Obama: Education data justify jobs plan

Obama: Education data justify jobs plan
Associated Press
August 18, 2012

Tight school budgets have meant fewer teachers, larger classes and shorter school years, according to a White House report that President Obama says shows the need for Congress to pass his proposals to help states reduce teacher layoffs.

The study concluded that 300,000 education jobs have been lost since the official end of the recession in 2009 and that student-to-teacher ratios have increased by 4.6 percent from 2008 to 2010 and are on track to grow more.

"If we want America to lead in the 21st century, nothing is more important than giving everyone the best education possible - from the day they start preschool to the day they start their career," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday.

For Obama, the report offered a fresh chance to push a nearly year-old jobs plan he proposed that provided money for states to keep teachers, police officers and firefighters on the job. The proposal included payroll tax cuts and jobless insurance provisions that Congress has passed. But other proposals in the plan have run aground amid mostly Republican opposition.

Obama is pressing Congress to act, part of an election-year strategy to portray Republicans as obstructionists. Republicans have proposed their own measures, but they have not advanced in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

While the private sector has continued to create jobs, though at a sluggish pace, the public sector has been posting monthly job losses, contributing to an 8.3 percent unemployment rate.

Obama's plan includes $25 billion in aid to prevent layoffs of teachers and pay for other education jobs. It is part of a broader effort to retain state and local government jobs...

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Obama-Education-data-justify-jobs-plan-3798736.php#ixzz240zuqFFt

Mary Brown, 'Obamacare' foe -- and broke

Mary Brown's hospital bills will be shifted to others since she refused to carry health insurance

Mary Brown, 'Obamacare' foe -- and broke
A woman whose case is before the Supreme Court is an exemplar of a problem the healthcare law was designed to address.
Los Angles Times editorial
March 11, 2012

Mary Brown, whose case against the 2010 healthcare reform law is pending before the Supreme Court, argues that the government shouldn't be able to force her to carry health insurance. Joined by three other individuals and a small-business trade association, she's asking the justices to rule that the law's insurance mandate is unconstitutional and that the rest of the act should be thrown out with it. But new revelations about her own situation make the case for the other side.

As The Times' David Savage reported, Brown and her husband have fallen on hard times since filing the lawsuit, largely because their auto repair business in Florida failed. The couple have filed for bankruptcy protection, asking a federal court to wipe out close to $60,000 in consumer debts. Significantly, their unpaid bills include $2,750 owed to a local hospital and physicians group and $1,735 to out-of-state medical specialists.

The disclosures are political gold for the Obama administration, transforming Brown from a champion of individual liberty into an exemplar of a problem the new law was designed to address. Uninsured and underinsured Americans rack up about $60 billion in medical bills every year that they cannot afford, forcing doctors and hospitals to pass those costs on to federal taxpayers and those patients who can pay their bills. It's not impinging on personal freedom to ask people to cover their own medical tabs. The mechanism Congress created to do that is the individual mandate.

Sarah Palin's weird 'Sputnik' story

01/27/2011
Sarah Palin's weird 'Sputnik' story
By Stephen Stromberg
Washington Post

On Wednesday night, Sarah Palin attacked the "Sputnik moment" line from President Obama's second State of the Union address.

That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated this Sputnik moment that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. And he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yikes.

In her rant, Palin wildly misconstrued the president's argument, which was not about emulating the Soviets in the 1950s but instead about the Americans who responded to early Soviet success in space exploration by educating themselves and out-innovating the Soviets. Did she listen to the speech? Alexandra Petri has more on this here.

But let's pretend that wasn't Obama's point. The Soviets didn't have an empire-draining debt problem until some 30 years after Sputnik passed over America. And when they did, it was in large part a result of massive overinvestment in heavy industry, which supported Soviet military pretensions. None of this is to argue that the Soviet economy is anything we should emulate. But let's at least get the basic facts right when we criticize it.

It's a fair guess that Palin thought she was borrowing her "insight" from the mythology of Ronald Reagan, who massively increased America's spending to spur the sort of competitive expenditure that contributed to the ballooning of Soviet debt in the 1980s. According to many conservatives, this was a -- if not the -- crucial factor that catalyzed the Soviet collapse.

But in claiming that the Soviets incurred their consequential debts long before Reagan was president, Palin ends up arguing that the Gipper wasn't nearly that responsible for the USSR spending itself to death...

Obama is USA's most-admired man, Clinton most-admired woman

Obama is USA's most-admired man, Clinton most-admired woman


10 MOST ADMIRED
Most admired man:

1. Barack Obama
2. George W. Bush
3. Bill Clinton
4. Nelson Mandela
5. Bill Gates
6. (tied) Pope Benedict XVI
6. (tied) Billy Graham
8. (tied) Jimmy Carter
8. (tied) Glenn Beck
10. The Dalai Lama

Most admired woman

1. Hillary Clinton
2. Sarah Palin
3. Oprah Winfrey
4. Michelle Obama
5. Condoleezza Rice
6. Queen Elizabeth
7. Angelina Jolie
8. Margaret Thatcher
9. (tied) Aung San Suu Kyi
9. (tied) Laura Bush
9. (tied) Barbara Bush

Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,019 adults taken Dec. 10-12, 2010.

Obama is USA's most-admired man, Clinton most-admired woman
By Susan Page
USA TODAY
Dec. 27, 2010

His party may have suffered a shellacking in November's elections, but President Obama remains the unchallenged champion on another front: For the third year in a row, he is by far the most admired man in America.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues an even longer run, ranked in the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll as the most admired woman for the ninth straight year. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is second, as she was in 2009.

Despite Americans' unhappiness with the nation's politics, politicians dominate both lists. The top 10 men include not only the president but also the three living former presidents. Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton take the top three spots...

Getting things done requires a mix of compromise and confrontation

"...getting things done requires a mix of compromise and confrontation,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

Obama Is Set to Shuffle His Staff
By JEFF ZELENY
New York Times
December 23, 2010

President Obama is planning the first major reorganization of his administration, preparing to shuffle several positions in the West Wing as he tries to fortify his political team for the realities of divided government and his own re-election...

“In a world of divided government, getting things done requires a mix of compromise and confrontation,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “What are the things you can do without Congress? In some cases, that involves executive orders, but it also involves using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make a political argument about the direction of the country.”

Most Americans want schools to stay the same; unions seem to succeed in anti-reform message

Fewer Americans Back Obama’s Education Programs
By Dakarai I. Aarons
Education Week
August 25, 2010

Support for President Barack Obama’s education agenda is slipping among Americans, according to a poll released today of the public’s attitude toward public schooling.

The survey, conducted by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Gallup Organization, reports that just 34 percent of those polled would give the president an A or B when grading his performance on education during his first 17 months in office, compared with 45 percent in last year’s poll, which covered the president’s first six months in office. ("Obama School Ideas Getting Good Grades," Sept. 2, 2009.) The president’s grades fell not just among Republicans surveyed, but also among Democrats and Independents, who increasingly gave Mr. Obama grades of C or lower.

Poll respondents, for example, took a decidedly different tack than the president and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when it comes to turning around low-performing schools. When asked what was the best solution, 54 percent said the school should remain open with the existing teachers and principal and receive outside support...

Glenn Beck attacks Obama's 11-year-old daughter

Glenn Beck Apologizes for Mocking Obama's Daughter
Lauren Frayer
AOL News
May 29, 2010

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck has apologized for a segment on his radio program in which he made fun of President Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter, imitating her in a childish high-pitched voice and criticizing her intelligence...
Read full post here.

Obama to Wall Street: ‘Join Us, Instead of Fighting Us’; Steve Schwartzman doesn't get it

This related story seems an apt introduction to Obama's words:

Wall Street's know-it-alls can't tell right from wrong
By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post
April 23, 2010

I know you'll all be comforted, as I was Wednesday, by the public vote of confidence from Steve Schwartzman, chief executive of private equity giant Blackstone Group, when he said that his firm would continue to do business with Goldman Sachs and that he's never had a shred of doubt about the investment bank's ethical character.

So let me get this straight. Goldman Sachs is now relying on the character reference of a Wall Street sharpie who notoriously snookered investors into buying non-controlling shares of a private equity firm at the very moment when a credit-induced takeover bubble was about to burst...



Obama to Wall Street: ‘Join Us, Instead of Fighting Us’
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
April 22, 2010

President Obama challenged some of the nation’s most influential bankers on Thursday to call off their “battalions of financial industry lobbyists” and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis.

Speaking in the bankers’ backyard, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Obama castigated a “failure of responsibility” by Wall Street for having led to the financial crisis of 2008, and he pressed his case for what he called “a common-sense, reasonable, non-ideological” system of tighter regulation to prevent any recurrence. He took issue with the claim that his proposal would institutionalize the idea of future bailouts of huge banks.

“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not true. In fact, the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts...

Verizon internal affairs investigation re Obama snooping leads to firings

It turns out that Verizon is tough on employees who break the law. Compare this story to the Sheriff of Santa Barbara, who is protecting a deputy who criminally abused his snooping privileges, and a commander who covered up for the deputy.


Verizon fires workers who snooped on Obama cell records
ZD Net Government
by Richard Koman
November 23, 2008
Red-faced Verizon Wireless has fired an undisclosed number of employees who couldn’t resist the chance to peek into Barack Obama’s cellphone records, CNN reports.

It was an old, flip-top phone, not his famous BlackBerry, and the account had been inactive for months. No text messages or voicemail contents could have been accessed. The employees were satisfying “idle curiosity,” a source told CNN, and the employees were not authorized to access customer records.

Verizon said, in an internal memo, that it has launched an internal investigation into whether the records “of our customer had in any way been compromised outside our company, and this investigation continues.”

The company has also notified federal law enforcement agencies.

While this appears to be little more than a case of bad behavior, it does highlight again the issue of telecom spying –and sharing with the NSA – on customer data. Obama supported legislation giving telecom companies immunity from lawsuits for such transfers.