[Humorless sticklers can read "Tornadoes, extreme weather, and climate change."]
While this is Toles’ cartoon for today, he actually had a “Friday rant: Dumb and glum edition” on climate change after reading an article on the oceans study that I also covered last week (see World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline, report finds ‘speeds of many negative changes … are tracking the worst-case scenarios’):
Ever since Ken Blackwell’s oversight of the Buckeye State’s 2004 presidential election resulted in the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, the Ohio secretary of state has played an outsized role in election administration.
Seven years later, with Republicans in at least 22 states across the country pushing voter ID laws, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) has broken with his party and criticized the effort, which restricts voters’ access to the ballot box.
As the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature considers a bill to restrict voting rights by instituting a photo ID requirement, Husted came out forcefully against such a move last week. In a statement from his office, Husted declared:
“I would rather have no bill than one with a rigid photo identification provision that does little to protect against fraud and excludes legally registered voters’ ballots from counting.”
Unfortunately, Husted is virtually alone among Ohio Republicans in opposing photo ID bills. Republicans in the state legislature will likely vote on such a measure next week, and Gov. John Kasich (R) has indicated he will sign the legislation if it reaches his desk. Husted conceded that, despite his role as the top elections official in the state, the matter “is in the hands of the General Assembly.”
Still, Husted’s strong opposition to the legislation is laudable. Photo ID bills are a solution in search of a problem. They fight the non-existent menace of voter fraud by preventing millions from voting and adding an unnecessary expense for taxpayers. Young people and minorities are especially impacted, with voter ID laws depressing Latino turnout by up to 10 percent.
But unless Husted is able to convince his fellow Republicans of these facts, thousands of Buckeye voters will again find themselves disenfranchised in next year’s presidential election.
ThinkProgress filed this report from Ames, Iowa.
In his bid for the White House, Rick Santorum is trying to shed the perception that he is mainly a religious right candidate. In recent days, he’s pushed hard to position himself as a far right hawk on foreign policy as well.
At a recent campaign stop in Ames, Iowa, Santorum spoke at length on Middle East policy. Lamenting the rise of democracy in Egypt, Santorum said Obama thew former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak “under the bus.” Santorum explained that he would have stood with autocratic leaders against the growing protest movement deemed the Arab Spring:
SANTORUM: Let’s go after America’s allies because America’s going to back down and not support them. Well obviously the first ally in the region is Israel. So why are we seeing, boldly, the Egyptians post Mubarak bringing Hamas and the Palestinian authority together in an alliance. So Obama throws Mubarak under the bus, the new military regime in Egypt brokers a deal between Hamas and the PA and now the President rewards that by saying we’re going to go back to the 1967 [Israeli] borders. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist if you’re sitting in the Arab-Muslim world thinking, “Well how do we deal with this guy?”
Watch here:
First, Obama never said on Israel, “We’re going to go back to the 1967 borders.” But it’s good to know that despite all of Santorum’s talk of freedom and liberty, apparently that rhetoric doesn’t extend to the people of Egypt. And it appears that if he were to become president, he would stand with the world’s most autocratic regimes as long as they’re pro-U.S.
Cameron Diaz applies unorthodox methods in 'Bad Teacher.'
That said, the middle section of the movie provides a surprisingly balanced look at the question of what role performance pay and testing should play in education — along with the movie’s most successful sustained dramatic and comedic tension. When Elizabeth, who has previously gotten by showing her class Stand and Deliver and sleeping through lessons, learns that if her students get the highest scores on an Illinois State performance test, she gets a $5,700 bonus that would allow her to afford her dreamed-of breast implants, she engages as a teacher for the first time (one thing the movie does nicely is keep salaries realistic, and makes clear that $5,700 would be a game-changer for Elizabeth). Her teaching methods, including abusing her class with dodgeballs and writing the world’s meanest test comments, are unorthodox, but her students do appear to learn something. The problem is, performance pay is too much of an incentive. Worried they aren’t learning fast enough, Elizabeth dons a Little Orphan Annie wig from the school play, tells a state Education Department official she’s a reporter writing about racial biases in testing for the Chicago Tribune (“Orientals test better,” he tells her.), drugs him, and snaffles the test. Her kids ace the test, and after many hijinks, Elizabeth’s rival for the bonus check and Scott’s affections is effectively deported to a hard-case school, where her cheerful approach to teaching will presumably get her absolutely annihilated.
That realism about the uses and dangers of incentives is refreshing — performance pay is neither a panacea nor a means of destroying teachers’ pay and benefits. At one point, the school principal frets over what the teachers’ union would do to him if he demanded that Elizabeth be drug-tested with what he thinks is insufficient evidence — of course, she would be totally busted — but the union isn’t there as a malign force, either, forcing a good principal to do bad things. He’s just cowed by it, to the point of avoiding conflict that might have been worth the risk. And while the movie is clear that Elizabeth shouldn’t be teaching anyone — and by the end of the movie, she’s not — Bad Teacher does suggest that she’s good at something test scores don’t measure: helping kids acclimate to their surroundings. In this sense, the movie is kin to School of Rock, a generally warmer if less pointed movie, in arguing that obsessions with achievement, whether they come from education bureaucracies or parents, are missing the point. It’s kids’ social lives and individual growth that matter. Which means that even if one teacher isn’t the key to that growth, Bad Teacher still shares a general educational philosophy with Dangerous Minds and all the good teacher movies that have gone before it.
NEWS FLASH
Michele With One ‘L’ | Say what you will about Michele Bachmann, but she’s got the best Get-Up Kids Song about her of any candidate in the GOP field.
Congressional Republicans last week, as we’ve been documenting, blew up negotiations meant to produce a deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling due to their insistence that no taxes be increased anywhere, even on those making more than half a million dollars annually. Summing up the attitude that the GOP has taken toward the obvious need to raise new revenues, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that, if given a choice, he would rather have a bigger deficit than see taxes go up on anyone, even the richest Americans:
MR. WESSEL: Would you rather reach [a deficit of] 3% [of GDP] even if it required some revenue increases, or hold the line on revenue and settle for a higher deficit?
MR. CAMP: What we want to do is not have higher revenues. Because the issue is who’s going to pay them. Their idea is always, quote unquote, “rich people over $250,000.” Half of that, as we know, is small business, which is the very sector we need to see some growth in.
For starters, Camp is simply wrong that half of those making more than $250,000 are people running small businesses. This is a common Republican claim that has no basis in reality.
But its Camp’s clear pronouncement that a bigger deficit is preferable to raising taxes even on the richest two percent of Americans that makes his priorities clear. When asked “if you had to raise revenues, where would be the least damaging place to look?” Camp literally refused to name anything. “I can’t think of a least damaging place,” he said.
However, Camp, unlike many of his Republican colleagues, did say that the debt ceiling needs to be raised before the August 2 deadline identified by the Treasury Department. “We need to because we can’t default,” he said. “The concern is, if you get close to that date without a deal, what the markets may do.” Several other Republicans have floated the possibility of forcing the U.S. over the cliff and into defaulting on some obligations for a short period while a deal is brokered.
NEWS FLASH
RAND Study: U.S. Doesn’t Have A Good Chance Of Succeeding In Afghanistan | The Washington Post reports that, according to a new RAND National Defense Research Institute study that was commissioned by the U.S. military, “the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan has a chance to succeed, but not a very good one. [...] The lack of Afghan government legitimacy and good governance, along with the inability to disrupt Taliban support and supply systems, are the leading indicators of defeat.” According to the Post, RAND used the same method it used in analyzing the outcome of the past 30 counterinsurgency campaigns — including the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the contras in Nicaragua, and government counterinsurgencies in Turkey and Algeria — and “the method picked the actual winner every time.”
NEWS FLASH
After New York: The Five Battlegrounds For Marriage Equality | California, Maryland, Rhode Island, Maine and Oregon are the next targets in the campaign to legalize gay marriage across the nation, Equality Matters’ Richard Socarides predicted. “The right to marry is a federal constitutional right. It ought not to depend on which state any individual lives in,” he said. Watch it:
NEWS FLASH
Perdue Vetoes Abortion Bill Requiring A 24-Hour Waiting Period | Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC) has “vetoed a bill that would have required women seeking abortions to wait 24 hours after state-mandated counseling and to undergo ultrasounds.” “This bill is a dangerous intrusion into the confidential relationship that exists between women and their doctors,” she said.
French banks appear to be leading the charge for a plan that could let Greece not repay all the money it owes without technically “defaulting” on its debts:
As the [Greek] finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, desperately tried to woo dissident deputies ahead of the vote on the radical €28bn (£25bn) [austerity] package, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, said his country’s banks had agreed on a plan to reinvest a significant amount of their holdings in Greek debt.
By reinvesting in new securities over 30 years it is hoped the pressure on Greece to repay investors will ease. With €355bn, bondholders in France are more exposed to Greek debt than any other eurozone country. The announcement of the scheme helped dissipate fears that Greece was heading for default. The FTSE 100 rose 24.62 points to close at 5722.34, while the Dow Jones was up 92 points at 12,026 by lunchtime on Wall Street.
Basically, instead of paying the French banks the money that the Greek government owes them, the Greek government will give them some new longer-dated bonds. Then I guess what happens next is that French bank regulators need to pretend to believe that these new bonds constitute perfectly sound capital. The result would be a kind of immaculate default, or at least a very clever way of kicking the can down the road. But according to the FT, commercial banks of the sort making the forgiveness offer hold a relatively small share of Greece’s total outstanding debt. The ECB has 14 percent and says it won’t participate in a rollover. The EU and IMF have 16 percent as a result of previous interventions. And then a big 43 percent chunk is owned by miscellaneous investors including asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, and non-EU central banks.
Powered by NewsWhip
Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. Use the form below to send us the latest.
About ThinkProgress | Contact Us | Donate
