 9th Circuit panel disagreed, holding that, among other things, public shame could relate to rehabilitation.

Bycel suggests Ken Lay walk through Houston “wearing a sandwich board that reads: “I cheated my shareholders, employees and retirees.” Sounds right, if Lay is convicted, and if he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit.

… reading this and go read Charles Pierce at Eric Alterman’s Altercation. Pierce is just a few paragraphs down the page.

Then come back.

they’re not tax cuts. With a $450 billion deficit this year, they’re tax deferrals.

From The New York Times:

Fully one-third of President Bush’s tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings – averaging about $57,000 a year – were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

From The Daily Texan:

A 76-year-old prisoner walked out of jail, a free man for the first time in 41 years, after a judge dismissed the conviction against him.

Robert Carroll Coney, convicted of a 1962 robbery, exhibited a surprising lack of bitterness as he left Angelina County Jail with his wife on Tuesday.

“I’m going to try to pick up the pieces,” Coney told the Lufkin Daily News in Wednesday’s editions. “If I was angry, what could I do about it?”

Coney said his identity had been confused with a man he had carpooled with through Lufkin on the day of the crime: March 7, 1962. Court documents state Coney falsely confessed to the crime after Angelina County deputies broke his hand, the Daily News reported.

Not only was his confession inadmissible, but 41 years for a robbery? (Though, apparently he escaped from time-to-time and no doubt prolonged his jail time.)

Link via Talk Left.

From an editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune:

Every minute spent by Larry King or Fox News on Lori Hacking or Laci Peterson is a minute they don’t spend on health care, education, environmental quality, national security, the economy or other real issues that should be the center of public attention, especially in an election year.

A nation full of people who know more about Scott Peterson’s defense strategy than they do about Donald Rumsfeld’s is not a nation that shows much ability to govern itself.

Local folks have a right and a duty to look over the shoulder of their criminal justice system as it does its job. Reporters from other media outlets can and should be available to backstop the locals whenever there is reason to believe that those closest to the story were seduced into joining either a lynch mob or a whitewash.

But for so much of the talent, time and resources of our worldwide media to be spent on a story of strictly local importance displays no courage and little imagination. Instead, it is a symptom of a perverse laziness on the part of both the media and its audience.

From Brendan I. Koerner writing at Slate:

Suspected serial killer Derrick Todd Lee was found guilty [Tuesday] of second-degree murder. Eleven members of the Port Allen, La., jury voted for conviction, while a lone dissenter voted to acquit. Aren’t juries in criminal trials supposed to unanimous?

Not in Louisiana or Oregon, where most felony cases require only a supermajority of 10 jurors to convict or acquit. The exceptions in Louisiana are death-penalty cases, as well as trials that use six jurors rather than 12. (The second-degree murder charge that Lee faced carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.) In Oregon, all murder cases, regardless of the prescribed punishment, still require unanimity.

Roxanne Roberts on nursing in public:

I admit it: I’m lactose intolerant.

The latest assault on the right to a peaceful cup of Joe comes courtesy of Lorig Charkoudian, a Silver Spring woman who not only wants to breast-feed her daughter at Starbucks whenever she likes but expects me to avert my eyes or leave if I don’t share her enthusiasm for double breast milk latte. It’s not enough that a new Maryland law supports her right to lactate in public — no, she wants Starbucks to issue a nationwide corporate policy supporting her position.

Speaking for the school of not letting it all hang out, let me say: Don’t. Please, please please. Just don’t.

Read on.

NewMexiKen was a bit startled to notice a nursing infant next to him a few weeks ago while on the hayride at the petting zoo (with three of the Sweeties). But the mother was modest and the world didn’t end. As long as it’s not the Super Bowl halftime show, who cares?

Link via Electablog.

Monday NewMexiKen posted an item on an alternative school that is apparently bilking students and not even providing them with accurate learning materials. The Smoking Gun has the workbook and has highlighted the errors, beginning with instructions to read “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and a list of the four branches of government. (Gee, and my Congressperson thinks there are only two branches.)

From CNN:

California has joined other states in acting against a private school that claimed to award high school diplomas while teaching its immigrant students a curriculum riddled with errors, including the wrong years for World War II and the wrong number of states.

The California Alternative High School in Los Angeles targeted Hispanic immigrants, charging $450 to $1,450 for a 10-week course it said would lead to a valid diploma and help them get into college, find better jobs and get financial aid, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said last week.

But the school’s certificate isn’t recognized as a high school diploma, Lockyer said, and school officials ignored a previous court order that banned them from telling consumers it was.

Lockyer said the curriculum consisted of a slim workbook riddled with errors, including:

• The United States has 53 states but the “flag has not yet been updated to reflect the addition of the last three states” — Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.
• World War II began in 1938 and ended in 1942.
• There are two houses of Congress — the Senate and the House, and “one is for Democrats and the other is for the Republicans, respectively.”

Link via Political Animal.

Bumper sticker and other products from Jesus’ General.

The General’s daughter had a medical emergency this weekend.

I can’t really say more than that without violating her privacy–even if I am pseudonymous. I will say, however, that her condition is complicated by a problem that is a result of malpractice. Those who would minimize the suffering of people who have been maltreated by incompetent doctors should meet someone like my daughter. She’ll be in pain for he rest of her life and at some point, she will probably be unable to work–although the other costs she endures may be even worse than that.

If there is one thing that both The General and my Inner Frenchman can agree upon it’s that the supporters of tort reform can go fuck themselves.

Thursday Alabama executed a 74-year-old man for a murder he committed in 1977. From a Washington Post report via SFGate,com —

J.B. Hubbard’s failing body kept him lying in bed — a bunk on Alabama’s death row — most of the last days of his life. Other inmates say they walked his wobbly frame to the showers and listened to him complain about the pain: the cancer in his colon and prostate, the hypertension, the aching back. They combed his hair because he couldn’t. They washed him.

When spasms of dementia made him forget who he was — what he was — they told him: a 74-year-old, small-town Alabama man gone bad, a twice- convicted murderer, the oldest inmate on “the row.”

As of this writing, 81 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since we turned over sovereignty.

Pointer from Atrios.

Get Your War On sums up the Middle East. See more strips here.

Samuel Huntington is full of his usual nonsense:

America’s core culture has primarily been the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded our nation. The central elements of that culture are the Christian religion; Protestant values, including individualism, the work ethic, and moralism; the English language; British traditions of law, justice, and limits on government power; and a legacy of European art, literature, and philosophy. Out of this culture the early settlers formulated the American Creed, with its principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property. Subsequent generations of immigrants were assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers and modified it, but did not change it fundamentally. It was, after all, Anglo-Protestant culture, values, institutions, and the opportunities they created that attracted more immigrants to America than to all the rest of the world.

After a long discussion of his thesis, followed by a description of the problems of Mexican immigration, Huntington concludes:

The continuation of high levels of Mexican and Hispanic immigration and low rates of assimilation of these immigrants into American society and culture could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples. This will not only transform America. It will also have deep consequences for Hispanics–who will be in America but not of the America that has existed for centuries.

Read more of Huntington’s essay.

How can one man be so narrowly focused? Ever heard of Santa Fe (1608) or New Orleans (1718) or African-Americans (1619) or American Indians? Diversity is the soul of America.

Bruce Springsteen has some words:

A nation’s artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I’ve tried to think long and hard about what it means to be American: about the distinctive identity and position we have in the world, and how that position is best carried. I’ve tried to write songs that speak to our pride and criticize our failures.

These questions are at the heart of this election: who we are, what we stand for, why we fight. Personally, for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.

Continue reading Springsteen’s op-ed piece from The New York Times.