Glad somebody said it.

FP: Your new report puts quite a hole in the teacher's unionsÂ’ constant complaint that the reason why grad rates are low is because teachers need more money and that teachers are barely scraping by.

But before we get to that, letÂ’s back up a bit.

First tell us: how much are teachers really paid?

Greene: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), public school teachers earned, on average, $34.06 per hour in 2005. That is 36% more than the average white collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker, which are the categories in which the BLS places teachers. To give some examples, public school teachers are paid at a higher rate than architects, mechanical engineers, psychologists, and chemists. These earnings figures exclude benefits, such as health and retirement, which tend to be more generous for public school teachers than other workers. I should also emphasize that we did not calculate any of these earnings figures ourselves. We simply repeated information collected by the BLSÂ’ National Compensation Survey, which your readers can view themselves here.

FP: So how much do teachers get paid on an annual basis? And how much do they get paid on an annual basis if you factor in that they only work 10 months a year?

Greene: On an annual basis the average teacher in the United States is paid about $47,000 for 38 weeks of work. The equivalent for 50 weeks of work would be about $62,000.

FP: How do we address concerns about failing to count work that teachers take home?

Greene: It is certainly the case that many teachers take some work home, but that is also the case with many other professionals. The BLS survey is designed to capture all hours actually worked, both by teachers and by other workers....

I don't want to bash teachers, but with all this nonsense that they're so horribly underpaid and the most important workers in all of society, it's important to get past the NEA-pleasing rhetoric and cite the actual facts. They're not underpaid, they're quite well paid, in fact.

And as far as being the most important workers in society? That's a nice line unless you're not a teacher and keep hearing that these selfless troopers are so much more important than you are. After all, you're just doctors, lawyers, mechanics, plumbers, nurses, medics, chefs, truckers, soldiers, cops, etc.

Not doing truly important work like teachers. Why, the rest of us really aren't keeping our end up at all, are we?

They get a ridiculous number of days off during the ten months they work, only work eight hours a day, tops, and then a huge two-month long vacation. You simply have to include time off as a benefit of work -- many (though not all) people would swap such absurd time off -- to vacation, spend with the family, pursue a hobby, build an addition -- for a chunk of their salary.'

As NEA critics have noted -- teachers want all the job-security and plush government benefits that civil servants enjoy, but want to be paid as if they're professionals in a cut-throat, 70-hour-a-week-plus profession like the law.

Well, no shit-- who wouldn't want such a thing? But whether the public is required to indulge such a fantasy lifestyle is another question entirely.

Posted by: Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (80)
Post contains 574 words, total size 4 kb.

...so he can wear his shame on his driver's license.

Imagine what he might have done if the Bears had won.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (11)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Warning: Contains the worst sex scenes of all time. So, you know. There's sex. Unappetizing sex.

Actually, if you follow the link, you'll get descriptions of the scenes (which aren't really terribly work unsafe; it's Maxim, not Hustler) and a video clip you can click on. It's clicking on the link that gets the content warning. (Though, again, this is Maxim, not Hustler, and Hollywood, not the Valley.)

You might think that nothing could top, or fall beneath, I suppose, the Number 2 entry, a scene from David Cronenberg's Crash featuring James Spader fornicating with a... uhh... well, a wound, is what it is, and I don't mean that figuratively. What could it possibly take to beat one of Cronenberg's sickest bits of biological horror?

Three words:

Rosie. Fucking. O'Donnel. Having sex. On camera. Nice to see Satan is getting some directing work on cable. We don't know what kind of bet [costar Julian] MacMahon lost, but having to hump O'Donnell -- who can't even shut up during this, either! -- is a fate worse than Fantastic Four. When will Barbara Walters Finally shank her backstage and end the torture for us all?

Come on, that's not fair. I heard the scene was really hot. There were a lot of those rumors that these guys might have actually gotten too "into character" and actually had sex and everything. Because they were just so on fire with lust.

Plus, I heard she sings the theme from The Jetsons when she climaxes. And that's a pretty kickin' theme.

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (92)
Post contains 273 words, total size 2 kb.

Update: Marcotte and McEwan Both Fired By Edwards Campaign. Via Salon:

he right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps -- John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare's Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots," and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

Speculation from sources that the two bloggers might be rehired was bolstered by Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, who said in an e-mail that she would "caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later."

...

Leading the charge against Marcotte -- and to a lesser extent McEwan -- have been bloggers like the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez and Michelle Malkin. Malkin originally accused Marcotte of trying to scrub Pandagon's archives of material that could be embarrassing to the Edwards campaign. When that proved untrue, Malkin posted a correction, but said that the fact that she had been wrong was "even worse for the Edwards campaign" because "its blogmaster left crackpot posts like that one up and hired her anyway."

Thanks to, um, "swingin' dick," who presumably is a guy named Richard who enjoys 40's music.

Hot Air has more, including other bloggers not particularly looking forward to the same scrutiny, should they apply for a job with a legitimate outfit.

Allah notes, rightly, that there's hardly any percentage in rightwingers worrying about Marcotte, because whatever she got, we'd get a thousand times worse, no matter what the outcome might have been.

In fact, we'd get it so bad, from the left of the blogosphere and the MSM, that most campaigns wouldn't even bother. Safer to just make someone on your staff your campaign blogger -- no paper trail.

Or someone painfully boring, like Jon Henke. (I keed.)

...

I apologize if this bores you. There is blogging and then there is blogging about blogging and bloggers, and a lot of people are turned off by the latter. Still, this is now in the MSM, so here we go.

ABC's left leaning reporter Terry Moran: Does the Edwards campaign endorse hate speech?"

A bit of a tempest is brewing over the strident and profanity-laced writings of John Edwards' official campaign "blogmaster," Amanda Marcotte. She joined the Edwards campaign last week, and she's already gotten a lot of attention.

At issue are Marcotte's comments on her own blog, Pandagon (http://www.pandagon.net/), which has staked out a prominent place in the left-wing blogosphere. It's pretty strong stuff; her comments about other people's faiths could well be construed as hate speech.

Edwards Questions: What, if anything, does it tell us about Edwards that he's joined up with this blogger? Is Edwards' association with a person who has written these things a legitimate issue for voters, as they wonder--among other things--whom he might appoint to high office if he's elected? If a Republican candidate teamed up with a right-wing blogger who spewed this kind of venom, how would people react? Is the mere raising of this issue a kind of underhanded censorship, a way of ruling out of bounds some kinds of opinion? Are we all just going to have to get used to a more rough-and-tumble, profane, and even hate-filled public arena in the age of the blogosphere?

ON THE CATHOLIC TEACHINGS ON BIRTH CONTROL:

Last year, Marcotte blasted the Catholic Church's position on birth control: "Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: YouÂ’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology." (Side note: Would there be a different reaction if John Edwards "blogmaster" had insulted Islam to this degree? Is it "okay" to trash Catholicism--but not Islam?)

That's about the size of it. Whether Marcotte stays or goes, Edwards will be entirely undamaged by any of this. The media doesn't mind such animosity directed against Christianity (an animosity they share in spades), though, of course, here Moran pretends to be at least curious about this phenomenon.

On the other hand, any right-wing blogger who's said anything negative about a religion whose more violent, xenophobic, and barbaric teachings animate our enemies in the current global war is simply too radioactive for any Republican candidate to even consider hiring. It gets into the left's oddly-inverted worldview: It's wrong to denigrate the nation's enemies, but it's acceptable -- nay, one's very duty -- to demean one's own countrymen as if they were in fact enemies in a hot war.

Beyond the jump, some stupidity from Gleen. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (101)
Post contains 1651 words, total size 10 kb.

This is what it sounds like when doves cry after having had sex with Prince's massive shadow puppeted schlong.

In what may be the dumbest controversy of the day (although the day is still young) Prince is catching hell for his halftime performance at the Super Bowl.

Why you ask? Because apparently, he has a ginormous, barbed, shadowy, cock which inspires jealousy/envy/homoerotic and/or heterosexual lust in some viewers.

To the barbed blockquotes!

A number of bloggers have decried "Malfunction!" — including Sam Anderson at New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer. Daily News television critic David Bianculli called it "a rude-looking shadow show" that "looked embarrassingly rude, crude and unfortunately placed."

Lighten up, Nancy. Sometimes a guitar is just a guitar.

For decades, the electric guitar, by nature, has been considered phallic. From Jimi Hendrix's sensual 6-string swagger to Eddie Van Halen's masturbatory soloing, the guitar has often been thought an extension of a male player's sexuality.

I'll never hear "Eruption" the same way again. Curse your masturbatory soloing, Eddie Van Halen! And how the hell did Eddie Van Halen get attached to the word "masturbation" when you have David Lee Roth in the band, anyway?

Was Prince's pose phallic?

"The short answer is, of course it is," says Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Gavin Edwards, who points out that on Prince's "Purple Rain" tour in the mid `80s, he performed with a guitar that would ejaculate, squirting water out of its end during the climax of "Let's Go Crazy."

Didn't Gallagher try the same thing with his audiences? I always thought that hammer banging the melon bit was a little sadomasochistic.

"All that said, it didn't seem like a sniggering little puppet show," adds Edwards. "I think it was one of those things because a guitar at waist level does look like an enormous phallus."

By enlarging his shadow, it's possible Prince intended to accentuate this aspect of his solo, but it's just as likely it was accidental. (You can find videos of the halftime show at YouTube.com.) A message left with Prince's publicist Tuesday wasn't returned.

People see what they want to see. If you want to see the barbed cock of Prince, I suppose you will see the barbed cock of Prince.

And you know who among you wanted to see that. You aren't welcome here.

As for me? I was just psyched that he played a little "All Along the Watchtower".

If there's one thing I have long maintained it's that the Super Bowl needs more Bob Dylan.

Posted by: Jack M. at 07:45 AM | Comments (111)
Post contains 432 words, total size 3 kb.

Except, of course, the wrong instutions are being revealed as fundamentally corrupt and self-serving.

Those links lead, in case you want to know ahead of time, to a piece about the embarrassingly slight academic output of one of the more irresponsible Duke professors (does "zero" count as "slight"?), how such mediocre minds get hired by elite universities in the first place (hint: it may have something to do with universities announcing that "diversity" shall now trump academic excellence), and how a little liberal newspaper in the tri-state area seized upon the story as the perfect liberal storm of race, class, and gender, and has been less than candid in walking back its previous misreportage.

All a bit old, but I enjoyed them.

Bonus: An editor at the New York Times is quoted by New York magazine as saying David Brooks' skepticism about the case didn't change many minds at the NYT, because he's a conservative (and, thus, a big defender of race-motivated gang-rapes, one presumes), but when liberal Nick Kristof had his own bout with apostacy, suddenly the office was alive with doubt.

And yet, you know, they're not liberal or anything. I mean, a senior editor at the paper itself is saying that, but no matter. He, too, is likely one of those race rape enthusiasts.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 PM | Comments (49)
Post contains 241 words, total size 2 kb.

I was a skeptic. But no more.

I have long considered myself an agnostic. But when the Lamb of God descends upon us to spread the Gospel of George Benson albums, well, that dim part of my being I call my "soul" suddenly alights into a glorious blaze.

More Evidence: You'd think there'd be more Black Israelite video floating around on the Internet.

Here, those annoying guys who yell in city parks that Jesus was black because the Bible says he has wooly hair ("What kind of hair did Jesus have?" -- "WOOLY HAIR!!!") explain that Jesus was black, and, we can deduce, Barak Obama is therefore Jesus.

PS: They also claim they're the "real Jews," and only refer to what we think of Jews as "the so-called Jews."

Posted by: Ace at 05:29 PM | Comments (73)
Post contains 159 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm not going to say Andy Dick is never funny. He is funny. Sometimes.

And a lot of the time he's not, and when he's not funny, he's quite unfunny. And annoying.

Kind of like Andy Kaufman, who, since his death, is pretended by almost everyone to have always been hysterically funny, while, in fact, anyone who actually remembers him knows his schtick was sometimes very funny, but very often legal justification for intentional homicide.

Except Dick is never as funny as Kaufman was. Just kinda funny.

Why am I talking about him? He gets escorted off the set of the Jimmy Kimmel show for refusing to stop touching Ivanka Trump despite the fact she's obviously not cool with it -- uhh, Andy? This is a professional woman, not Tara Reid, you imbecile.

But that's not why I'm linking it.

I'm linking it for the not-yet-seen-before Ivanka legs in black velvet-looking go-go boots.

Maureen Dowd thinks that it's her braininess that keeps her unmarried?

Okay. We'll see how long one of Ivanka's suitors takes to "lock that down," as Michael Bluth says.

Bonus Celebrity Stupid: Mariah Carey blames the quick box-office demise of her legendarily-awful Glitter on the fact that it was released "around the same time as 9/11."

Mairah? Seriously? The studio released it after 9/11 for the same reason flacks release bad news on a Friday -- with the hopes that nobody would notice.

Unfortunately, that tactic hasn't worked since JFK, and it didn't work for Glitter, either.

There was a genuine movie casualty of 9/11 -- Zoolander. A movie people were too freaked out about in 9/11's aftermath. And of course no one was much in a laughing mood. But of course Zoolander has now displaced Fletch as the 13th most-quoted guy movie of all time.

I don't notice anyone quoting Glitter. At no point during has anyone ever turned to a friend and said, "We ask ourselves, is she black? Is she white? We don't care. She's exotic. I want to see more of her breasts."

Posted by: Ace at 04:16 PM | Comments (83)
Post contains 382 words, total size 3 kb.

Robbie writes in the wrong style -- i.e., not like a sixteen year old girl just told she would not be getting a pony -- and so the media takes no notice of him.

The right gays to consult on gay controversies are, the MSM believes, those with the foresight and resources to stock up on exclamation points.

This guy? Bah. He manages to write with a more finely-balanced emotional calibration that that typically displayed by eighth-grade girl. Who's he fooling? Probably he's a closet straight, a guy who so hates queers he's actually decided to date men exclusively just so he can mock lefty gays as a "gay man."

Won't work. The MSM sees right through such ploys. It didn't work for me in 1993-1998 (during my stint as managing editor of the gay Advocate), and it's not working for Robbie now.

They [Avarosis and other perpetually-hysterical gay advocates] cannot speak coherently on gay marriage, they could not prevent three-quarters of states from passing amendments, they have not the tools to persuade the electorate on our issues, but yesterday the professional grievance organizations of Gay America vanquished a candy company, and for that they are heroes.

Heroes, at least, if you found yourself among the offended.

...

What to make of the new definition of homophobia now concretely embedded in gay thought? No longer do we ask for amorphous tolerance and equality before the law. Now we seek not mere acceptance, but affirmation and security in all areas of politics, media, sports, entertainment, and advertising. A grimace from the face of an NFL player and an odd throwaway comment, and soon organizations like the HRC speak of violence against gay youth in response. Straight men must now always be comfortable with displays of same-sex affection, and if they are not, they must be hidden, silenced, scrubbed clean of public record. Anything less is harm against gays. You will do nothing less than celebrate and accept every aspect of our lives, or you will learn to shut up.

...

There could be no fairness in approaching the ad campaign, because being fair and thoughtful and reflective on what could be gained and lost in the hysteria is not the path to being relevant. It doesnÂ’t get your name in the newspapers, it doesnÂ’t bring visibility, it does not assuage a hurt or diminish the insecurity of perceived powerlessness.

How did the major gay blogs and gay organization rise so quickly in so unified a voice when homophobia remained so clearly disputed even among our fellow gays? Who were they representing? They were not representing me. They were not representing the scores of gay individuals who registered disagreement with those who claimed offense. How did not one voice of objection filter through this perfect storm of gay resentment?

Addressing the controversy on the View this morning, Rosie OÂ’Donnell stated, "IÂ’m tired of being the gay police." Because you are not, Rosie. Nor are you, John Aravosis. Nor are you, HRC and GLAAD and Taskforce, and a hundred other gay organizations that create controversies and feign hurt, and push politics on the purported behalf of me and countless others.

What these individuals and organizations did was for themselves. The politics of grievance required an offense, and now it will require money and a platform. You will offend us, and then you will serve us.

Read the whole thing.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing the two-men-kissing advertisment dropped off the airwaves, for several reasons.

1) Guys kissing other guys just wigs straight guys out. And most women, too, though not as badly.

A lot of gay guys are bothered by this, and insist that we immediately re-wire our brains to no longer express this aversion to man-on-man sex, and perhaps even embrace a bit of the Love That Dare Not Speak etc. ourselves, just to prove our tolerance.

A total idiot once argued with me online that unless I was willing to at least entertain the notion of personally engaging in gay sex, I was a "homophobe," because, I guess, you prove you're not anti-gay only by actually becoming gay. He didn't seem to get the whole gay/straight distinction, and, to the extent he comprehended such a thing existed, he found it oppressive and hateful.

Gays have to get over this. Sorry, but look: It's one thing to say gays shouldn't be mocked for their sexuality, but it's quite another to insist that straight's discomfort, to put it mildly, at witnessing or engaging in such behaviors themselves is inherently homophobic.

Am I a Brusselsproutophobe as well?

At any rate, yeah, I kind of hate seeing guys kissing, even in comedy (SNL does it a lot), so I guess I can get behind Avarosis' new gay jihad. He doesn't like seeing gay kissss played for cringe-inducing laughs; honestly, I'm wit' ya on that myself, brother. Let's keep gay kissing only in movies and tv shows where it's treated with the respect and smoldering eroticism it deserves (i.e., shows I will not be watching).

2) The joke is, I think, especially in a lowest-common denominator commercial, kinda weakly homophobic -- depending on how expansively one defines "homophobia." Certainly it's not suggesting two guys kissing is a good thing. It's a comical thing, something to get a hoot out of. (And, of course, a wince as well.)

The joke may be justified as the payoff in movie like Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, but in a commercial? Eh, I don't need to see it, and the potential for (low-level) offense isn't justified by its comedy payoff. If you're going to offend people -- even offend the perpetually offended -- a joke has to be worth it. Is this joke worth it? I don't think so; seen it a thousand times, and it always plays the same way.

3) All of these jokes are cheap, in the sense they all work the same way and one can hardly improve upon them through innovative writing or strong execution. You have two guys kissing -- that's the joke. There aren't really any variations on the joke possible. Two guys kissing, wince, chuckle. So there really is no room for artistic innovation here. Especially, again, in a thirty-second commercial for a candy bar. (Sometimes, I hear, a gay-kiss scene is even written into a movie just to annoy the actors involved.)

That said, there is a level-headed, sane, sedate objection to two-guys-kissing jokes, which could be made by a Robbie or a Gay Patriot West, and then there is the flying-off-the-handle spittle-flying eek-a-mouse OUTRAGE!!! about it, replete with rather dubious claims the ad "encourages violence against gays and lesbians." (Because the guys involved in the kiss tear off their own chest hair to prove how manly they still are -- just like as happened, kinda-sorta but really not, to Matthew Sheppard.)

And of course the media embraces the latter. Contributing, in their own clueless way, to perpetuating gay stereotypes.

Maybe the media could help fight anti-gay stereotypes by occasionally ignoring a shrieking sissy like Avarosis in favor of a gay guy who actually manages on occasion to not lose his shit like an Oprah audience member just informed her fat ass is sitting on a 40 carat diamond sculpted to look just like Steadman.

How Come... Americablog's hysteria will, by the time the weekend rolls around, be covered by Howie Kurtz and FoxNews Watch, but my only slightly-less-unhinged support of AmericaBlog won't be?

I see stealth messaging about amyl nitrate and sado-masochism; he sees a directive (by disproportionately-gay advertising guys, by the way) to go all Matthew Sheppard on gays everywhere.

What's kookier?

It's a close call, I admit. But I think my parody manages to be slightly less psychotic.

Posted by: Ace at 03:16 PM | Comments (43)
Post contains 1295 words, total size 8 kb.

The NYP on the new blog, which, of course, isn't called a blog but an online magazine:

TAKI Theodoracopulos obviously isn't losing enough money backing The American Conservative magazine, which he co-founded with Patrick Buchanan to counterbalance all the hawkish neocons who were cheerleading the war in Iraq. Today, he launches a Web site, takimag.com, that's to be updated five days a week with his own elitist world view, as well as those of other libertarian thinkers. "I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called conservative opinion," Taki said from Gstaad. "For the past 10 years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in Gothic dormitories while sipping port and smoking their fathers' stolen cigars."

Notice the emphasis on WASP imagery there. So, are those the true villains in Taki's imaginings? The WASP establishment?

Nope. Not by a longshot.

Seems the attack on WASPs (permitted without comment by the media) is just a smokescreen. There is an elitist klatch of pampered warmongering soft-hands responsible for all of our ills, to be sure, but they're not Anlgo-Saxon and definitely not Protestant, unless you consider the defiance of the Maccabees to be the original form of protestantism.

30 years [after Vietnam], give or take a couple, another Texan is trying to pull an LBJ, with one major difference. He already pulled it four years ago, when he went looking to destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. We all now know that those weapons existed only in the minds of the neo-cons, the Fifth Columnists whose allegiance is to the state of Israel and not to that of the United States. Unfortunately these Fifth Columnists still have the Bush-Cheney ear, and what they're looking for is more war. This time against Iran. A Gulf of Tonkin-style gambit is what these sofa samurais will use sometime this spring.

The facts, of course, are somewhat different. In brief: Iran is two to five years away from building a nuclear bomb, and some experts say as much as ten to twenty years. Even if Iran possessed one, why would Iran launch a nuclear attack on Israel when it knows its own homeland would be vaporized the next day. Mb

...

America is now seen as the biggest bully of the block by the majority of the people of this world. This is a very sad state of affairs. And we have the neo-cons to thank for it. I wonder when the good people of the United States will wake up and demand that these people are brought to book.

I don't know. I don't like tossing around the anti-semetic charge, and I think it's always worth asking if a course of action primarily benefits our country or merel benefits another, such as Israel.

Jews may be more emotionally invested in the fate of Israel than non-Jews, but many non-Jews like myself think of Israel as the new Sudentenland.

The Wahhabist command is not for Muslims to control Israel, but for Muslims to control the world.

If I could actually believe that the jihadists would be satisfied just to re-take Israel, as Hitler promised he'd be satisfied with just a piece of Czechloslovakia Germany kinda-sorta had a historical pretext of claim to, I would be more inclined to indulge in very hard-hearted, mercenary, and self-interested considerations about selling Israel out, letting Ahmadinejad "drive it into the sea," in return for a final and complete end of jihadism.

But fortunately I don't have to think too hard about such an odious trade-off.

Because Hitler's dream was not to annex a penny-ante slice of Czechloslovakia, but to create a thousand-year new (Un)Holy Roman Empire that would enslave Europe and, one day, unite the entire Anglo-Saxon world under Aryan fascist rule.

And the Islamists' goals are no less grandiose, and no less vile.

I urge Taki to start publishing pieces from historical greats that proceeded him, who urged the same sort of victory through submission, and seemed to harbor the same belief that, really, c'mon, Jews brought all this on themselves.

I suggest he start with Charles Limberg, another great American who really shook up conservatism in an earlier age.

Lindberg: Duh, I wrote "Limbaugh." Taki mentions him in his article. So it was sticking in my mind. (Or maybe it was in Raimondo's screed; either way, I just read the name.)

Posted by: Ace at 02:37 PM | Comments (40)
Post contains 759 words, total size 5 kb.