It’s simply amazing.
Year: 2014
If you haven’t paid your monthly 10 bucks for the Sarah Palin Network yet, this is the kind of brain-dead editorial garbage you’ve been missing.
Talk about rewarding someone for their bad behavior. Numerous reports state that the do nothing Republicans who even want as far as shutting down the government, will be rewarded for their bad behavior in the midterm elections.
Congressional approval ratings hover at historic lows. The Republican Party’s brand has tanked. More people than ever think their own congressman should be sent packing. And the most notable act in one of the most unproductive legislative periods on record was shutting down the government for 16 days.
Yet Republicans are forecast to pick up as many as a dozen U.S. House seats this November, strengthening their grip on the House majority. “I’d rather be us than them,” crows Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who chairs the House GOP’s 2014 campaign operation.
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairs the House GOP’s 2014 campaign operation. He wants to win 11 seats.
Democrats say they expect to make gains in the House, but Republicans have a host of built-in advantages this year, including:
• Recently redrawn districts have resulted in fewer competitive seats.
• Historical midterm-election-year trends indicate a limited Democratic turnout.
• President Obama’s waning popularity is part of a political climate suggesting that Democrats cannot expect a “wave” election to turn the tide in their favor.
Hillary Clinton has decided not only to run away from Barack Obama, but she has joined the Republicans in blaming the Obama administration for the birth of the terrorists group ISIS and the turmoil in Iraq.
In recent interviews, Clinton is quoted as saying that Obama’s “failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.
Will Clinton’s decision to go against the president hurt her with the die-hard Obama supporters? Time will tell…
Another ESPN hose is suspended over the Ray Rice domestic abused issue. Following the return of Stephen A. Smith from his week long suspension, ESPN has now suspended Max Kellerman for comments he made about domestic abuse on a radio show.
Kellerman co-hosts a show on the station and is the co-anchor of ESPN TV’s “SportsNation.” He is also HBO Sports’ lead boxing analyst.
On the “Mason & Ireland ” show, which leads into his afternoon-drive program, Kellerman admitted to hitting his girlfriend many years ago.
ESPN would neither confirm nor deny Kellerman’s suspension. In a statement issued Friday afternoon and ESPN spokesman said: “Max Kellerman will return to ESPN-LA Radio and ‘SportsNation’ on Thursday.”
What does George Bush have to do with this story, you may ask? Well, Republican family values, and how not to vet a candidate. But, Republican family values.
Atlanta police arrested a federal judge Saturday evening on charges that he assaulted his wife.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller was charged with misdemeanor battery and taken to the Fulton County jail around 2:30 Sunday morning.
Fuller, 55, is a judge in the Middle District of Alabama and presided over the 2006 bribery trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy. According to a jail official, the judge has a 9 a.m. Monday court appearance and was expected to remain in jail overnight.
Police responded to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 181 Peachtree Street at 10:47 p.m. According to Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones, officers spoke to Fuller’s wife, “who stated she was assaulted by her husband.” Fuller’s wife, who was not named by police, was treated by paramedics but refused treatment at a hospital.
He’s running for president, so there is blatant pandering going on. If you can vote, Rand Paul is your friend. Paul is hoping that folks forget certain things about his true philosophy and past votes, but there are a few truths that just wont go away, no matter how much pandering he does.
It might be summer, but the education know-nothings are clearly not at the beach. The latest case-in-point is former CNN correspondent Campbell Brown’s incredibly uninformed comments on teacher tenure that, unfortunately, millions of people saw and didn’t stick around for the fact-checking. Her musings come on the heels of a California decision in which a judge ruled that tenure is unconstitutional because it deprives some students of a quality education. There is another case against tenure in New York States and I will assume that many other states will soon join in. It is true that there are some teachers who should not be in classrooms because they are ineffective or burned out, but depriving teachers of a due process right and subjecting them to firing because of issues unrelated to their job performance is the height of irresponsibility.
In Campbell Brown’s case, she quotes the popular half-truth that the teacher is far and away the most important factor in a child’s success, and that if all classrooms had effective teachers, then all students would learn. I suppose we could read this as a compliment for great teachers, but I also read it for the folly of what it implies.
What she and other education know-nothings are essentially saying here is that an effective teacher can overcome poverty, child abuse, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, dysfunctional and nonfunctional families, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, developmental disabilities, ADHD, the autism spectrum, lack of sleep, entitled parents and students, and general ennui and make productive citizens out of every child. This is what teachers see in their classrooms and every one of these factors, or a combination of many of them, is a distraction or an impediment to learning. If effective teachers could negate them and educate children in spite of them, then we also need to elect teachers to Congress and the Presidency because the country clearly needs them.
The truth is that teachers do overcome these obstacles, but not at the pace that society needs in order to help all students. What then happens, and the education know-nothings are quick with the response, the teachers, whose students do not perform well on the latest misuse of data, the teacher evaluation metrics, are labeled incompetent and worthy of firing. Since tenure is in the way, getting rid of it is the know-nothing’s illogical retort.
The proper response would be for those with microphones and cameras to focus their attention on providing living conditions in all communities that allow for jobs with livable wages, responsive public services, adequate public health care, affordable housing, enrichment opportunities for the children, and safe neighborhoods. Those teachers who work in such communities know why their students are more prepared than others. It’s not rocket science, but it is science; and we know how the right wing feels about science.
To further the folly of their arguments, though, the know-nothings have managed to institute teacher evaluation systems throughout the land that will do everything except provide for a valid measure of an effective teacher. They’ve made testing the default activity in schools when there is little research to support a system based on such testing. And for those teachers who don’t teach a testable subject, there’s the SGO, or Student Growth Objective. But now those measures are under review because, surprise, SGOs don’t provide for a valid measure either.
In New Jersey, teachers who have questioned the testing/SGO folly are finally being heard. Tests, which were going to count for 30% of a teacher’s evaluation, will now only count as 10% for the coming school year, and SGO’s will be under scrutiny for how they are used for evaluation. Neither measure has been shown to predict or confirm a teacher’s effectiveness, and putting them under a microscope should confirm that. Of course, with Governor Christie now running for president, the chances of further reform are nonexistent, but perhaps in a few years things will change. Still, many otherwise qualified teachers will be affected by the evaluation system. That’s the shame of it all.
You want more? That’s easy. Simply go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
What else is new? Republicans, including John McCain himself have blamed Obama for everything that has gone wrong in this world since the beginning of time.
Sitting in his weekly chain on CNN, John McCain continued spitting his nonsense simply because like Fox News, he often goes unchallenged. For whatever reason now, Republicans and McCain are blaming Obama for the calamity that is Iraq.
Iraq, remember that place, where the Bush administration and Dick Cheney told 935 lies to fool us into an unnecessary war, where thousands of Americans were killed and thousands more dismembered? That place where John McCain and these same Republicans voted to invade? Yea, that Iraq… is now somehow Obama’s fault! Can’t you see the connection? It’s as clear as… night!
So on CNN’s State of the Union, McCain said that because of Obama, the terrorist group ISIS is roaming the land doing whatever they will. McCain is blaming Obama for pulling out the troops and ending the war…although the end of the war and its terms were negotiated before Obama even became president, under the Bush administration.
But of course, this point went unchallenged.
The senator said Obama’s targeted strikes in Iraq aren’t enough.
“That’s not a strategy. That’s not a policy,” McCain said. “That is simply a very narrow and focused approach to a problem, which is metastasized as we speak.”
McCain called for airstrikes in Syria and for the U.S. to give weapons and supplies to the Kurds in order to fight ISIS.
“There’s a vacuum of American leadership all throughout the Middle East,” he said.
CNN host Candy Crowley asked McCain to respond to the widely-held belief that he opposes everything Obama does when it comes to foreign policy.
“I predicted what was going to happen in Iraq,” he said. “And I’m predicting to you now, that if we pull everybody out of Afghanistan, not based on conditions, you’ll see that same movie again in Afghanistan.”
Back when bush invaded iraq on false pretense and with false information, no one on the right questioned his motives. Bush was right they thought, and the conservative and Republican media did all they could to push the weapons of mass destruction lie as a valid reason to invade.
President Obama, then a Senator from Illinois, objected to the invasion and referred to it as Bush’s distraction from a disastrous economy.
Well now that there is a legitimate threat to Iraq’s security called ISIS, President Obama has ordered targeted air strikes to selected targets and the same Republicans and conservatives who pushed Bush’s false narrative, are now questioning Obama’s reasoning, saying that Obama is bombing Iraq to cover up what they call, a failed economy.
This was Rush Limbaugh’s theory:
“He didn’t vote for it,” Rush said of Obama. “He made a speech before it even happened condemning it, that Bush was just dredging it up as a distraction. He makes a speech at the Democrat convention in 2004, called it a dumb war, continued with that theme, and now look where we are. Would it be too cynical to suggest that Obama might be bombing Iraq to distract us from his numerous problems? I mean, we’ve got an immigration disaster taking place. Our economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a disaster.”
Audio
Sometimes, I strongly disagree with Chris Matthews of MSNBC, like when he went on his show and clearly parroted talking-points from the Teaparty, or when he said that Democrats should accept the Teaparty and their crazy ideology. His acceptance of the Teaparty and their message has caused some rather angry posts to be written about him, right here on this site.
But there are other times when the unpredictable host of Hardball say things that’s worth repeating. Like on a previous broadcast when Matthews suggested that if Boehner and the Republicans are suing Obama for… absolutely no reason whatsoever, then maybe the President should sue Congress for not doing their job!
I’ll agree with that, but I’ll be more specific and suggest that President Obama should sue John Boehner and the do-noting Republicans in Congress.
Now you know this wouldn’t happen, even if it were possible for the Executive branch to sue the Legislative branch. This president, for whatever reason, seems to want to stay above the fray, and maybe this knowledge that Obama would not do anything, is the reason why Congressional Republicans are the way they are… determined to do nothing, determined to collect a paycheck from the rest of us, while not performing their duties!
(Reuters) – New Jersey voters favor Democrat Hillary Clinton over their own Governor Chris Christie in the 2016 presidential race, according to a poll released on Wednesday.
Clinton, the former secretary of state and U.S. senator from neighboring New York, would be more fit as commander in chief than Republican Christie, said half of those polled by Quinnipiac University.
“As Gov. Christopher Christie traipses around the nation, his presidential potential seems alive, but former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the adopted girl next door, easily beats him in his home state,” Maurice Carroll, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.
Clinton was also the front-runner against other possible top Republican presidential contenders. She led former Florida Governor Jeb Bush by 54 percent to 34 percent, U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, by 55 percent to 35 percent and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee by 57 percent to 34 percent.
The early look at the upcoming presidential race in the Garden State showed a broad gap between female and male voters.
While Clinton led the overall poll over Christie for the presidential race in New Jersey, 50 percent to 42 percent, women favored her by 54 percent. Men chose Christie over Clinton 44 to 42 percent.