As governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, Jeb Bush championed school choice. His first year in office he created a program that offered vouchers to students in failing schools. The program successfully boosted student achievement until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2006. Two other Bush-supported programs — one that offers Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Big Government Discovery Date : 19/01/2011 21:00 Number of articles : 5
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A Philadelphia abortion doctor has been charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a woman patient and seven babies that prosecutors say were born alive and then killed with scissors. (Jan. 19)
Continue reading …Funny thing happens when you become House speaker: Everyone starts parsing your every move for hidden meaning. Such is the case with John Boehner’s rejection of President Obama’s invite to the state dinner tonight with Hu Jintao. For the record, that’s the third official presidential invitation he’s declined, including receptions…
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President Barack Obama has told US and Chinese business leaders that he wants specific ideas on how to remove trade barriers and protect intellectual property. (Jan. 19)
Continue reading …Gabrielle Giffords will be released from the hospital on Friday, heading instead to the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Politico reports. The center specializes in brain injury recovery. Giffords’ mother sent out an excited email today, telling friends that Giffords was recovering so well…
Continue reading …Yoga for Unity: Can Sun Salutations Resolve Tensions in Post-Conflict Areas?
January 19, 2011 No Comment
Image: Yoga For Unity It’s hard to picture some of the most impoverished, and at one point violence-prone, regions in Kenya being turned into yoga studios, but that’s what Yoga For Unity aims to do—and is starting to make happen. On December 18th, yogis in LA, London and Kenya took up their mats in public places—Yoga Flash Mobs—in support of The Africa Yoga Project, which is trying to use yoga to heal tribal boundaries in Kenya. … Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …Bill O’Reilly dismisses evidence linking Beck to Byron Williams — but Arizona shouting incident is a bigger deal
January 19, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Bill O’Reilly thinks the Eric Fuller story is a Big Fracking Deal, revealign the depths of depravity of the “far left” and their use of violence — so much so that he devoted his opening “Talking Points Memo” segment to this thesis. A little later in the show, he brought on Alan Colmes and Monica Crowley to talk it over. Crowley, predictably, complained that the “story was buried” by the rest of the media. That’s because, in fact, it was rather more similar to the right-wing O’Reilly fan’s arrest last week for threatening Rep. Jim McDermott — which is to say, the story dealt with a threat and not actual violence. Did anyone happen to notice Fox News covering that story? I sure didn’t. But then Colmes started in with some serious points: COLMES: Look, I object to something you said in the opening talking points. You said that the logical argument could be made that the far left encouraged an unbalanced guy. There’s no more evidence of that than that the far right encouraged this guy Loughner to do what he did. O’REILLY: Wait. There is evidence in the specificity of what the man said. The names that he used in the context of the threat. Hmmmmm. Well, using that same criteria, we can definitively connect the man who threatened Jim McDermott to Bill O’Reilly now. Because not only did he call and threaten McDermott on the very same day that O’Reilly’s column attacking him was published, but the caller specifically threatened McDermott over the very same issue for which O’Reilly attacked him. But then it got really serious: O’REILLY: Loughner had no — and testimony now has revealed — that he didn’t watch cable TV. He didn’t listen to talk radio. COLMES: There is no evidence — look, you could make the case that Byron Williams went to attack the Tides Foundation and shot up the California Highway Patrol because of stuff that Glenn Beck said about the Tides Foundation. O’REILLY: You can’t make that case. COLMES: Sure you can. That’s just as much equivalency there as what you’re talking about! O’REILLY: No, there isn’t, because the overwhelming debate last week was about this story. It wasn’t one guy. It was everywhere. COLMES: But when a guy goes and wants to go attack the Tides Foundation and shoots up the California Highway Patrol because Beck is vilifying them and the ACLU — there’s equivalence! O’REILLY: All I’ll give you is it’s circumstantial. But the evidence is far more compelling — COLMES: You are doing, Bill, the same thing you are accusing the left of doing, by accusing the left of violent rhetoric. O’REILLY: No I’m not. No I’m not. I’m only dealing in the facts. And the facts as we know it were presented. O’Reilly is just flat-out lying. Because it was three months ago that a devastating story from Media Matters provided all the evidence you need to make that connection — since Byron Williams himself went on the record and explained quite ineluctably that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck. Here are some of the things Williams said: “I’m not gonna say anyone is worthwhile,” he replies. “I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this.” … Byron says he thinks Beck has improved in recent months. “I don’t think he’s a natural newscaster, you know what I mean?” he says. “I look at it more like a schoolteacher on TV, you know? He’s got that big chalkboard and those little stickers, the decals. I like the way he does it.” … “You know, I’ll tell you,” he says, “Beck is gonna deny everything about violent approach and deny everything about conspiracies, but he’ll give you every reason to believe it. He’s protecting himself, and you can’t blame him for that. So, I understand what he’s doing.” … “And I’d say, well, you know, that’s the thing. It’s that anything you do is going to be considered promoting terror attacks or promoting violence. So now they’ve got Beck labeled as this guy that is trying to incite violence. And what I say is that if the truth incites violence, it means that we’ve been living too long in the lies.” I don’t believe O’Reilly is actually ignorant of these facts — in fact, they read Media Matters almost obsessively over at Fox. O’Reilly is simply lying baldfacedly and pretending not to know these facts exist. And Monica? Perhaps when your channel actually reports anything on the Byron Williams matter or Charles Habermann’s threats , or for that matter any of the litany of threats and violence against liberals and the “government” perpetrated by right-wing extremists over the past two and a half years — threats Fox either ignores completely or dismisses as “isolated incidents” — then we may begin to take your complaint that no one reported much on the Fuller case seriously.
Continue reading …If liberalism is more “academic” than conservatism, it's because it looks a lot better in a classroom (or a newsroom) than it does in real life. Just ask Harper's Magazine publisher John “Rick” MacArthur. In a recent article, New York magazine detailed an ongoing fight at Harper's between MacArthur and his recently-unionized staff. MacArthur fought hard against unionization, and is now trying to lay off a veteran at the magazine who, according to NY mag, “played a key role in the union drive.” The newly-formed union says the effort “is pure retaliation.” The irony of the situation has the righty blogosphere giggling : despite his vehement efforts to prevent unionization, MacArthur and his magazine have a history of supporting the labor movement. NY magazine reported: In a follow-up phone call, MacArthur told Rosenstein that he viewed the union as a “power play” by the staff. “He was very hostile,” Rosenstein told me. “He said people had lied and misled him me about the reason they wanted to form a union, and that the staff was angry about Roger Hodge being fired. This was about Ben Metcalf becoming editor and they were against Ellen.” MacArthur contested the entire staff's right to unionize, arguing that editors and assistant editors who make up about half of the editorial team were management and thus did not qualify. Staffers couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony: The staunch defender of unions, who in a 2009 Harper's piece called the UAW “the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization,” was now on the other side of the table as the “worst kind of factory owner,” as one staffer put it to me. MacArthur hired veteran employment lawyer Bert Pogrebin, who had previously faced off against the Village Voice union, to negotiate on his behalf. In August, the matter was taken up by the National Labor Relations Board. Pogrebin tried to get many of Harper’s' editors, including Metcalf and senior editors Donovon Hohn and Chris Cox, excluded from the union on the grounds that were in management positions. In September, the NLRB ruled that Metcalf and the others could join the union. In October, the NLRB denied MacArthur’s appeal, and the union went ahead with plans to hold elections that would certify the union. Staffers put up signs around the office and a ballot box was placed in the conference room. On October 13, the day before elections were scheduled, MacArthur sent a letter to the staff lobbying employees to vote against the union. “I confess that I remain confused about the goal of the people seeking union representation,” he wrote, “but I have to assume it has something to do with my firing of Roger, objections to my promoting Ellen over Ben, and general insecurity about the future of the magazine.” MacArthur wrote that forming a union “will not, as some have requested, give any of you a great voice in the selection of the next editor,” and added, “Certainly, the union will not be able to solve the financial problems of the magazine or get us more subscribers, newsstand buyers or advertisers. It will, of course, be able to collect initiation fees and dues from you.” On October 14, staffers certified the union and formally joined UAW Local 2110. MacArthur had lauded unionization in writings beyond the April 2009 article NY mag mentioned – which, of course, praised the same union, the UAW, that now represents Harper's employees. Two years earlier he bemoaned “the bipartisan bludgeoning of labor unions into nothingness.” (Harper's has generally been, editorially, a pro-union publication. The magazine's left-wing Washington Editor, Ken Silverstein, has written numerous articles extremely friendly to union interests. In one, he described efforts to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act as “the latest onslaught in a business crusade to destroy the labor movement” – hardly a neutral presentation of the issue.) But now MacArthur is in the position of having to deal with some of the consequences of unionization, and all of a sudden the labor movement is not looking so helpful.
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Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said Wednesday that he will retire next year, ending a career in which he became his party’s vice presidential nominee but six years later ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary. (Jan. 19)
Continue reading …GE or General Electric has been considered to be the largest industrial group among the numerous companies of the US. It has provided thousands of jobs to Americans for so long and has brought billions of revenues to government. When the country has suffered chaos during the great recession, GE might as well be one GE’s Partnership With Chinese Companies Brings Hope is a post from: Daily World Buzz
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