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Education

Maryland And Ohio At Risk Of Losing Their Race To The Top Funding

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 9, 2010 at 5:15 pm

Governor-elect John Kasich (R-OH)

During his campaign, Governor-elect Rick Scott (R-FL) said that he would “refuse temporary funding from the federal government that creates permanent spending in Florida,” a seemingly veiled shot at the Race to the Top funds Florida was awarded by the Department of Education. And it seems like Florida may not be the only state at risk of losing its Race to the Top funding.

Race to the Top provides competitive grants to states to implement education reform measures, but receiving the money is contingent on a state actually following through on its submitted plan. And the Maryland legislature yesterday took a step toward dismantling its state’s blueprint:

A Maryland legislative committee voted Monday to reject a new regulation requiring that half of teachers’ evaluations be based on student progress, calling into question the future of a $250 million federal Race to the Top grant…The federal money was awarded in part because Maryland promised that student progress would be such a large component of the evaluations, and President Obama has encouraged such changes.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Governor-elect John Kasich (R) may endanger his state’s grant, according to the Columbus Dispatch:

Ohio could lose more than $400 million in federal Race to the Top funds if Gov.-elect John Kasich follows through with his plan to dump outgoing Gov. Ted Strickland’s education overhaul…Although Kasich said during the campaign that he will scrap Strickland’s evidence-based model for distributing state aid to schools, a spokesman for the incoming governor said he is supportive of “concepts” included in Ohio’s Race to the Top plan.

There is some flexibility for tweaking Race to the Top plans, but wholesale changes could lead to funding being pulled. “If any state significantly changes the plan, it will be putting all Race to the Top funding in jeopardy,” said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the Education Department, adding that “what was ‘significant’ would be determined on a case-by-case basis.”

As the New York Times editorial board put it, “the Race to the Top initiative won’t solve this country’s education problems by itself, but it is focusing attention on the right issues and moving them up the national agenda.” But it won’t work if state lawmakers backtrack when the political winds change.

Update

The Quick and the Ed has more.

Politics

House Republicans Name Program That Already Expired As First Spending Item They Would Cut

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 9, 2010 at 4:50 pm

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA)

ThinkProgress has been documenting the struggles that House Republicans have been having as they attempt to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility without laying out any real spending cuts to which anyone might object. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) epitomized this dance, saying on PBS’ Newshour that he had a path to budget balance, and then outlined cuts that amounted to less than one half of one percent of the budget.

One program which House Republicans have consistently seized upon to bolster their budget-cutting bona fides is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund, a successful program that has created 250,000 jobs in 37 states via subsidized employment programs for low-income and unemployed workers. And according to National Journal, Republicans are once again railing against the program, selecting it as one of their first programs to cut:

House Republicans have targeted one of the first programs they would like to ax: the $25 billion emergency fund for people who lose their jobs, part of last year’s stimulus bill. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said the program encourages states to increase their welfare caseloads “without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance.”

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, Price’s characterization of the fund is completely inaccurate. The program has also earned the staunch support of many Republican governors, including Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), who said it provided “much-needed aid during this recession by enabling businesses to hire new workers, thus enhancing the economic engines of our local communities.”

But the crux of the issue is that eliminating the TANF emergency fund will not save any money because the program has already expired. It was funded at $5 billion for two years, and ended on September 30, 2010. There is no money left for Price to save.

As The Wonk Room has explained, advocates, as well as the Obama administration, have asked that Congress fund the program for an additional year for $2.5 billion. Price multiplied that over ten years to come up with his ludicrous pronouncement that he would save $25 billion by cutting the program.

LGBT

Two New DOMA Cases Expand Reach Of Legal Effort To Discredit Law

By Igor Volsky on Nov 9, 2010 at 4:30 pm

Earlier today, the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) and the American Civil Liberties Union filed two new lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. GLAD scored a victory with a similar challenge in July, when a Federal District Court in Boston ruled that DOMA interfered with the “traditional state right to define marriage and forces the state to ‘violate the equal protection rights of its citizens.’” The Obama administration is currently appealing the ruling.

These cases build on that victory in two important ways. As the New York Times explains, the two new lawsuits, “which involve plaintiffs from New York, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, expand the attack geographically and also encompass more of the 1,138 federal laws and regulations that the Defense of Marriage Act potentially affects — including the insurance costs amounting to several hundred dollars a month in the case of Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen, and a $350,0000 estate tax payment in the A.C.L.U. case.” And secondly, the cases argue that DOMA not only forces states to discriminate against same-sex spouses, but it also demands that private corporations deny benefits to same-sex partners. Metro Weekly’s Chris Geidner pulls out the following quote:

Under the terms of the Bayer [Corporation Pension] Plan, and in compliance with applicable federal law, where a Participant, like Thomas Buckholz, who has vested and has a nonforfeitable right to benefits under the Bayer Plan, dies prior to his annuity start date, the Participant’s surviving spouse shall be paid a Preretirement Survivor Annuity. (Bayer Plan, §5.6(a)).

As a result of the application of DOMA, 1 U.S.C. § 7, through ERISA and the Internal Revenue Code, Jerry has been denied the vested qualified preretirement survivor annuity (QPSA) available to all spouses of vested participants in defined benefit pension plans in the equivalent situation as Jerry finds himself today even though he is legally Tom’s surviving spouse under Connecticut law.

In the decision handed down in July, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro had concluded that “there is a historically entrenched tradition of federal reliance on state marital status determination,” and found that DOMA not only violates the tenth amendment but also “induces the Commonwealth to violate the equal protection rights of its citizens” embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

“DOMA plainly conditions the receipt of federal funding on the denial of marriage-based benefits to same-sex married couples, though the same benefits are provided to similarly-situated heterosexual couples,” the Court ruled. ” As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Alyssa

Cultural Literacy

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 9, 2010 at 4:26 pm

I was watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie the other night, and as much as I enjoy it, it strikes me as the kind of show that could only be make in England, and is only accessible to a certain kind of audience. The range of jokes in a single episode, from faked and exceedingly funny cultural criticism, to satire of pretentious businessmen, to dead-on knock-offs of Australian soap operas, requires a broad and particular kind of cultural literacy.

Obviously, cultural literacy in the E.D. Hirsch Jr. sense is not unproblematic. Attempts to draw up a clear catalogue of what all Americans, or all educated people, or whatever dividing line one chooses to set, ought to know will inevitably exclude some set of knowledge, will inevitably result in some sort of difficult and tippy balance. Do we include comprehensive knowledge of hip-hop but leave out Native American traditions? Do we include English history and leave out pre-Colonial Africa? There’s no way to create a canon that includes deep knowledge of a fairly broad range of subjects without leaving anything critical out.

And yet, having some knowledge in common is such a gift to comedians. If you can assume your audience knows certain things reasonably well, you can use that knowledge, build on it, rely upon it, riff on it. The comedy of inference is available to you, and not simply the inference of family dynamics or behavior, but the inferences based on culture, history, custom. A show like Community does extremely well within the realm of popular culture, but I can’t really imagine an American show that’s as broad and rich as British sketch comedies like Fry and Laurie seem to be.

Yglesias

Rick Perry’s Medicaid Fantasies

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 9, 2010 at 4:25 pm

I sort of favor Texas secession from the United States of America, but nevertheless it bugged me to see Texas Governor Rick Perry randomly prattling over the weekend about his alleged desire to opt-out of Medicaid “rather than this one size fits all mentality that comes out of Washington, DC with string attached.”

You see, though there are a lot of problems with Medicaid’s hybrid state/federal nature, one virtue that structure has is that doesn’t have a one size fits all mentality. Any governor who thinks he has a more cost-effective way of meeting Medicaid’s coverage goals is free to apply for a waiver to restructure the program. Perry’s problem, as my colleague Igor Volsky explains, is that he doesn’t actually have a way to do this:

But of course, if Perry believes that Medicaid is such a bad deal, he can continue petitioning the government for a waiver that would allow the state to alter some of the rules of the program — so long as he can demonstrate that his ‘Texas solution’ is comparable to Medicaid’s coverage standards. Perry hasn’t proposed anything remotely plausible during his first term as governor and while he talked a lot about states acting as “laboratories of innovation” in the above CNN interview, but didn’t list a single “good idea” for how Texas would provide care more efficiently than Medicaid.

The fact of the matter is that governors generally don’t want flexibility over this sort of thing. What they want is the ability to do what Perry did—to go on television and tell people they have a double super secret way to accomplish the goals of federal programs more efficiently if only the jackbooted thugs in Washington would get out of the way. But nobody is standing in Perry’s way. He just doesn’t have a proposal that works.

Politics

Allen West’s Hiring Of Hate Radio Host As Chief Of Staff Is ‘Potentially Problematic,’ House Official Warns

By George Zornick on Nov 9, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Republican Allen West was just elected to the House of Representatives in Florida’s 22nd district, defeating two-term Democratic Rep. Ron Klein. His first move since being elected is rather strange: he has hired a conservative talk radio host, Joyce Kaufman, to be his congressional chief of staff. “Her 20 years of experience on the political scene in South Florida (always as a radio host) will give me helpful insights and perspective,” West said. “As chief of staff, she’ll be my right-hand person.”

WFTL said in a statement that Kaufman will continue to work for the station but not as a host: she has been “retained as our Washington correspondent, with details on her new exciting schedule to be announced soon.”

Carol Dixon, counsel for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, told ThinkProgress that she had not heard of Kaufman’s situation in particular, but said that generally this setup could be “potentially problematic.” “There may be potential confidentiality issues — some of the issues she’s reporting on may be gained by virtue of her House status. At a staff level it seems problematic,” Dixon said. The committee’s rules also say Kaufman must earn a fair market salary from WFTL, and refrain from using any office equipment for her radio duties.

As a Tea Party mini-star, West raised more money than any non-incumbent in a House race, making it the second-most expensive House contest in the country. He received major backing from the Republican Party and its major players — he was named a “Young Gun” by the National Republican Congressional Committee, was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and got a campaign visit from Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the presumptive Speaker of the House.

West retired from the Army after facing a court martial for abusing an Iraqi man, and ran an unusual, bombastic and often offensive congressional campaign, frequently targeting Islam. “Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD,” West told an audience in March. A month earlier, he told supporters that jihad “is not a perversion” of the Quran — “they’re doing exactly what this book says.” West has also slammed “chicken” leaders who read “memos from the feminists,” and defended his outsized rhetoric thusly: “That’s how people talk. … And you can print that: That’s how men talk.”

One of the places West liked to talk was Kaufman’s radio show on WFTL in Florida, making over 100 appearances over the past four years. Like her new boss, Kaufman is also no stranger to offensive statements:

– She said Jewish people voted for President Obama because “they don’t embrace being Jews anymore.”

– She said Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan “looks basically like Ed Schultz in drag.”

– Discussing illegal immigrants on her show, she said: “If you commit a crime while you’re here, we should hang you and send your body back to where you came from, and your family should pay for it.”

– At a rally with West standing by, she said: “Calling illegal immigrants ‘undocumented workers’ is like calling a drug dealer a pharmacist without a license.” “There are people who want to change your way of life, and some of them may be your gardeners,” she said.

– She also blamed undocumented immigrants for pollution and disease: “We are destroying the environment in this country at an incredibly accelerated pace because of this group of people who have come to this country and have to live a very substandard existence. They don’t have mufflers on their cars. I mean, it sounds like silly nonsense, but it’s not. The cumulative effect is huge. They live, you know, 10 to a household; they bring disease with them.“

Kaufman must first clear the ethical hurdles, but if she does, perhaps it’s not so strange that West hired her.

Update

Al Tompkins, senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, tells The South Florida Sun Sentinel that Kaufman’s appearances on WFTL may now open the station up to demands of equal time by a West challenger, under federal communications law.

Climate Progress

The Next Steps For Advancing Biofuels Policy

By Guest Blogger on Nov 9, 2010 at 3:55 pm

Our guest blogger is Center for American Progress Agriculture Policy Director Jake Caldwell.

The Obama administration has been active in recent weeks on several significant advances in biofuels policy. Rural areas will increasingly become both the direct providers of renewable energy and the beneficiaries of a region-by-region clean energy transformation as an increasing number of sustainable biomass and biofuels energy facilities — and the jobs that accompany them — are sited in rural communities. Separately, the EPA announced that it is willing to approve higher blends of ethanol in newer vehicles to allow the use of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline or E15 in our gas tanks. Many of these initiatives reflect and build upon earlier policy recommendations made by the Center for American Progress and others. They are steps in the right direction, but our biofuels policy still needs reform to maximize the economic and environmental benefits to the nation.

The combination of Congress’s RFS mandate to produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022, the recently announced USDA initiatives, and EPA’s boost in the ethanol blend to E15 for late-model cars and trucks should enable the current biofuels industry to support additional reforms needed in key aspects of biofuels policy:

– Further promotion of advanced biofuels that deliver measurable lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions reductions
– USDA should reinstate the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions requirement for feedstocks seeking eligibility in the Biomass Crop Assistance Program
– Reform of the federal loan guarantee programs for the construction of biorefineries
– Boosting biofuel distribution infrastructure
– Elimination of the current import tariff on imported biofuels
– A phase-out of the expiring blender’s credit in favor of a variable and performance-based producer tax credit

Biofuels that deliver measurable lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions reductions, minimize the use of food-based feedstocks, and reduce public health and environmental impacts should be encouraged. With the right policy in place we can maximize the benefits of biofuels, and ensure they contribute to greater economic growth, less pollution, and reduced oil dependence.

Read more at “Fine Tuning Our Biofuels Policy.”

Yglesias

Actually Existing Internet Communism

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 9, 2010 at 3:28 pm

Henry Farrell finds Steven Johnson running away form the somewhat radical anti-capitalist implications of his work on innovation, something that I think is a fairly widespread problem.

The issue is that most people don’t have a great vocabulary for talking about valuable activity that’s neither organized by the government nor undertaken for commercial reasons. And yet there’s lots of activity along those lines in everyone’s life. Importantly, this has always been the case. People have always had hobbies. The number of people who play sports on an amateur basis has always exceeded the number of people who do it professionally. And most significantly, people—especially women—have always done intensely valuable work in the household sector and related to raising and educating children.

But rapid improvements in communications and information technology have drastically expanded the scope and importance of non-commercial activities. It’s also created a (virtual) space where commercial, hobbyist, non-profit, and government undertakings interact, compete, and collaborate in novel ways. This nexus of undertakings has created several billionaires and “hot” innovative businesses of the sort that those inclined to valorize the work of entrepreneurs can and do valorize. But it’s also created a much larger set of amateur or quasi-amateur producers who are impacting the lives of people all around the world. In its 1875 Gotha Program, the German Social Democratic Party “demand[ed] the establishment of socialistic productive associations with the support of the state and under the democratic control of the working people.”

It turns out that finding a feasible way to do that for industrial age enterprises was fairly problematic. And yet their arguments that such associations would be beneficial remain compelling. Meanwhile, the Internet makes it much easier for individuals to form socialistic productive associations without a ton of explicit support of the state. This means, however, that the extent to which the state is implicitly supporting or hindering the work of said associations deserves to be on the table politically. And that discussion needs to consider not just the GDP impacts of peer production (which are often quite small) but the giant quantities of consumer (and producer) surplus welfare that are involved.

Related Posts

Economy

House Republicans Name An Already Expired Program As First Spending Item They Would Cut

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 9, 2010 at 3:10 pm

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA)

We’ve been documenting the struggles that House Republicans have been having as they attempt to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility without laying out any real spending cuts to which anyone might object. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) epitomized this dance, saying on PBS’ Newshour that he had a path to budget balance, and then outlining cuts that amounted to less than one half of one percent of the budget.

One program upon which House Republicans have consistently seized upon to bolster their budget-cutting bona fides is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund, a successful program that created 250,000 jobs in 37 states via subsidized employment programs for low-income and unemployed workers. And according to National Journal, Republicans are once again railing against the program:

House Republicans have targeted one of the first programs they would like to ax: the $25 billion emergency fund for people who lose their jobs, part of last year’s stimulus bill. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said the program encourages states to increase their welfare caseloads “without requiring able-bodied individuals to work, get job training, or make other efforts to move off of taxpayer assistance.”

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, Price’s characterization of the fund is completely inaccurate. The program also had the staunch support of many Republican governors, including Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), who said it provided “much-needed aid during this recession by enabling businesses to hire new workers, thus enhancing the economic engines of our local communities.”

But the crux of the issue is that eliminating the TANF emergency fund will save exactly zero dollars, because the program has already expired! It was funded at $5 billion for two years, and ended on September 30, 2010. It’s over, and there is no money for Price to save.

Advocates, as well as the Obama administration, have asked that Congress fund the program for an additional year for $2.5 billion. Price multiplied that over ten years to come up with his ludicrous pronouncement that he would save $25 billion by cutting the program.

This highlights the extent to which Republicans want to employ gimmickry instead of actually being honest about their budget priorities. The TANF emergency fund did precisely what it was designed to do, and Republicans are now using it to demonize the working poor and falsely point to it as an example of government waste that will yield loads of savings if it is cut.

Politics

VIDEO: After Promising New Era Of Disclosure, GOP Refuses To Disclose Transition-Related Documents

By Lee Fang on Nov 9, 2010 at 2:45 pm

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the leader of the House Republicans, tasked Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) as the party’s chief liaison to corporate lobbyists in early 2009 in preparation for the 2010 elections. Walden carefully courted business leaders by holding a series of meetings with trade associations and lobbyists to help shake the K Street “money tree” to support Republican candidates. After Republicans captured the House, Boehner appointed Walden to lead the Republican Office of Transition — which began meeting the day after the election, November 3.

The GOP Transition Office has widely publicized itself as a mechanism for guiding a “smooth and transparent transition into Republican majority.” Announcing the Transition Office, Walden said he would make Congress “more transparent, cost-efficient, and accountable to the people.” Just this morning, Roll Call published a story with the headline, “Walden: GOP Transition Focusing on Transparency.”

Given Walden’s promise of accountability and transparency, ThinkProgress traveled to the Transition Office today to request documents disclosing who has been attending the transition meetings, what ethics rules have been governing the meetings, and how things are actually being run differently. After asking Walden for a list of the transition meeting participants, he ducked back into the office. Later, a Republican staffer emerged to hand us a press release and a copy of a newspaper article about Walden’s leadership. None of the documents provided to ThinkProgress were actually official disclosures:

TP: Are there going to be any new ethics rules?

STAFFER: You are going to have to ask members of the committee that.

TP: Are lobbyists going to be allowed in these meetings?

STAFFER: You’ll have to ask members of the committee.

Watch it:

ThinkProgress witnessed dozens of men and women, none of them members of Congress, walk in and out of the room. Simply listing the members of Congress on the transition committee is nothing new. Since Republican transition meetings have been occurring since November 3, the public still does not know what has been discussed, which staffers or lobbyists have been involved, or if there are any actual new ethics rules.

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