My wife and I are both Star Wars fans, and we joked about telling just one guest that our wedding would be Star Wars themed and asking him to come in costume. We're not that cruel, but I can't help but regret that our wedding album lacks a picture of a bunch of guys in formal wear standing around with a guy in a cheap Chewbacca costume.
The problem with using standardized tests have always been that teachers spend more time teaching the students how to pass the test than actually teaching them useful skills. I know a guy who's mom is a teacher. On the grade 3 test, they had Venn diagrams that the students were supposed to understand. Now usually they wouldn't teach this kind of thing in grade 3, but since it's on the test, they had to teach it, even though there's much more important things for them to understand, especially at that age group.
It seems to me that (allowing for your implicit assumption that venn diagrams are not as useful as the stuff they displaced) the problem is misplaced priorities in the exam design, not the fact that the teachers have to "teach to the exam." The solution is to fix the exam, not to throw up your hands and say that exams are not useful tools for achieving educational goals. The fact that a particular exam doesn't give teachers a way to direct their teaching is a failing of that exam design, not in the idea of exams in general. If the exam requires that students be able to demonstrate the skills we want them to acquire, "teaching to the exam" is a *good* thing. I simply can't buy into the idea that no exam could possibly assess a child's quantitative or language skills.
Without meaningful objectives and a way to determine whether they've been met, you're really just spinning your wheels.
It's interesting. Teaching seems to be the one market where people think that adding more producers will result in a decrease in quality for the consumer. I can't quite figure out why. I seriously doubt that baseball players would get any better if we cut their salaries to a minimal level so only people who "love" the game would play. I just don't see how teaching is suddenly a backward bizarro world market where less is more.
I thought that might be the case. Somehow I doubt that he's advocating for extremely high taxes on the rich to subsidize the poor, though, even though that may be what needs to happen to make his proposal work. Anti-tax folks who long for the "good old days" when the average working stiff had low taxes seem to forget that those low taxes were subsized by phenomenally high upper tax brackets and (I believe) high corporate income taxes as well.
Re:This is cronyism at its finest
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More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 2, Informative
When the poor are so heavily taxes, the poor have fewer choices. We all could do more for ourselves if we were not taxed so heavily. Go back 30 years and the household tax rate was under 15%, and I believe under 8% a decade or two before that. Any wonder that both parents have to work today?
This is for the US? I would dearly love to see your sources on this. Mine indicate that before the 1980s, income tax rates were significantly higher at the higher ends of incomes, although I'd be interested in seeing data for the lower tax brackets. I know that the highest brackets had marginal tax rates of *well over* 50% for federal taxes alone.
I'll buy into that when you can convince me that a black man who votes to throw all black people in jail shouldn't be thrown in jail based on his own damn law because the law is "unjust." Yeah, it is unjust, but if it's going to be enacted, it had better burn the people who enacted it too. I think we have a different opinion of poetic justice. My opinion is, if you're planting mines for innocent people to step on and you blow yourself up in the process, well... HA HA!
And also you misunderstood me when I asked "hows that for hypocrisy?" I wasn't saying Kerry and Dead are hypocrites, no, I was saying that YOU are a hypocrite. Those who are supposedly for gay rights are outing gays. Now you may add an adjective to "gays" like "republican gays" or "hypocritical gays", but that doesn't change the fact that these people who you are supporting here, are outing gays. How anyone can reconcile that bit of hypocrisy is beyond me.
Does the fact that I support gay rights somehow mean that I should support gay people in any idiotic thing they choose to do? The only reason "outing" these guys hurts them at all is because of the wave of anti-gay sentiment that they are whipping up and riding. They shouldn't be insulated from the harm they're doing to society. I would argue that outing homosexuals who hurt gay rights helps the gay rights cause. If you have to reap what you sow, you'll think twice about pushing for unjust laws in the first place.
When can you show me gay republicans demonizing gays? or do you just assume that because they're your political enemy you can distort their views?
Let's try prominant conservative religious leader Ted Haggard with his declaration that homosexuality is "devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization." Mr. Haggard has close ties with the Republican Party and George Bush in particular. Mark Foley voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage act, although his behavior and rhetoric were definitley more tempered than Haggard's. It has been key to the Republic strategy to put some sort of anti-gay legislation on state ballots during elections to turn out the reliably Republican anti-gay vote. If you're in the party and you're not speaking out against crap like that, you're part of the problem.
hould I be turned in to the cops if I smoke weed but vote republican, even though you don't think smoking weed should be crime?
This is a good example, because I also agree that smoking weed shouldn't be a crime. That won't stop me from *laughing my ass off* when a prominant anti-weed politican gets thrown in jail due to his own votes and rhetoric. In fact, if I knew of a prominant politican who smoked weed *and* voted in favor of harsh penalties for weed smoking, I think it would be great to turn him in. Either it's OK or it's not OK. It can't just be OK for him. If you're cynically pushing REAL legislation that unjustly hurts REAL people for political play, you deserve to be hurt by that legislation, even if it is unjust. Perhaps it's time to learn a lesson. As for you supporting the Republican Party and smoking weed, I don't see it as a big deal since you have to vote for somebody, and you're unlikely to agree with the whole platform. If you gained the public spotlight or were elected to office, I'd expect you to make your position known and try to change the law, though.
What if the gay man thinks lower taxes and limited govt and foreign policy are more important than trying to get the state to allow two guys/girls to marry? There's not priorities allowed?
There's no voting voting against the party on one particular issue allowed? If you VOTE for a particular piece of legislation, you're SUPPORTING it. Like Foley and DOMA. If you don't support it, vote against it. DOMA didn't have any foreign policy ramifications, as I recall.
Why are YOU judge jury and executioner for any gay person that YOU judge is a hypocrite? Where did you get such a right to be able to intrude on others private lives?
I stay out of the private lives of people who don't make the private lives of others an issue. People like Haggart who do have no right to complain when it's done back to them. Sure, schadenfreude isn't the healthiest emotion, but it's certainly reasonable in these cases. If you booby trap your front yard to hurt the mailman and one of your traps springs on you, I'm going to laugh, even though I don't approve of booby trapping to hurt people. It's not hard to understand.
Do you also support throwing oreos at black republicans and calling them racist names?
No, for a few reasons. First, I don't buy into the "Republicans hate black people" meme or the "Democrats are the saviors of minorities" argument. I don't see the Rs as especially anti-minority. Second, I don't approve of calling people racist names. However, if you are a black man and you vote for some ridiculous thing like "let's throw black men in jail if they're out after 6:00", I *seriously* hope that you're caught out after 6:00 and thrown in the slammer so you can understand what a dumbass you've been. It's called being hoist by your own petard.
Is any amount of demonizing and intruding allowed as long as they disagree with you on some point, as long as they are your enemy?
So their right to privacy, to live their life how they want, to not be persecuted by people like you for being gay all goes out the window because of what? because they are republican?
No, because they are the ones making political hay by demonizing the gays. You *do* lose some of your right to privacy when you "get out the vote" by scapegoating the gays for the decline of society and put anti-gay measures on ballots to get people whipped up into an anti-gay frenzy. The same holds true for Rush Limbaugh ranting against drug addicts and any number of divorced politicans ranting about the sanctity of marriage. If you make it an issue, it becomes an issue.
and why do democrats get a pass on this? Can you name me some democrats that are pro-gay marriage? Didn't John Kerry say he had the same position as Bush on gay marriage? Isn't the head of the DNC Howard Dean the guy that said, "The Democratic Party platform from 2004 says that marriage is between a man and a woman. That's what it says."
Find me a gay democrat who votes for anti-gay legislation and espouses an anti-gay platform, and I'll definitely call him on it. I'm not callin John Kerry on it because he's not a closeted gay man as far as I know. I find his position on the topic contemptible, but at least it's consistent.
So why only republican gays that "deserve" to get outed? Why only them that have no right to privacy? Because they are on the other side of the political spectrum, because they are not just your political enemy, they are your enemy. They are subhuman, and deserve no rights.
If the Republicans would keep their platform out of peoples' bedrooms, the voters would probably stay out of their bedrooms. That's why nobody points and laughs when Democrats come out of the closet (except maybe Republicans who want to paint Democrats as the party of moral decay). Like I said, if you want to make it an issue, it's an issue. That's why I got so much joy out of Pastor Haggart's downfall. This one isn't such a big deal for me as I don't know of any openly bigoted statments made by the man in question, but if you support 100% of the Republican Party's platform, you're supporting making sexual preference and the morality thereof an issue.
Hows that for hypocrisy?
When you can find me proof that Kerry or some other prominant Democrat is pushing anti-gay stuff while being gay, let me know and I'll acknowledge the point.
People have a problems with this?
I don't want anyone with anything other than heterosexual lifestyle (or hopes of one for you geeks here) teaching, serving in the military or feeling like they have a right to get married which further diminishes any sacredness left in the institution.
Some of us just don't see the difference between the laws that are currently being thrown around and the anti-miscegenation laws of yesteryear. Many of us know gay people and couples and note that they're normal folks whose relationships occupy the same places in their lives as our own relationships, and we can't justify the government's position that the people we break bread with are somehow less worthy than the rest of us.
I hate to break it to you but every conservative I know is extremely tolerant. This is largely a war of words. Ask 99% of conservatives what they think of gay marriage, then ask them what they think of civil unions which would give effectively every legal right/protection that marriage does... and I think you will be very surprised at the response.
The passage of laws (that is... with a MAJORITY vote) that prevent even contracts that approximate marriage (i.e. civil union type of private contracts) definitely puts the lie to this. It's quite possible to talk a good game about equality and then work to stomp it out in the voting booth. "I'm not against gays. I just think they should stay in the closet, and I don't think that they can form meanginful relationships like real people can," is not a tolerant position, even if the first sentence implies that it is.
I would have a lot of respect for a gay Republican who was out of the closet and simply broke with the party on gay issues. There's no law that says you have to vote with your party on everything, and it's pretty common for represetntatives not to. For me, that says, "I believe in and support most of the principles of the Republican Party, and I'm willing to try to change the ones I disagree with." Falling silently in line with the anti-gay rhetoric when you obviously disagree wtih it because it brings out the votes says, "I'm a spinless coward who cares less about principles than about falling in line with the party." I suppose that doesn't make you stand out among the legions of sleazy invertibrate politicans, but the fact that you're gay doesn't mean that you can't be called on being a hypocrite.
Even more importantly, when the investigations begin and Rumsfeld has to face some humiliating questions, it's a lot nicer that he's just some retired guy and no longer a cabinet member.
Could you cite this number for Iraqi deaths since the war began? I recall a rather quick repudiation of these numbers after the researcher/theorist proposed them. Amazing how this false number gets a +4, Insightful mod... wait - it's really not. It's just Slashdot...
I would be very interested in a detailed rebuttal of the study. I've heard a lot of "common sense" arguments and people dismissing the results out of hand, but nobody seems to be able to put any serious holes in the statistical methods. There's a difference between an actual rebuttal and "It can't be true!"
I would be very interested in a detailed rebuttal of the study. I've heard a lot of "common sense" arguments, but nobody seems to be able to put any serious holes in the statistical methods. There's a difference between an actual rebuttal and "It can't be true!"
Free trade isn't so free if the otherside isn't playing by the same rules.
Don't worry. The Libertarians have a solution to that one too: remove the rules. Hooray for child labor and unsafe working conditions! It'll be like the good old days that Dickens wrote about!
I think that people are taking very much the wrong view of the "crash" of 2000. The downward correction wasn't the economically wrong thing. The wrong thing was the ridiculous bubble's existence to begin with. I can't fault Clinton or Bush for not keeping an unreasonable bubble from bursting. Then again, I also can't say that I'm thrilled with how quickly the markets have "recovered" over the past few years. The markets' rebound has far outstripped reasonable expectations of GDP growth, so I don't see a reason to think that stock prices realigning themselves at levels that are historically both unreasonable and untennable is a good thing.
So now we are the German army the Iraq is the French resistance. Except one problem, The Germans intended on keeping France were we intend on giving Iraq to the Iraqi people. It is beautiful to see how you can obscure that thought. I don't know if it is intentional or you actually believe the campaign slogans.
If you're going to occupy a country for the benefit of its people, you had damn well better do a good job of selling the idea to its people, using both rhetoric *and* action. That's part of the job. It wasn't done well. Not at all. I think it's too late to make that sale, but smiling while saying, "We'll continue to occupy your country for as long as we see fit. For your own good," doesn't help the perception that you're an occuping force that indends to hang around forever.
Speaking of, why does the Green Party get so much support as opposed to the Libertarians (which from what I can tell, seem much more "mainstream" in that if you asked someone their thoughts, would probably fall in line with them)?
Probably because while Libertarian philosophy is generally more or less mainstream in the US, the party's candidates tend to take the philosophy to its logical conclusions rather than moderating it with common sense. You end up with a bunch of political candidates who think that stop signs are an abuse of government power.
For most offices, the easiest way to defeat a Libertarian in a debate is to ask him whether he thinks the office should exist at all. Try getting votes once you admit that you think the position you're running for (that is, a JOB you have to actually DO) should be eliminated.
This is like the joke among the US officers during the invasion of Iraq: What's the difference between the US government and the Iranian government? The Iranians have a post-war plan for Iraq.
Hmmmm... no that's not necessarily the case. There's no reason to think that budget cuts or the lack thereof are necessary or sufficient to change the change in revenue with respect to tax rate. In fact, I would argue (and I think that the statistics bear me out) that there isn't much of a simple rule of thumb for deciding whether you're on an upward or downward sloping portion of the curve. At the very least, it's pretty certain that the curve is not stationary and certainly not smooth the way it's represented on a chalk board.
Most importantly, it is not necessarily the case that we're always on a downward sloping region of the LC. I can't figure out why conservatives always insist that we are, aside from the obvious fact that if we were, tax cuts would always be the correct course of action.
You are correct that the increase in spending causes an eventual increase in total taxes paid. Although lowering tax rates now will increase taxes that have to be paid later, the lower tax rates increase the total economy, and before long more taxes are paid at the lower rate than would have been paid at the higher rate. This is the effect of the Laffer Curve, which any honest and competent economist can tell you about. The real benefit of the lower tax rate is that the populace is richer in the short term and much richer in the long term.
Actually, any honest and competent economist will tell you that the Laffer Curve indicates that what you say is true in some cases, but not in others. The number of people who worship the Laffer Curve and assume that it says that future tax revenues necessarily increase for every marginal decrease in tax rate surprises me, and your description of the effect isn't doing a whole lot to fix the problem.
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Better than The Mighty Jabba, I always say. Mmmmm... Jabba...
My wife and I are both Star Wars fans, and we joked about telling just one guest that our wedding would be Star Wars themed and asking him to come in costume. We're not that cruel, but I can't help but regret that our wedding album lacks a picture of a bunch of guys in formal wear standing around with a guy in a cheap Chewbacca costume.
Without meaningful objectives and a way to determine whether they've been met, you're really just spinning your wheels.
It's interesting. Teaching seems to be the one market where people think that adding more producers will result in a decrease in quality for the consumer. I can't quite figure out why. I seriously doubt that baseball players would get any better if we cut their salaries to a minimal level so only people who "love" the game would play. I just don't see how teaching is suddenly a backward bizarro world market where less is more.
I thought that might be the case. Somehow I doubt that he's advocating for extremely high taxes on the rich to subsidize the poor, though, even though that may be what needs to happen to make his proposal work. Anti-tax folks who long for the "good old days" when the average working stiff had low taxes seem to forget that those low taxes were subsized by phenomenally high upper tax brackets and (I believe) high corporate income taxes as well.
I'll buy into that when you can convince me that a black man who votes to throw all black people in jail shouldn't be thrown in jail based on his own damn law because the law is "unjust." Yeah, it is unjust, but if it's going to be enacted, it had better burn the people who enacted it too. I think we have a different opinion of poetic justice. My opinion is, if you're planting mines for innocent people to step on and you blow yourself up in the process, well... HA HA!
Let's try prominant conservative religious leader Ted Haggard with his declaration that homosexuality is "devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization." Mr. Haggard has close ties with the Republican Party and George Bush in particular. Mark Foley voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage act, although his behavior and rhetoric were definitley more tempered than Haggard's. It has been key to the Republic strategy to put some sort of anti-gay legislation on state ballots during elections to turn out the reliably Republican anti-gay vote. If you're in the party and you're not speaking out against crap like that, you're part of the problem.
This is a good example, because I also agree that smoking weed shouldn't be a crime. That won't stop me from *laughing my ass off* when a prominant anti-weed politican gets thrown in jail due to his own votes and rhetoric. In fact, if I knew of a prominant politican who smoked weed *and* voted in favor of harsh penalties for weed smoking, I think it would be great to turn him in. Either it's OK or it's not OK. It can't just be OK for him. If you're cynically pushing REAL legislation that unjustly hurts REAL people for political play, you deserve to be hurt by that legislation, even if it is unjust. Perhaps it's time to learn a lesson. As for you supporting the Republican Party and smoking weed, I don't see it as a big deal since you have to vote for somebody, and you're unlikely to agree with the whole platform. If you gained the public spotlight or were elected to office, I'd expect you to make your position known and try to change the law, though.
There's no voting voting against the party on one particular issue allowed? If you VOTE for a particular piece of legislation, you're SUPPORTING it. Like Foley and DOMA. If you don't support it, vote against it. DOMA didn't have any foreign policy ramifications, as I recall.
I stay out of the private lives of people who don't make the private lives of others an issue. People like Haggart who do have no right to complain when it's done back to them. Sure, schadenfreude isn't the healthiest emotion, but it's certainly reasonable in these cases. If you booby trap your front yard to hurt the mailman and one of your traps springs on you, I'm going to laugh, even though I don't approve of booby trapping to hurt people. It's not hard to understand.
No, for a few reasons. First, I don't buy into the "Republicans hate black people" meme or the "Democrats are the saviors of minorities" argument. I don't see the Rs as especially anti-minority. Second, I don't approve of calling people racist names. However, if you are a black man and you vote for some ridiculous thing like "let's throw black men in jail if they're out after 6:00", I *seriously* hope that you're caught out after 6:00 and thrown in the slammer so you can understand what a dumbass you've been. It's called being hoist by your own petard.
Find me a gay democrat who votes for anti-gay legislation and espouses an anti-gay platform, and I'll definitely call him on it. I'm not callin John Kerry on it because he's not a closeted gay man as far as I know. I find his position on the topic contemptible, but at least it's consistent.
If the Republicans would keep their platform out of peoples' bedrooms, the voters would probably stay out of their bedrooms. That's why nobody points and laughs when Democrats come out of the closet (except maybe Republicans who want to paint Democrats as the party of moral decay). Like I said, if you want to make it an issue, it's an issue. That's why I got so much joy out of Pastor Haggart's downfall. This one isn't such a big deal for me as I don't know of any openly bigoted statments made by the man in question, but if you support 100% of the Republican Party's platform, you're supporting making sexual preference and the morality thereof an issue.
When you can find me proof that Kerry or some other prominant Democrat is pushing anti-gay stuff while being gay, let me know and I'll acknowledge the point.
I would have a lot of respect for a gay Republican who was out of the closet and simply broke with the party on gay issues. There's no law that says you have to vote with your party on everything, and it's pretty common for represetntatives not to. For me, that says, "I believe in and support most of the principles of the Republican Party, and I'm willing to try to change the ones I disagree with." Falling silently in line with the anti-gay rhetoric when you obviously disagree wtih it because it brings out the votes says, "I'm a spinless coward who cares less about principles than about falling in line with the party." I suppose that doesn't make you stand out among the legions of sleazy invertibrate politicans, but the fact that you're gay doesn't mean that you can't be called on being a hypocrite.
Even more importantly, when the investigations begin and Rumsfeld has to face some humiliating questions, it's a lot nicer that he's just some retired guy and no longer a cabinet member.
I would be very interested in a detailed rebuttal of the study. I've heard a lot of "common sense" arguments, but nobody seems to be able to put any serious holes in the statistical methods. There's a difference between an actual rebuttal and "It can't be true!"
I think that people are taking very much the wrong view of the "crash" of 2000. The downward correction wasn't the economically wrong thing. The wrong thing was the ridiculous bubble's existence to begin with. I can't fault Clinton or Bush for not keeping an unreasonable bubble from bursting. Then again, I also can't say that I'm thrilled with how quickly the markets have "recovered" over the past few years. The markets' rebound has far outstripped reasonable expectations of GDP growth, so I don't see a reason to think that stock prices realigning themselves at levels that are historically both unreasonable and untennable is a good thing.
Don't forget that they also failed to take a stand in favor of cervical cancer like the Family Research Council wanted them to.
For most offices, the easiest way to defeat a Libertarian in a debate is to ask him whether he thinks the office should exist at all. Try getting votes once you admit that you think the position you're running for (that is, a JOB you have to actually DO) should be eliminated.
This is like the joke among the US officers during the invasion of Iraq: What's the difference between the US government and the Iranian government? The Iranians have a post-war plan for Iraq.
Hmmmm... no that's not necessarily the case. There's no reason to think that budget cuts or the lack thereof are necessary or sufficient to change the change in revenue with respect to tax rate. In fact, I would argue (and I think that the statistics bear me out) that there isn't much of a simple rule of thumb for deciding whether you're on an upward or downward sloping portion of the curve. At the very least, it's pretty certain that the curve is not stationary and certainly not smooth the way it's represented on a chalk board.
Most importantly, it is not necessarily the case that we're always on a downward sloping region of the LC. I can't figure out why conservatives always insist that we are, aside from the obvious fact that if we were, tax cuts would always be the correct course of action.