Category: Education

Rick Santorum Calls For End of Public Education, But He Took $100,000 From Pennsylvanians to Educate His Kids

Here’s the truth about Rick Santorum’s commitment to home schooling:

Between 2001 and 2004, Santorum enrolled five of his children in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Since Pennsylvania law requires school districts to pay for students who live in their district but enroll in cyber schools – and since Santorum claimed his residence was a house in Penn Hills, Allegheny County – the Penn Hills School District paid $100,000 for the Santorum children’s tuition.

But wait a minute – it turns out Rick Santorum, his wife, and their children don’t actually live in Penn Hills…in Allegheny County…or even in Pennsylvania. They actually live in a big house he owns in Leesburg, Virginia.

Yes, that’s correct. And everyone, even conservatives in Pennsylvania, know that to be true.

Rick Santorum took $100,000 from the taxpayers of Pennsylvania to pay for his childrens’ tuition, even while living in Virginia.

And he’s okay with that.

He has not re-payed that.

Nor has he offered to repay that.


How the War on Drugs Became a Race War (MSNBC Video)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

How the war on drugs became a race war, from the Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.


Sh*t Homophobic People Say. No Kidding. (Video)

Commentary

Sh*t Homophobic People Say: no spoofing necessary, 100% real commentary by antigay public figures. Some, many, masquerading as Christians.

Lambda Legal fights for the rights of LGBT people and people with HIV.

Wow.


Paul Krugman on Romney’s Record of Destroying Good Jobs

Mit Romney, job destroyer:

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.


Is the Southland Charter School Really a Good Thing?

The appeals court rules:

In the appellate court’s decision, Judge Rudolfo Garcia wrote the majority opinion for Judges Robert Gordon and Bertina Lampkin.

“We are left with no doubt that the establishment of the charter high school is in the best interest of the students it was designed to serve and, eventually, its establishment may well serve the best interests of all District 227 students to the extent that the academic success of the charter school raises the educational bar for the other three schools,” Garcia wrote. “Nothing in the record supports District 227’s contention that the establishment of the charter school is contrary to the best interests of all the students in District 227.”

District 227 must come up with the approximate $2 million annually to keep the charter school afloat.

Is this really fair to District 227?

We think not.


GOP Working Overtime To Keep College Students from Voting

From the New York Times:

Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.

And this too:

William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience. “Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration. New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.

Read more.

Nod to Eric Byler.


NYTimes: Newt’s War on Poor Children

From Charles M. Blow at the NYTimes:

Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

Read the entire article. It’s worth it.


NYTimes: U.S. Rejects Plan to Widen Availability of Morning-After Pill

Disappointing news from the New York Times:

In a surprise move, the nation’s health secretary stopped the Plan B morning-after pill from moving onto drugstore shelves next to the condoms, deciding Wednesday that young girls shouldn’t be able to buy it on their own.

The Food and Drug Administration was preparing to lift a controversial age limit and make Plan B One-Step the nation’s first over-the-counter emergency contraceptive, available for purchase by people of any age without a prescription.

But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius intervened at the eleventh hour and overruled her own experts.

Plan B instead will remain behind the pharmacy counter, as it is sold today — available without a prescription only for those 17 and older who show an ID proving their age.

That this comes from this sometimes-perplexing Democratic administration is one thing. That the move comes in direct opposition to the administration’s own experts baffles me.


ABC: Gay Teen Jonah Mowry Says Bullying Made Him Stronger

From ABC News:

Jonah Mowry, the 14-year-old whose heart-wrenching four-month-old YouTube video described his despair at being bullied for being gay, resurfaced online Sunday, telling his supporters he is doing just fine.

Jonah, chewing gum and with a female friend by his side, says on a more recent YouTube video, “To the people who think nobody likes me … Everyone in my school loves me.”

This kid’s gonna make it.

Amen.


The True Spirit of Thanksgiving (Video)

Thanksgiving.

Enjoy.