C.S. Lewis once wrote that "of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Rulers who just want to exploit us may relax once their greed's sated.
But "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience," Lewis said.
Who Wins? Who Pays? The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelor’s Degree finds clear winners: Bachelor’s degree holders get a good return on their investment. But taxpayers can be losers, the report concludes. Including public subsidies, tax breaks and government aid to students, taxpayers spend more than they get back for bachelor’s degrees earned at public and private nonprofit institutions; only for-profit colleges turn a profit for the taxpayers.Definitely worth a read, especially in these budget-cutting times.
The California Teachers Association's State of Emergency rallies ended last Friday, not with a bang but with a whimper. "Mellow" is not a word you want associated with the culmination of your angry protests.
Many of the union's nuttier ideas were discarded under public scrutiny, but one that survived intact was the "300 volunteers needed for a sit-in in the State Capitol (beginning Monday, May 9)." We've since learned that the sit-in and arrests on Monday occurred over CTA objections, and the "occupation" of the Capitol involved searching in vain for GOP legislators to bother (it helps if you know what they look like).
Two news cycles were devoted to CTA president David Sanchez's overnight jail stay (plus video) and the - I kid you not - vigil that was held until his release.
It's somehow appropriate to the situation in California that the State of Emergency protests cost millions of dollars and thousand of man-hours while accomplishing nothing concrete.
Washington Education Association Approves "Day of Action." It's all the rage with the cool kids. I'm guessing it will include, oh, I don't know, a protest rally at the Capitol?
Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen released 100 pages of documented threats against lawmakers. The released documents include threats against both Republicans and democrats but, of course, the most vile and violent threats were sent to Republican officials.According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "A surprising number of even the most vile messages came from readily-identifiable senders."
Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.
That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.
Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.
Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.
Monday’s New York Times had another classic entry in the annals of Obamacare. It seems that nursing homes are asking HHS for waivers from Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health coverage to their workers. Nursing homes, even though they are in the health-care business, often don’t provide insurance to their employees. They can’t afford to. And why is that?Mark Parkinson, president of the American Health Care Association, the largest trade group for nursing homes, says the problem is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare, set by government agencies, do not pay them enough to offer their employees medical coverage. “We do not have much ability to increase prices because we are so dependent on Medicaid and Medicare” for revenue, he said.
Yes, that’s right. They can’t afford to give their own workers health insurance because they are dependent on government-provided health insurance programs for their own revenue, and the arbitrary price controls in those programs don’t allow them to make much of a profit.
Don’t like Obamacare? Want your company to get a waiver from it, but they won’t give you one because you don’t have the right connections? Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with Barack. TheDC’s Matthew Boyle reports: “Amidst the news that 38 of the 204 Obamacare waivers approved in April went to posh entertainment venues in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district, new questions about the Obama administration’s transparency pledge have arisen. Although the administration has approved more than 1,300 Obamacare waivers and published the recipients’ application information online, it has not made public which companies and other entities have been denied waivers and why they were denied. Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) won’t release that information, nor will they publicly release the identities of those still waiting for a decision. HHS won’t even say how many applications are in the queue.” This is the most transparent administration in U.S. history, and everybody knows that when something’s transparent, you can’t even see it. Duh.
I will repeat the same question I’ve been asking since the first health care waiver was granted: If Obamacare is such a great law, why does the White House keep exempting its best friends from it?
The “auction” would work as follows. Schools would announce a limited number of sponsored undergraduate fellows that could be “endowed” by super-rich do-gooders. Given the prestige (and favorable publicity) of sponsoring a university fellow, the rush would be on, especially at elite schools. The opening bid would be set equal to the total four-year cost for a minority student, and this would include full tuition, student-activity fees, room and board, some spending money, all necessary remediation, the per-student cost of the cultural center, and everything else imaginable. Moreover, to cover administrative costs, “overhead” would be tacked on (in research contracts, this can be as high as 80 percent of a grant). I’d guess that $100,000 per year per fellow would suffice as the minimum opening bid for direct expenses, plus, say, another $50,000 for overhead. If, for example, Harvard opened the bidding at $150,000 for 30 fellows, the guaranteed yearly haul would be $4.5 million (the actual net would be substantially higher, since this outside contribution cancels the cost of internally funding affirmative action). For a four-year (probably five-year) program, this works out to at least $18 million per year in fresh revenue.
But, given today’s philanthropic madness, these figures are far too low. Imagine an auction at a lavish New York Plaza Hotel banquet, complete with New York Times coverage and glamorous celebrities with Bill Clinton as the emcee. The event would be a feeding frenzy for well-heeled, social-status-seeking do-gooders. Billionaire hedge-fund operators would vie for the honor of the most extravagant bidder. Auctions in the hinterland would be more subdued, and at the local Holiday Inn, but the cost of education here is much lower, and so $25,000 a year might “buy” a fellow. In a nutshell, achieving diversity becomes a profit center.
Now, the winning bidders would get to choose their recipients according to their own standards. Actually, they would probably outsource this task to others, just as members of Congress farm out military academy appointments. In any case, it would be unlikely that any fellows would remain unsponsored, and, in an instant, revenue soars and expenses drop sharply. The million-dollar tuition/expense/overhead checks would arrive promptly and no discounts would be given. Proud sponsors would take out full-page Wall Street Journal advertisements to showcase their latest fellows. And with some legal finagling to avoid laws banning reverse discrimination, these fellows would not be classified as regular students, though in practice they would be indistinguishable.
Privately paid fellowships also avoid certain commonplace political problems — no public money goes toward admitting and then retaining students who fail to meet academic standards. No parent complains that their super-smart offspring was pushed aside by an unqualified minority student. Indeed, the private largess may reduce tuition, so diversity would more than pay for itself. Financially hard-pressed parents may even demand greater revenue-generating diversity at State U.
Having failed to win enough Republican votes to put the taxes on the ballot in June, the governor is expected to ask lawmakers to impose at least some of the levies first and seek Californians' blessing after the fact, said officials with knowledge of Brown's plan...
Even Democratic leaders and the governor's union backers, doubting the odds of a tax measure passing at the ballot box, are pushing Brown to break his pledge and forgo voter input.
"Go get a deal done," said David Kieffer, executive director of the state council of the influential Service Employees International Union, in a challenge to Brown and the Legislature. Californians "would vote the taxes down," he said, and "they don't actually need to be involved in this decision."
Are California public retirement plans better than those for federal or private-sector workers? Yes in some ways, no in others.
Generally they allow earlier retirement than their counterparts. Typically, public-safety employees such as police officers and firefighters have the best deals, schoolteachers the worst.
An Ohio seventh-grader was suspended last week for doing arguably the most predictable thing a 13-year-old boy could do for a laugh on the school bus. He cut the cheese.Mumsy claims that she has "gastrointestinal distress" and perhaps her son does, too. So? Others shouldn't have to suffer because of your problem. Wear those charcoal-lined undies or something, and quit making excuses for your jerk of a kid.
Canal Winchester Middle School students Anthony Nichols and another boy lost their bus privileges on Friday for their stinky stunt, which prompted the customary rousing laughter and "lowering of windows," according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Administrators ruled that the flatulence was in violation of the school's code of conduct, but if you ask Nichols' parents, the decision reeks of poor judgement.
New Zealand parents are outraged after learning some schools are helping to keep teenage girls’ abortions a secret, the Sunday Star-Times reports.
One mom is angry that her 16-year-old daughter had a secret abortion allegedly arranged by a school counselor.
"I was horrified. Horrified that she'd had to go through that on her own, and horrified her friends and counselors had felt that she shouldn't talk to us," she told the Star-Times.
The mother learned that the school counselor had taken the girl for a scan and to doctors. “I didn’t know they could do that,” she said. link
The California hotel workers union is pushing a bill that requires all hotel mattresses to have flat sheets instead of fitted sheets. They argue that the heavy lifting required for fitted sheets is causing back injuries for workers.Do I even need to comment on this? Perhaps I should create a new category/label called "insanity" and put posts like this in it.
Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it. link
