At “Shoot Straight,” the bullet went straight through one man’s finger and another man’s leg. You cannot make this stuff up.
Two friends were injured Sunday afternoon at Shoot Straight, a Casselberry gun range, when one tried to unjam a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and wound up shooting himself in the finger and his friend in the thigh, police reported.
Neither man suffered a life-threatening injury, said police Sgt. Mark Stein, but both were taken to the hospital.
Stein did not release the names of the victims, two men who worked together.
“One of them, I guess, thought he could teach the other he could shoot,” Stein said.
The man acting as instructor tried to unjam the 9mm Smith & Wesson, which was owned by someone else at the range, Stein said, when he inadvertently pulled the trigger.
“He shot himself in his own finger,” Stein said. The bullet then went through his friend’s thigh and embedded itself in a wall.
Aside from the December holiday season, the back-to-school late August and early September rush has the most profound effects on the United States. Shopping patterns change, traffic gets worse, and the general tenor of every community shifts to accommodate the children and adults who work in education.
Welcome to this year’s edition. Some things have changed, and other have stayed the same.
In most polls, a majority of Americans say that they respect their school’s teachers and consider them, aside from parents, to be the most influential voices their children will encounter every day. The problem is that the evaluation systems that most states have set up do not accurately measure how effective the teachers are. Standardized tests have not proven to be reliable and systems that use Value Added measures, such as in California, are notoriously unstable. In addition, most Americans don’t like the tenure system as it is applied to teachers and we’ve had one court weigh in and declare the California system to be unconstitutional. In Wisconsin, Indiana and a host of other states, teachers, and other public employees, have lost significant contract negotiation rights that impact their pay, benefits and work rules. Add all of these up and you get a picture of an education system that wants to change, but is ignoring or minimizing the very people who can affect that change most specifically. Teacher morale is low nationally. That’s not good.
Most Americans also value education and consider education to be the major stepping stone to a better economic, social and democratic life. But the truth is that just below that surface, a roiling debate is under way about how much money schools should spend and on what materials, and what should schools actually teach anyway. This year is no different.
The most pressing issue in the poll is the reaction to the Common Core Curriculum Standards which is opposed by most of the respondents. A good deal of that opposition is related to the idea that Americans are wary about a national curriculum, especially one that seems to be prescriptive about what teachers can teach, and that local communities will have little say in what their children will learn. The Common Core is also the basis for national tests, which are anathema to many parents and strike most teachers as a waste of good instructional time.
While the standards are new, they are not as dangerous as many people would make them out to be. They do focus more on having students read nonfiction and analyzing in greater depth what they read, but otherwise, they give schools and teachers the leeway to choose reading materials and to tailor instruction to address local concerns. They ask that all students be conversant in research tools and to determine the reliability of sources, an especially important skill in the electronic era.
The mathematics standards are proving to be especially vexing since they ask students to explain their answers in both numbers and words. My experience with younger students is that they have a difficult time explaining how they came to an answer. Some do the calculations in their heads and others are not as articulate with explanations. This has lead to some famous YouTube videos of parents excoriating school board members for turning their child off to school and making homework time a tear-filled exercise in screaming and running away from the table.
As with anything new in education, and there have been many new programs in the thirty years that I’ve been teaching, the Common Core Standards will need some alterations, but in the long run, they will provide a useful map for student progress. The other advantage is that as students move from one town to the other, the standards will remain the same. That hasn’t happened in the United States, and it’s a major step forward.
We’ll have to wait until October for more polling answers on questions relating to teacher evaluation and spending.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: The United States succeeds because its teachers succeed in educating generations of children with the resources we have available. Where schools do not have the resources or community support or high levels of social dysfunction, the job becomes that much more difficult. If we can equalize the curriculum, we should be able to equalize the educational opportunities for every child in this country.
And so to my teaching colleagues I say, have a wonderful school year. You do one of the most important paid jobs in this country and you deserve respect and appreciation.
There can be no doubt that Governor Chris Christie will be running for president in 2016. He’s taken trips to the states with the earliest primaries and caucuses and he’s even begun commenting on foreign affairs. Not that he’s at all qualified in that area, but when did that ever stop him from talking? The most convincing evidence of his intention to pursue a national run, though, comes from his latest actions in New Jersey, and ironically, those might actually cause his downfall.
First up is the New Jersey economy, which is limping along in no small part to the governor’s refusal to do anything that will stimulate it. The jobs picture has not improved as much as the national numbers and Christie continues to blame middle class workers such as teachers, firefighters, police officers and government workers for the problem. Yes, he was able to get a landmark pensions and benefits bill through the Democratic legislature in 2011, but now, three years later, he’s gone back on his promise to pay a full public pension payment because he says that the problem has not been fixed and that workers need to pay even more for their future benefits.
The “No Pain, No Gain” tour has been a colossal failure so far mainly because the public is slowly coming around to the idea that public workers can’t be squeezed any more and that Christie’s refusal to ask wealthy New Jerseyans for more in taxes is good old fashioned Republican trickle down economics. The kind that hasn’t worked since Ronald Reagan tried it back in 1981. All it’s lead to is wealthier wealthy people and a scramble for decent wages for the middle and working classes.
What’s worse is that Christie appointed a committee to investigate why pensions and benefits need continued reform and
So any chance that this committee will be an independent arbiter or that it will fairly assess the pros and cons of Christie’s plan will be, say, nil.
The next clue to Christie’s intentions comes from the fact that he and his adviser’s are now becoming very stingy with information about the governor’s public schedule. This is a guy who ran on transparency and openness and is now going all legalistic on the public and saying things like, “You guys want everything. You’re not entitled to everything. So we give you what you’re entitled to under the law. And I think that’s fair.”
Fair, maybe. Politically smart? Not so much. If you want to be president, you should give the press the free stuff that it asks for and withhold the difficult information. That placates the press and makes it more likely that they’ll give you a pass on the tough issues. And what’s on the governor’s schedule that would preclude him from fully disclosing it? More helicopter rides? Getaways to the Bahamas? It just doesn’t make sense, and it belies Christie’s desire to be known as an open politician. That’s how he ran in 2009 and 2013. But now that he wants to be president, he’s playing political word games.
I suppose that Christie believes that yelling and belittling people who disagree with him is a sign of great leadership, but in the end, I think that this will ultimately sink him. Americans might be tiring of President Obama’s cool detached manner, but they don’t want a bully with a volatile personality in the Oval Office. We need a pragmatic, thoughtful person to interact with the country and the world.
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.
If I was a conspiracy theorist, which I am decidedly not, I would posit that the Democrats maneuvered the Watergate scandal to end right smack in the middle of the summer doldrums so that it wouldn’t be drowned out by other political news. The truth is that Richard Nixon was enough to keep the story in the news for years after he resigned, so compelling a figure was he that he is still both loved as a foreign policy practitioner and loathed as a petty, selfish democratic tyrant.
The fortieth anniversary of his resignation on August 9 will find the country still in a state of political gridlock with both parties blaming the other for starting and perpetuating the problem. Television programs this week will look back on Nixon and his summer of discontent using newly released White House tapes and interviews with people who were there, and who now speak with more candor. There are a couple of new books about Watergate. The paradox is that as much as we think we know about the scandal, there is still more to learn. More people will talk. Papers stashed away with strict orders not to open them until the owner dies will reveal more. Perhaps the digital revolution will uncover the 18 and a half minute gap that has tantalized historians for forty years. These are tasty possibilities.
Watergate summer, though, can also be used as the first year of our present political troubles. Many Republicans have never forgiven Democrats for making the Watergate scandal more than what they thought it was; a minor political issue relating to the election of 1972 and nothing more. Democrats have blamed Republicans for using the Nixonian campaign manual for splitting the country and playing on white’s fears of minorities and social programs that take money from middle class Americans and redistribute it to the poor.
It gets deeper. Robert Bork was denied a seat on the Supreme Court in part because he played a role in the Saturday Night Massacre by firing Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. From this point on, Supreme Court nominees have faced blistering questions about every aspect of their lives while giving stoic non-answers in reply. Democrats threatened to consider impeaching Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra scandal. Republicans made good on their promise by impeaching Bill Clinton. The current House of Representatives is suing the president over perceived unconstitutional actions. Gerrymandered seats protect representatives of both parties from having to make tough policy decisions.
Watergate and the political climate it engendered has not helped the United States. Congress did pass some reforms, but many of them have been overturned by the Supreme Court, especially the ones having to do with the corrosive influence of unregulated money in the political system. And in foreign policy, Nixon’s actions helped open the door for more globalization, but we have no blueprint for a world in which the United States plays a less forceful role in international affairs.
More than half of all Americans living today were born after the Watergate scandal. That’s good news because although we do need to remember and learn from the past, we also need to purge the emotion from our system. Political cultures tend to do better in the generation after a traumatic event has occurred. Ours will be no different.
You would think, from all the talk about the midterm elections and the final two years of the Obama Administration, that the president doesn’t matter anymore or that absolutely nothing will get done in Washington between now and January 2017. While we may be fighting political gridlock, and the possibility that few if any consequential laws will be passed soon, the rest of the world is not stopping nor is our country’s need for attention to our very real problems. The Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they do not want to work with Barack Obama or give him any victories from which the Democrats can claim any advantage going into the 2016 election season. This is no way to run a country, and we will pay a price in the future for our inability to act now.
There is no shortage of media stories purporting to paint Obama as a lame duck before his time, abandoning his legislative agenda in favor of executive orders and agency rule-writing. The problem with this interpretation is that Obama’s actions, especially on the environment, will have a profound effect on business and industry. New rules that detail how much a company can pollute and whether they need to clean up their emissions is no small matter. If it was, then the various business groups that oppose these changes wouldn’t be making so much noise.
The same is true with the Affordable Care Act. Yes, two Circuit Courts did issue contradictory rulings last week about whether people who buy policies on the federal exchange are entitled to subsidies, but in the end I believe that the law will be upheld and the subsidies will remain in place. I base this not on my fine reading of the law, but on the fact that by the time the Supreme Court gets the case, upwards of 30 million people will be covered by federal subsidies and the cost of ending them will be too much of a disruption to the country. Just as the Supreme Court ruled that police can’t search cell phones without a warrant mainly because the justices understood first hand what that would entail, so they will understand what it means to take health care away from people or make it unaffordable. Either Roberts or Kennedy will provide the deciding vote in any future case; the former to maintain his legacy, the latter because he tends to see applicability more than the other conservatives. The result of any case will be the president having to issue orders or to order executive branch offices to maintain the law so that it continues to honor its promises.
The president is never a lame duck when it comes to foreign policy, and Obama will not be an exception. The world is on fire as we speak and the United States will play a role in unwinding many of the conflicts that engulf it. Critics have been unsparing in their denunciations of Obama’s seemingly uninspiring handling of foreign affairs, but many on the right are calling for actions that the United States will not, and should not, take, such as sending troops or issuing ultimatums. Economic sanctions will have an effect on Vladimir Putin, and I think he understands this which is why he continues to push for separatist actions in Ukraine. Obama’s continuing contact with Benjamin Netanyahu will result in a cease-fire and long-term cessation of hostilities because the American president still carries great weight in the region. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya look hopeless, but a concerted American effort will yield some results. Ultimately, these countries will have to solve problems on their own, but each will look abroad for help. Obama will be there.
Labeling a president as a lame duck is dangerous business in today’s world technology has made everything faster and response time smaller. The economy is improving, but if the gains in the stock market prove to be a bubble, then the president will need to act quickly. Any number of natural disasters would require a response. And if the GOP ever gets the message that tax policy, infrastructure improvements and immigration really do need more attention than suing or impeaching Obama, then perhaps we could have a significant bill before the next election.
“The Republican Party is essentially dead to our community. They have killed the dreams of thousands of people,” said Greisa Martinez, an organizer with United We Dream, the youth-led immigration advocacy network that organized the event. Explaining that her mother is undocumented, Martinez said, “They have killed the dreams of my mother for not moving forward on immigration reform. They have killed the dreams of millions of people across the nation. And we’re here to say, ‘Enough.'”
Dressed in black and carrying a mock coffin, a coalition of immigration activists paraded through the halls of the Dirksen and Hart Senate buildings on Monday morning as part of a protest of the Republican Party’s stance on immigration.
During the staged funeral procession, demonstrators said that they wouldn’t cry for the Republican Party or mourn its death because its politicians are out of touch on immigration and no longer represent their community.
The procession started at Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) office and meandered through the halls, stopping at the offices of Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas). At each office, the casket was laid outside the office doors while members of the procession, some of whom were undocumented, shared personal stories to suggest that the GOP is out of touch on immigration.
I took my talents to South Beach over the weekend for a relative’s surprise birthday party, and on the plane to and fro I had the opportunity to…think. Love airplane mode. Phones and tablets should have other modes, such as marriage mode, play-with-children mode, just-watch-one-screen mode, or perhaps physical media mode, where you would be forced to consume news and entertainment using a newspaper or magazine. I know, I know. I’m old and out-of-touch.
I am worn out about the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian war and the war over which press outlets are too pro-Israel (FOX) and too pro-Palestinian (The New York Times). Terrorist groups and organizations have for too long molded the narrative and have sabotaged every attempt at peace in the region. And the governmental authorities in the warring camps have let it happen. Clearly, Benjamin Netanyahu is not the man who will lead Israel to recognize a two-state solution and there is no current Palestinian leader with the credibility to make peace with Israel. As long as countries in the region refuse to recognize Israel’s sovereign right to exist, there is no basis for meaningful talks. As long as Israel continues to blow up Palestinian homes, the world will continue to paint it as an immoral country.
And speaking of leaders with no credibility and few morals, Vladimir Putin has almost succeeded in building his neo-Soviet state out of the ashes of the USSR. Covering up the shooting of the Malaysian airliner, then having his thugs block access to the crash site is right out of the Chernobyl 101 textbook. The problem is that textbooks are so passe and the technology we have now has laid bare his claim that it was Ukrainians, not pro-Russian separatists, who perpetrated this horrific deed. I don’t believe that this will lead to Putin’s downfall in the short term because he’s still very popular in Russia and he controls the media. Some Russians even believe that Putin himself was the target as he was flying in the general vicinity at the time the Malaysian plane was destroyed. Next up to blame will probably be the Israelis. Putin loves the Israelis.
As for the latest domestic squabbles, the Third Circuit Court in DC struck down the ACA subsidies and the Fourth Circuit in Richmond upheld them. Gotta love our judicial system. Both sides can claim victories, but my sense is that the ultimate decision by the Supreme Court, either next year or the year after, will uphold the subsidies that people get when buying insurance on the national exchange even though the law says that subsidies should only be given to people who buy on the state exchanges. Of course, the last time we tried to parse the ACA arguments in the court, the general consensus was that the law was toast. Ouch. And even if the Republicans win the Senate in November, which they won’t, the law will still survive.
This is an unfortunate situation for the deceased, but a valuable lesson for the rest of us. Never put on a bulletproof vest and willfully make yourself a target. Soo much can go wrong.
A Maryland man was charged with first- and second-degree murder last week after he shot and killed a friend while the two were testing a bulletproof vest, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Early Wednesday morning, Darnell Mitchell, Mark Ramiro (pictured) and another friend decided to film themselves testing a bulletproof vest in the basement of a Westport, Md. home.
According to video tape reviewed by Baltimore police, Mitchell put on the vest, looked into the camera and said he was ready to take a “deuce deuce in the chest.”
Ramiro missed Mitchell’s vest and instead shot him with a .22 caliber handgun.
Ramiro and the third person rushed to help Mitchell, and drove him to the hospital. Mitchell was declared dead a few minutes after they got to the hospital, according to police.
Officers were then called to the hospital and obtained a warrant for the video tape that captured the incident, according to the Baltimore Sun.
A spokesman for the Maryland attorney, Mark Cheshire, told the Baltimore Sun that prosecutors originally sought a second-degree murder charge, and the court commissioner later added the first-degree charge.
Following his meeting with Texas Governor Rick Perry, President Obama issued a statement saying that there are no real differences between what he an Perry wants in regards to the border security and immigration issues in South Texas. The President stated that the real stumbling block is getting Congress to act on getting things done.
“The problem here is not a major disagreement around the actions that could be helpful in dealing with the problem. The challenge is, is Congress willing to act to get this done,” the president told reporters. “The question is are we more interested in politics or are we more interested in solving the problem.”
The president urged Republicans to put politics aside and act on his request for $3.7 in emergency funding to cope with the influx of unaccompanied minors flooding across the border.
“Congress has the ability to work with all parties involved to directly help this solution,” Obama said. “This supplemental offers them the ability to work immediately to get this done.”
Five people were killed and two others wounded Wednesday afternoon in a shooting at a suburban home in Spring, and a suspected gunman was cornered in a cul de sac a few miles away after a short car chase with police officers.
Harris County Precinct 4 Assistant Chief Deputy Mark Herman said three children and two adults died at the scene of the shooting at a home in the 700 block of Leaflet Lane. Another child and an adult were airlifted to Memorial Hermann Hospital. There conditions were not known.
Homicide investigators and Crime Scene Unit were at the scene, a four-bedroom brick and wood home about a mile from I-45.
About 3 miles away, a standoff involving SWAT officers was unfolding in a cul de sac in the Country Lake Estates subdivision where a suspect was cornered.
A television station helicopter followed the chase of a small silver Honda sedan possibly driven by the suspected shooter It could not be immediately confirmed if the driver of the Honda was connected to the shooting.
Republican brainchild Louie Gohmert believes he has fugured out who is responsible for the immigration crisis developing in South Texas, where thousands of kids and young adults are illegally crossing the border into the United States.
According to Gohmert, Obama is orchestrating the illegal migration because the immigrants would vote for Democrats in the election.
Speaking to Steve Malzberg of Newsmax, Gohmert showed the true size of his brain.
“In the end, they have said that they want to turn Texas blue, they want to turn America blue. And if you bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of people and give them the ability to vote and tell them — as Quico Canseco said, he had illegals in his district that were told, ‘If you want to keep getting the benefits, you have to vote, and President Obama’s lawyers are not going to allow them to ask for an ID, so go vote or you’re going to lose the benefits you’re getting now.’ That drives people to vote and it will ensure that Republicans don’t ever get elected again.”
This utter nonsense is coming from an elected official in the Republican party. Louis Gohmert and his band of imbeciles are the ones making up the party of Lincoln.
That he, an elected official, would open his mouth and say such hogwash, just shows how far from grace the party has fallen, and given their current makeup, there is no coming back for this bunch.
The question now is, are you going to go down with these numbskulls, or are you going to do your part to progress, to move forward. Is today’s regressive Republican party the future you envisioned?
Then vote like your future depends on it, cause it does.
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