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A couple of posts up today over at Tapped (here and here) which ponder over the writing portion of the SAT and why our students largely can’t seem to put together strong, insightful, well-sourced essays. (Admission: my girlfriend was a grad student who taught freshman English and I can testify to the unbelievably poor writing skills of America’s youth). So I thought I’d add my two cents on the failure of our education system to enhance our students’ writing skills.
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As an enormous lover of shrimp, I find this article at CNN disturbing. I’m not sure I understand how I’m to avoid shrimp that comes from these sweatshops, though. Are there specific brands? Is it frozen shrimp? Breaded shrimp? Raw shrimp?
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No surprise to those of us who know Republican economic policy (rob the poor to give to the rich), but McCain’s economic plan — unveiled yesterday — offered more of the same: corporate tax cuts for the rich, gas tax suspension for everyone else. He’s looking to slash corporate taxes by nearly a third from 35% to 25%. I’d call that an incredible overreach. That would cost the government — and the American people — untold billions at a time when our budget is stretched to the breaking point.
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The average American is struggling with higher gas costs, higher food costs, higher health costs, and higher education costs, and despite spending less on food, clothing and major appliances that the previous generation, the average household has less disposable income than they did thirty-five years ago, despite most homes now having two earners. The Center of Budget and Policy Priorities released a report to date demonstrating the lower and middle class squeeze:
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This graph has been bouncing around the blogosphere for the last week, but I didn’t think to include it because I was pretty sure we all already knew this (or at least suspected it to be true). But, as it’s continuing to pop up in my reading, I thought I’d include it here (with my own added “pizazz”). So, here it is, the chart that shows that Democrats are not only good for the middle class, but for the rich as well. It shows the average annual growth in real income during Republican and Democratic administrations. Every income class does better under Democrats than under Republicans. It can’t possibly be a coincidence, not with this kind of absolute division:
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For some reason the media thinks we liberal bloggers are being unfair to McCain in describing his support for a hundred years of war in Iraq (for the record he’s gone as a high as a million years), and while they are correct in that McCain speaks of a long occupation as of the kind we have in on the Korean Peninsula or Kuwait, what they fail to recognize is that for McCain’s plan to work, we have to “win” in Iraq first. Otherwise, we can’t expect to be there without our soldiers being killed and maimed. So, regardless of how McCain intended the statement, implicit in it is the fact that we’ll have to remain in Iraq however long it takes to win the war. After which, he’s comfortable keeping us there for centuries more.
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From The Army Times:

“The U.S. is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago,” it concluded. “Lasting political development could take five to 10 years of full, unconditional U.S. commitment to Iraq.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we already given five years of unconditional support?

General Petraeus just said that Iraq was “on the brink of civil war” eighteen months ago, from which brink it’s now been brought back. Now it seems to me that if we’d had a large pitched battle in Chicago or Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, we would say that the United States was currently in a state of civil war.
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This is an incredibly cool video, which visually represents the release of greenhouse gases in the United States. The East coast looks to be by far the greatest contributor. It’s especially interesting to see the large difference between daytime and nighttime emissions. All around fascinating, if a bit depressing.

Further confirming my theory that this whole Florida/Michigan dust-up will be decided long before the convention, Dean re-iterated today that he fully expects to seat the delegations of the two contested states. Everyone screaming about Dean’s poor leadership on this issue will be eating crow by the end of this summer. The nominee will be decided in June at which point seating the full delegations of Florida and Michigan will pose no problem for the DNC.
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