Big Bad Rick Perry. He don’t need no freakin’ gov’ment! If these little children want to cross the border in his state, then Big Bad Rick Perry knows exactly how to handle these young little rascals whose only hope is to survive. He’ll send in the National Guards… 1000 of em!
Now Rick Perry already knows that the National Guard can not do anything to these children. He’s already admitted that in numerous interviews. But Big Bad Perry is trying to send a message, a photo-op for those other children thinking about crossing the border – Look, we have the National Guards at the borders.
“It’s just like a law enforcement effort in your neighborhood,” Perry said, explaining his reasons for ordering up the Guards. “Where you see a parked patrol police car on the corner, and the bad guys see it and don’t commit a crime.”
That message, that photo-op is going to cost the state of Texas $12 million dollars a month.
But according to news reports, Big Bad Perry apparently didn’t think this thing through. Who’s going to pay for the 1000 National Guards ordered by Perry to waste time at the border? A $12 million a month price tag?
Reports say that macho man Perry is now running to the Federal Government to ask for help paying for his vary expensive photo op.
Perhaps realizing the threat, President Obama dispatched a team to the border last week to determine whether a federally organized National Guard deployment was necessary.
No matter what (President Barack) Obama decides to do, Perry has said he intends to ask the federal government to pay for his deployment of 1,000 troops, estimated to cost $12 million a month.
“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.
There is a sickening trend happening these days with so-called “parents” leaving their kids locked in cars on hot days. In a few of these cases, the little helpless kids are killed. So imagine the frantic scene in Texas when passerbys heard children crying in a locked car, on a hot 98 degrees day, and the so-called parent was no where in sight.
They did the only thing any good Samaritan would do – they took a hammer and smashed the glass to free the two small children trapped inside.
The so-called “parent” later ran out of a beauty salon. She claimed she wanted to get her hair washed and left her kids locked in the hot car.
The cops were not called. I cannot understand why.
I know, I know: Money is the answer, plain and simple. School districts don’t want to pay teachers for advanced degrees and right wing politicians don’t want public schools to begin with, so it makes sense that Texas and North Carolina are both in the forefront of starving their states of effective teachers in an effort to…well, I’m not sure.
The debate over whether teachers who earn advanced degrees and credits that allow them to earn more money on the salary scale are actually better teachers than those who don’t, or are better themselves than if they had just stuck with their Bachelor’s degree credits, is becoming louder and more intense. As any teacher can tell you, though, there really is no debate. Teachers who continue their educations, broaden themselves or even go in a new educational direction tend to be more effective. There is no question that teachers should be encouraged (required?) to take courses in content or pedagogy.
So why the screed? Because a few states, most notably Texas and North Carolina, have decided that paying teachers more for advanced degrees doesn’t necessarily lead to high student test scores. And they might be right, but that’s exactly what’s wrong with the current push for test scores to evaluate teachers. Earning a higher degree makes the teacher more knowledgeable and exposes them to more effective teaching methods. Students are then exposed to a greater variety of teaching methods and more expansive content. That’s the point of an education. Equating the tests with teacher effectiveness is a terrible idea whose time, unfortunately, has come.
Even worse is the fact that public leaders continue to say that we need the best and brightest college graduates to become teachers (as if we don’t have a significant majority of them in classrooms right now). What the best and brightest know, and being one of them allows me to represent their argument, is that educating yourself is the best practice any teacher can follow. The best and brightest also know that motivating people to push themselves should be recognized monetarily. Isn’t that what law firms, banks and other corporations do?
The best and brightest are not swayed by specious arguments from elected officials who are not, in most cases, the best and brightest. For proof, consider the reaction in North Carolina:
In April, the Wake County Public School System – the largest in North Carolina with about 150,000 students – said more than 600 teachers had left since the beginning of the school year, an increase of 41 percent over the same period the year before.
One district official blamed a lack of a significant pay raises in recent years, along with the phasing out of tenure and extra pay for advanced degrees. Human Resources Superintendent Doug Thilman called the figures “alarming” but “not surprising.”
Not surprising? If your best teachers are leaving the schools, why continue the policy? And who, might I ask, is taking the place of these best and brightest? People with no interest in getting advanced degrees? These are not the best people to have in your classrooms. This is the kind of lazy thinking that will rule the country if conservatives are elected to the Senate and the White House.
Something to seriously think about this fall and for 2016.
Once again, under extreme fire from the Right, Barack Obama calmly, and oh, so cooly, tells the GOP and Texas Delegates what time it is. Last Thursday night, in Austin, Texas, the president slammed the Republican agenda, and brought up their pending lawsuit. He makes it very clear this ain’t his first rodeo.
“As long as Congress will not increase wages for workers, I will go and talk to every business in America if I have to. There’s no denying a simple truth: America deserves a raise, and if you work full-time in this country, you shouldn’t live in poverty. That’s something that we all believe.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. There are a number of Republicans, including a number in the Texas delegation, who are mad at me for taking these actions. They actually plan to sue me. Now, I don’t know which things they find most offensive — me helping to create jobs, or me raising wages, or me easing the student loan burdens, or me making sure women can find out whether they’re getting paid the same as men for doing the same job. I don’t know which of these actions really bug them.
The truth is, even with all the actions I’ve taken this year, I’m issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years. So it’s not clear how it is that Republicans didn’t seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did. Maybe it’s just me they don’t like. I don’t know. Maybe there’s some principle out there that I haven’t discerned, that I haven’t figure out. You hear some of them — ‘sue him,’ ‘impeach him.’ Really? Really? For what? You’re going to sue me for doing my job? Okay.
I mean, think about that. You’re going to use taxpayer money to sue me for doing my job — while you don’t do your job.
There’s a great movie called ‘The Departed’ — a little violent for kids. But there’s a scene in the movie where Mark Wahlberg — they’re on a stakeout and somehow the guy loses the guy that they’re tracking. And Wahlberg is all upset and yelling at the guy. And the guy looks up and he says, ‘Well, who are you?’ And Wahlberg says, ‘I’m the guy doing my job. You must be the other guy.’ Sometimes, I feel like saying to these guys, ‘I’m the guy doing my job, you must be the other guy.’
So rather than wage another political stunt that wastes time, wastes taxpayers’ money, I’ve got a better idea: Do something. If you’re mad at me for helping people on my own, let’s team up. Let’s pass some bills. Let’s help America together.”
First of all, the pastor has a gun! I’m still having a hard time figuring out why a man of God, a follower of Christ, has a gun.
But I digress!
Donald Frazier noticed an intruder in his home. The 69-year-old pastor grabbed his gun and went to investigate. That is when he came in contact with 30-year-old Daniel Durham in his back yard. The two struggled and the stronger Durham took the gun away from Pastor Frazier. Frazier pleaded for his life but he was killed with his own weapon.
Frazier’s wife saw the struggle.
Another example of a good guy with a gun dead at the scene!
The racist numbnuts in the republican party are trying to intimidate some black people in Texas by holding what they call a “walk” through a black neighborhood. Said walk would feature these numbnuts brandishing their weapons as they stroll through the neighborhood where families with kids live.
They are the Houston chapter of Open Carry Texas, and they intend to masquerade their intimidation effort this Sunday, by calling the walk, a food drive. According to the groups Facebook page, they’re encouraging their supporters to turn out and “make this a big event.”
“Let’s once again show that gun rights belong to all,” they said.
But wait, something happened. It seems the intimidating Open Carry racists have canceled the event. Apparently they have realized that guns are not exclusive to whites only.
The recent decision in California regarding teacher tenure is causing a great deal of anxiety in public education and in those states where teacher tenure still has some meaning. The ruling that tenure is unconstitutional because it denies students the right to a decent education is an interesting take on the subject, but it obscures the truth about how tenure works and why it’s still needed.
I’ve already visited the subject, but it’s worth repeating that tenure is NOT, I repeat, NOT a guarantee of lifetime employment, no matter how many times the know-nothing reformers repeat that it is. Earning tenure merely means that after four years in one district, a teacher must get a due process hearing if a school district wants to fire them. In New Jersey, the tenure laws were changed in 2012 to streamline the process so it didn’t take years and a lot of money in order to fire a teacher. Now, an arbitrator hears the case and generally rules within five months, and their decision is final.
Opponents of tenure, and these are the people who want to privatize all government functions in the United States except the military, say that tenure, and unions, protects bad teachers and makes it almost impossible to fire them. They also say that seniority rules that protect experienced educators at the expense of newer teachers when there are layoffs are outmoded and result in many young, energetic educators being let go before they can even begin their careers. I will admit that there are teachers in classrooms right now who do not belong there and who should not be teaching. There are also middling teachers for whom a younger replacement might mean an improvement in children’s education.
But blaming teacher’s unions is not the answer. No, the real reform in teacher retention, training and development rests with the administrators who run the school districts and schools. They are the ones who have the ultimate power to evaluate and make hiring decisions about their staffs. If these administrators keep teachers who should not be in the classroom, then they will be the ones responsible when those teachers do not turn out to be effective educators.
And who are these administrators? They are self-selected people who decide on their own to become principals and superintendents. There is no national or state organization that recognizes and encourages people who would be excellent administrators and sets them on a path to effective leadership. It’s the luck of the draw, and the deck is thinning in New Jersey due to Governor Christie’s support and signature on a law that limits pay for superintendents and other upper echelon school management. Yes, yes; I’ve heard the false argument that money doesn’t matter in education, at least where pay is concerned, because the false common wisdom is that teachers do not enter their field for the money. If you don’t pay people enough, though, then you don’t get good people to fill those jobs whose charge is to maintain and grow excellent teaching staffs.
It’s a terrible cycle and the California ruling will unfortunately reinforce the idea that if we could only fire incompetent teachers that our schools would improve. Of course, that would be true, but the problem is that schools wouldn’t only fire incompetent teachers. They would fire expensive teachers, union leadership members, teachers who cross administrators or don’t fit the boss’s vision of what a successful teacher looks like. It would also open the floodgates for purely nepotistic and corruptive practices that would make the schools worse. Facebook gave the Newark school system $100 million dollars; don’t you think that any corporation would love to make hiring and firing decisions?
There is far more to this reality than what the know-nothings are saying in response to the California ruling. Only time will tell if the political winds indeed do blow eastward in this country.
A new poll conducted by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune, finds that despite his well known association with nutjob Ted Nugent, Republican Greg Abbott leads Democrat Wendy Davis by 12 percentage points in the race for governor.
That result is close to the 11-point spread, also in Abbott’s favor, in the February UT/TT Poll. In this most recent survey, he maintained a 14-point lead among male voters and a 10-percentage point lead among female voters.
“Abbott remains strong and this, in a lot of ways, confirms the strategy that we’ve seen from his camp: Leave well enough alone,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the UT/TT Poll. “The Davis campaign seems to be not able to reverse the trend.”
Here is a racist. Her name is Connie Trube and she is a councilwoman in Texas. Here are the racist things she said to describe why the Texas school system is messed up and why it will stay messed up.
“It’s not going to get any better until you get those blacks off the school board,” Trube said. “She really turned black. She got on the school board with the rest of the blacks and they all just ganged up and that’s why the school system has gone to hell.”
Trube is not denying she made the comments, nor is she backing down from them, nor is she apologizing, nor is she resigning — despite public calls for her to do so.
“What is on the tape is nothing more than me stating my honest opinion, and I don’t back down from that,” Trube says. “I never denied what was on the tape.”
The investigation into her remarks is slated to end at the end of the month and the findings will be given to the U.S. Department of Justice.
In Texas, little men with big guns need a law to authorized their little egos. But the good people of the state are speaking up for their right to peacefully assemble and eat at a restaurant without the unnecessary, legally justified intimidation of these little men and their little egos, and their big guns.
It would be an understatement to say that the tactics of gun rights activists have been backfiring of late. The showdown has taken place foremost in Texas, where in recent months groups such as Open Carry Texas have conducted provocative demonstrations in which armed men exercise their right under state law to carry semi-automatic rifles in public. No fewer than five national food and beverage chains have now told them to get rid of their guns or get lost, including Starbucks, Wendy’s, Applebees, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle.
And now Chili’s and Sonic have effectively joined the list: Two videos posted on YouTube on May 19 by the San Antonio chapter of Open Carry Texas—since removed from public view but obtained by Mother Jones—show its armed members being refused service at both restaurants. The two companies have not made official statements on open carry but have since indicated that they are reviewing their policies. [See update below.] From the nervous and angry reactions of some patrons to comments from some of the gun activists themselves, it’s not difficult to see why these spectacles haven’t been winning many people over.
There’s an analogy used in the piece that sums up this judge’s decision, and that analogy is – having a rapist watch over rape victims it’s like having a pedophile in charge at a children’s day care. In other words, it makes no sense!
A Texas judge ordered an admitted rapist to spend 45 days in jail, plus 5 years probation and 250 hours of community service at a rape crisis center where volunteers work directly with victims, reports CBS DFW.
Sir Young, 20, was sentenced Friday as part of a plea deal for raping a 14-year-old girl on their high school campus when he was 18, according to the station.
He had faced a maximum of 20 years in prison, according to the Dallas Morning News.
“When probation called, they asked, ‘Is this possible?’ I said, ‘No, it’s not possible’,” Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center (DARCC) executive director Bobbie Villareal told CBS DFW.
DARCC is the only rape crisis center in Dallas that uses volunteers, and it requires them to clear a criminal background check. Volunteers work directly with victims, answering their calls to the hotline and assisting them during rape exams. They also work with local organizations like the Girl Scouts and attend public events doing community outreach with police, according to the station.
“It flies in the face of logic. First of all, in that you would ask someone to do their community supervision for the population that has been directly affected by the exact crime. That’s like saying a pedophile should do their community supervision helping at a pre-school,” Villareal said.
Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), agrees that it’s not a logical idea to have a rapist spend time with rape victims.
“It’s incredibly hard to get [sexual assault] survivors to report in the first place and when they see sentences like this, it’s just more discouragement,” Berkowitz told CBS News’ Crimesider.
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