The Fourteenth Post in the “Oh My Achin’ Head” Series: Alaska GOP Congressman Rattles High School Audience with His Profane Talk about Bull Sex and Suicide

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Don Young

Don Young

By Elaine Magliaro

Zaz Hollander of Alaska Dispatch News has reported an interesting story about Don Young, a Republican congressman from the Land of the Midnight Sun. Tuesday morning, Young spoke to students at the High School in Wasilla. Hollander said that numerous witnesses claimed that Young, who is known for having a “notoriously abrasive personality,” acted “in a disrespectful and sometimes offensive manner to some students, used profanity and started talking about bull sex when confronted with a question about same-sex marriage.”

Amy Spargo, principal of Wasilla High School, said, “We really spend a lot of time at our Alaska-StateSeal_svgschool talking about how we treat each other. We just don’t talk to people that way.” Hollander said that what concerned school officials even more was the “hurtful and insensitive statements’ that Young made “about suicide just days after a Wasilla student took his own life.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservatives, Homosexual Rights, Politics, United States | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

NEWSFLASH: Four Former Blackwater Guards Who Were Charged in 2007 Iraq Killings Found Guilty

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Blackwater_Scahill

By Elaine Magliaro

TPM News has reported that four men who once worked as security guards for Blackwater were found guilty in the shootings of more than thirty Iraqis back in 2007. A federal judge ordered that the men be sent to jail immediately. The trial was said to have “focused on the killings of 14 Iraqis and the wounding of 17 others.” According to TPM, the outcome of the trial proceedings “stunned the defense.”

Read the full story here.

 

Posted in Courts, Crime, Iraq, Murder, United States, War, War on "Terror" | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley: No Problem with a Confederate Flag at the Statehouse Because No CEOs Have Complained

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

ConfederateFlag

By Elaine Magliaro

Last week—during the gubernatorial debate in South Carolina—Democratic candidate Sen. Vincent Sheheen said that the Confederate flag at the statehouse should “be retired to a museum.” Sheheen added, “I think the people of South Carolina are tired of having an image across America that’s not truly who we are…” He continued by saying that everyone should “rally together under a flag that unites us all, the American flag, that looks toward the future, and not the past.”

Nikki Haley Governor of South Carolina

Nikki Haley
Governor of South Carolina

In her response to Sheheen, Governor Nikki Haley admitted that the Confederate flag was a “sensitive” issue. Still, she defended the flag’s presence at the statehouse and rejected the idea of removing it. While Haley conceded that South Carolina “had suffered an image problem in the past”—she claimed that her state “had moved beyond those days.” Haley added, “What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservatives, Politics, Racism, States, Tea Party, United States | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

John Oliver Explains How to Use Animal Visuals to Make Listening to Supreme Court Audios More Entertaining

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

By Elaine Magliaro

I love Last Week Tonight with John Oliver! Here’s a video clip from last night’s program on the subject of no television cameras being allowed to film Supreme Court proceedings and how to make listening to SCOTUS audios more interesting:

Continue reading →

Posted in Dogs, Humor, SCOTUS, Short Video, United States | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Music Monday: Fugues

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Gene Howington

by Gene Hownington

I’ve been listening to music in the car quite a bit lately. A little of this, a little of that, but on the longer stretches I’ve preferred classical music. Lately, I’ve been listening to fugues.  I’m a sucker for counterpoint. A fugue – meaning “to flee” or “to chase” – is a baroque classical form that traces back to the 16th Century. The word itself is French and describes a contrapuntal composition where a theme (sometimes called the subject) is introduced at the beginning and repeated throughout the composition in different keys. I like the way fugues build. They are very rational structures mathematically speaking. Some are even mirror fugues, which are actually two fugues where one is a mirror of the other and played in a key above or below the main melody “like a mirror”. There are also Italian named variants on fugues, the fugato (a small fugue inside a piece of music that is otherwise not a fugue) and the fughetta (a small fugue). This later leads to the piece I’ve been listening to most for it is a rather large fugue.  Its name in German in fact means “great fugue”. This is Ludwig von Beethoven‘s Große Fuge in B-flat major. Enjoy.

Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Music | 22 Comments

Former New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert on How Millionaire and Billionaire School Reformers Are Ruining Public Education in the United States

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

BillGates5By Elaine Magliaro

Last week, I wrote a post about Bob Herbert and his new book titled Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America. Herbert, who was a columnist for the New York Times for eighteen years, is now “a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a national think tank that works to promote economic opportunity and equity for all Americans, democracy, and a strong public sector.” Recently, Herbert talked with Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company about the inequality of income and wealth in our country—which he thinks should be a great cause for concern for Americans. Herbert said that the United States is becoming “a place of limited expectations” instead of a “land of opportunity” for all.

On October 6th, Politico published an article that Herbert wrote about wealthy school reformers and how they are having a negative impact on public education in this country. In The Plot against Public Education, Herbert talks about how millionaires and billionaires are “ruining our schools.” He says the school reformers’ “let’s try this, let’s try that” approach to improving public schools “has been a hallmark” of their “efforts in recent years.’

BILL GATES, SCHOOL REFORMER

Herbert provides an example of what he calls the reformers’ “hit-or-miss attitude” with regard to implementing new educational approaches—Bill Gates’ idea to break up large high schools. Herbert said that Gates “backed his small-schools initiative with enormous amounts of cash. So, without a great deal of thought, one school district after another signed on to the notion that large public high schools should be broken up and new, smaller schools should be created.” Herbert said that establishing these smaller schools—or academies as some called them—within larger schools “was an inherently messy process”—and that the details appear not to have been well hashed out. But Gates was “on a mission to transform American education” and wasn’t concerned about the nitty-gritty—such as what might happen when you had “two, three or more schools competing for space and resources in one building.” Herbert said, “That caused all sorts of headaches: Which schools would get to use the science labs, or the gyms? How would the cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the brawls among students from rival schools?”

Continue reading →

Posted in Education, United States, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments

WHO (World Health Organization) Admits It Bungled Response to Ebola Outbreak in West Africa

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Ebola Virus

Ebola Virus

By Elaine Magliaro

The Guardian reported on Friday that the World Health Organization (WHO), the public health agency of the United Nations, admitted to “mishandling the early stages of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa…” WHO said that it had “failed to recognise the risks of the disease in the fragile states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

The draft of an internal WHO document that was obtained by the Associated Press says, “Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall.” According to Aljazeera, the WHO document, which is a timeline of the outbreak, found that the organization “missed WHO_svgchances to prevent Ebola from spreading soon after it was first diagnosed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea last spring, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.” Aljazeera said that one of the report’s findings was that WHO’s “own experts failed to grasp that traditional infectious disease containment methods would not work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems…” The WHO report also said, “Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Health Care, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

NEWS ROUNDUP: October 19, 2014

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

NewsHeadlineBy Elaine Magliaro

 

BUSINESS/FINANCIAL

Janet Yellen: Rising Income Inequality Could Seriously Harm The U.S. Economy (Huffington Post)

Excerpt:
The Federal Reserve is sounding increasingly alarmed about income inequality. “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen said in a speech at an inequality conference in Boston on Friday. Her comments come just days after Swiss bank Credit Suisse warned that inequality in the U.S. is at levels that have been associated with recessions in the past, with one key measure at its highest level since the Great Depression.

Though Yellen didn’t go so far as to echo Credit Suisse’s recession alarm, she did warn that rising inequality risked doing serious harm to the overall strength of the U.S. economy. Yellen, too, noted that “income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.”

Yellen suggested such inequality is downright un-American:

“I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity,” she said.

Amazon’s Wal-Mart problem: Why low wages, working conditions and disdain for culture will hurt us all–Amazon drives down wages, avoids taxes and destroys intellectual life, while profiting from government subsidies (Salon)

This is your brain on money: Why America’s rich think differently than the rest of us Nobody’s perfect. But only the rich get away with thinking that their luck and their flaws are actually strengths (Salon)

“We hope they were duped”: How prosecutors gave banks the best “penalty” ever–Wells Fargo engaged in awful, deceptive practices. For its sins, it engaged in a settlement that brought… profits (Salon)

Continue reading →

Posted in News Roundup | 2 Comments

A New Heart for a Young Man

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

By Elaine Magliaro

Mike Spindell’s column From the Bottom of My New Heart inspired me to write a short post about my dear friend Lynne and her son Steve. I have known Lynne since grammar school. We attended parochial schools together through twelfth grade. We also attended the same college—and we both became public school teachers in Massachusetts. Lynne has two sons. Both of them have had heart transplants. Her son Steve had to have a second transplant last year.

Last weekend, I hosted a get-together for ten old girlfriends with whom I have remained close for several decades. Lynne was there. She was happy to tell us all that her son Steve is doing well. Lynne is a remarkable woman who has been a pillar of strength for her sons over the years. I have great admiration for her. I consider myself fortunate to have her as a friend and role model.

Here’s a YouTube video of Lynne’s son Steve “jamming” with his buddies from Big Jugs and the Turtlenecks after his recovery from transplant surgery.

Laffie’s First Jam Back from Surgery

Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Short Video | Tagged | 1 Comment

A Look at Some of the Driving Forces behind the School Reform Movement and the Effort to Privatize Public Education

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

SchoolRoom1By Elaine Magliaro

NOTE: I originally posted this article at Res Ipsa Loquitor on March 3, 2013. Having worked as a public school teacher for well over three decades, I became concerned about the “school reform” movement—which brought us the mania for the high-stakes testing of children and the push for charter schools and school vouchers—back in the 1990s. Since I retired from teaching in 2004, I have watched the ever-increasing attempts by “school reformers”—moneyed interests and politicians—to vilify public school educators and to paint all public schools in our country as failures. The school reformers’ goal is the privatization of our public schools. Members of our mainstream media have been willing accomplices in their effort.

**********

In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.

Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.

I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)

One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?

I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.

Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Education, Education Policy, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments