Four years without a budget, vastly spiraling debt, credit downgrade, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the sequester...you can ask an Obama supporter about numerous recent actions and events of this government and they will deny that Obama had anything to do with it.

Then if you ask this person if Obama is doing a good job, they will express giddy support for all his good work for which he cannot be held responsible.

Previously, Janet Napolitano smarmily said that sequester cuts left the administration no choice but to release waves of illegal immigrants who had been detained for breaking other laws.

Then when that decision sparked a backlash, she said it had been made by some faceless drone "...in the field."

And now that the decision to close White House tours has been called out as a similarly obvious (but less dangerous) ploy, Obama again deflects responsibility.

ItÂ’s your sequester and you live in the White House, but you have nothing to do with childishly cutting off tours to punish people?

Please.

President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups.

“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.

The Secret Service says the White House made the decision to cancel the tours. The White House says it was the Secret Service's idea first.

This game is getting f*cking stupid.

It's the major press, of course, constantly reframing everything and keeping Obama's own actions from tainting his record.

They cannot report on an issue without also building in an excuse or cover for Obama within the same article.
It has become reflex now to look for the excuse or fall guy in every news story about this administration's dysfunction.

Posted by: LauraW at 06:55 AM | Comments (574)
Post contains 318 words, total size 2 kb.

• Senate Democrat Budget Proposes A Trillion Dollars In New Taxes
  
• Obama Claims He Had Nothing To Do With Stopping WH Tours
  
• The Holocaust: FDR's Indelible Failure
  
• An Important Day For Detroit
  
• Twinkes Should Be Back By Summer
  
• Obamacare Set To Increase Your Already High Vet Bills
  
• Bankrupt Countries Are Coming After Investors
  
• Japanese Politician Banned For Wearing Wrestling Mask To Meetings
  
• Does John McCain Have Standing To Complain About Political Stunts
  
• Illinois Pension Crisis Turns Criminal
  
• Only Police Should Have Guns
  
• The GOP Congressman Who Destroyed Obama's Sequester Scare Story
  
• RNC To Hire Chief Technology Officer
  
• Bombshell Report Reveals NYC Women Can Make Extra Cash By Stripping
  
• NAACP Head Slams Solicitor General, Not Realizing He's Sitting At The Same Table As The Solicitor General
  
• FL Lt.Gov Resigns From Office
  
• Doctors Fighting Back Against Obamacare
  
• No New Pope Yet
  
• Funny Obit
  
• LAPD Shoot Up The Truck Of An Innocent Women, Offer To Replace It If She Pays Taxes On The Replaced Vehicle
  

h/t to Andy and Slublog on a couple of those stories.

Follow me on twitter

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:34 AM | Comments (291)
Post contains 184 words, total size 4 kb.

Happy Wednesday.

Conclave goes on.

Sen. Paul: "The Tea Party, I always say, is more like the American Revolution, and Occupy Wall Street is more the French Revolution."

ABC finds that "drops in approval and trust on the economy end Obama's post-election honeymoon."

The Boy Scouts are surveying members about their feelings about gays. It's a short survey (PDF).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (392)
Post contains 67 words, total size 1 kb.

Danish Islamic Imam Who Said Uncovered Women Deserve To Be Raped Arrested For Attempted Rape

Well he ain't no hypocrite. Imam Shahid Mehdi talked the talk:

"Women are not entitled to respect when they walk around without a Hijab. They are to blame for it when they are attacked," Imam Shahid Mehdi said.
"All the crimes that occur against women is because they are not covered. When they are not covered, you have no respect for them. "

And walked the walk...with his penis:

A 36-year-old Danish man is the protagonist in a bizarre sex case, which will soon be dealt with in court in Malmö.

Now, however, he is accused of pulling his penis out and chasing a 23-year-old woman around in a park in Malmö in August 2012, according to the court in Malmö.

The woman managed to get away, and she called the police, who arrested the man a few minutes later.

Oh and it turns out that when not demanding women wear hijabs Imam Mehdi also shares a common interest with Sir Roderick Spode as well.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:15 PM | Comments (510)
Post contains 1159 words, total size 15 kb.

This is the future of American healthcare. What could go wrong?

#ObamaCare regulations - 828 pages in one day. Overall, there are nearly 20,000 pages – with many more to come. twitter.com/McConnellPress…

— Sen. McConnell Press (@McConnellPress) March 11, 2013

If you missed it over the weekend, tmi3rd had an interesting post on what this will mean for patients and doctors.

Heck of a job America. Heck of a job.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:16 PM | Comments (424)
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

This is just something I've been noticing from learning French. I have no idea if there is such a thing as Frustration/Revelation, or if they've done Studies to see if there's anything to it, or if this is actually a newish idea.

But I think it's something worth looking into, if it hasn't already been looked into.

The Frustration/Revelation model comes from my own experience. I learn something best when I am initially subject to intense frustration -- or maybe Mystifcation -- over something. What I'm suggesting is that Emotion can play a role in learning.

If you frustrate someone, and Mystify them, and and just bother them with something they cannot understand, they now have emotional skin in the game. They feel dumb, and don't want to feel dumb. Not understanding bothers them.

And then when you Reveal it All to them, they have another Emotional reaction: They feel great. They have gone from being perplexed and feeling that things are Beyond Their Understanding to having a feeling of Being in Charge and now understanding the thing that baffled them.

And they remember, because this wasn't just some dry logic-only exercise, now this was something that activated your Competition/Anger parts of your brain, so the actual learning now becomes an emotional relief.

I mention this because I could almost see Whole Word teaching being a useful part of a lesson, frustrating kids with this "Guessing Game" nonsense, and then, when they are frustrated, supply to them the keys that will release them from ignorance: w sounds like whuh, a sounds like ah, t sounds like teh, until you reveal the Mystery Word is Water, and furthermore, now you've given the formerly-frustrated kids empowering tools to dispel future frustrations.

Our Brains Work Like This: In movies, there's a thing called "Exposition," telling the audience important information that's needed to understand the story going forward.

It's often dry and people tend to hate it.

One way screenwriters make exposition more interesting is by having characters not immediately offer it to the audience, who will be bored with it. Instead, they set things up to provoke a question in the audience's mind -- "Wait, why is this happening?" -- and then, the audience now actively engaged in interrogating the movie, they now have Mr. Exposition answer the question the audience was actually (mildly) interested in.

So they've moved from a dry recitation of the facts-- snoozer -- to injecting a minor mystery, thus increasing audience interest, and then solving that mystery for the audience.

This is done a lot, certainly. Most math teachers will start a lesson with a tough problem and invite students to solve it. They can't. Then they proceed to solving it.

I don't know if this is a central part of pedagogy, but I'd like to see a study to see if it should be a very central part of it.

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (274)
Post contains 493 words, total size 3 kb.

Her kid was smarter than his teacher, so of course they tried to throw him into special ed. Not gifted and talented education, but learning-disabled.

I think the other day I said it was in third grade that the school gave us trouble over Robert. I was wrong, it was actually in first grade. I sent them a kid who could read, write and was working on fractions. Imagine our shock when in our first first grade conference, the teacher informed us that Robert was learning disabled and would probably never learn to read and write. This was particularly surprising since one of her pieces of evidence was a worksheet that consisted of 1+0, 2+0 etc. across the top of which Robert had written in properly spelled words “this is stupid and boring. A number plus zero always equals the number.”

Note the teacher here failed to recognize that the student had in fact already digested the main point of addition of zero -- that is, the whole point of the rote memorization was to get the student to realize the universal rule that any number plus zero is just that number. The student understood this -- the teacher, apparently, did not, for she seems to have thought this was some kind of "mistake," rather than the whole point of the tedious rote memorization exercise. The kid understood; the teacher was baffled.

Quick, let's pay them more money before they all jump ship for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But I digress.

Dan and I threw a fit – we would – and they insisted Robert needed to be in Title One and remedial education. We insisted he didn’t. In the end, they had him IQ tested, after priming the school psychologist, who used a “set” that topped out at 107 IQ. Then they informed us his IQ was 107 and he needed to be in Title One and remedial education.

At that point I wanted to go raze the school or perhaps set it on fire. (I did say I’m excitable, right?) But Dan wouldn’t let me. Instead we burned around 1k dollars we didn’t have (we were so tight in those days we hugged each cent till it squealed. Considering whether to buy an extra head of lettuce was existential. We drove a $1500 car, and only had one for the two of us,) found the most reputable psychologist in town, and had him tested over Christmas break. (They were making noises about a “staffing” meeting in January and how they’d take our parental rights away if we didn’t sign Robert for “what’s best for him.”) We said nothing, just had him tested.

He tested profoundly gifted (which is a technical designation.)

So, next thing you know, Dan marches into the staffing meeting with the results, authenticated by a psychologist who was known and respected in the region. He first asked them what they thought of her, and they said she was very good, but of course very expensive. Then he laid the results on the table.

Shock, horror and confusion ensued, the most important – the teacher, who btw, we later found out did this every year to a kid she perceived as ‘minority’ (this, btw, in a town that is one of the most liberal areas in CO. I told this story to a leftist friend who absolutely refused to believe it. And yet it happened.) and her friend, the school psychologist were both present – reaction being BETRAYAL. “How could you go and do this behind our backs, without warning us?”

Then the meeting broke up in disarray, Robert got put in “gifted” classes and no more was said about it.

A lot of her essay is about "Whole Word" reading, such an absurd concept I can only explain what it's not: It's not phonics. It's not reading based on sounding out a word based on the letters, but instead just looking at the word in a gestalt sort of way and guessing what word it is, repeatedly, until the teacher tells you the answer.

There's Cargo Cult thinking going on there.

I think that once someone really knows how to read, their brains skip the phonics sounding-it-out process and just shortcut to whole word reading. When Tami wrote in the comments something like this...

Can you raed tihs? Cachens are you can. Taht's bacsuee poelpe tned to sacn wlohe wrdos at a tmie and olny look at the frsit and lsat ltetres of wrods, and tiehr lgntehs, and of crouse the cntoxet cules of our ebdemded udnretsnding of gammrar and epxetced wrod odrer.

... I think she demonstrated that people who can read automatically, intuitively, really don't need correct spelling nor phonics to do so. We have large enough vocabularies combined with a very strong intuitive grasp of how sentences are supposed to look and what sorts of words we can expect in which parts of a sentence that our brains can just automatically figure these things out without much exertion of conscious effort. (It occurs to me that search-engines' prediction of what word you're going to write next in your search term is just this sort of thing performed by computer code. Our brains do it, without code, but still based upon the same sorts of things, "past searches" (previous experience in what words tend to follow each other, statistically) and the basic logic of sentence structure.)

So that's true of Strong Readers who are now, by their adulthood, intuitive readers who know the rules so well, and so unconsciously, that they can completely ignore the rules and don't even remember what "the rules" are. We all know "the rules" -- we know what has to come in a sentence, and what word goes where, and such -- but we know them unconsciously.

We'd have trouble explaining to a foreigner what the rules are, because we don't really think about the rules in conscious thought or in "mind words," just as we don't consciously think about where precisely we should put our hands to catch a ball. We just do it.

So this sort of thing is the end goal of education-- to get kids to know the rules so well they don't even know the rules anymore. They operate according to the rules, but they don't think about the rules. I can do a lot of basic 8th through 11th grade algebra, but I couldn't justify why I'm permitted to divide both sides by 8 or why I use the FOIL method. I just do.

But does it make sense to "teach" 4, 5, and 6 years old this way?

No. Because it's not teaching. In order to forget the rules by age 15, a kid has to first be trained according to the rules at age 5. You don't "cut out the middleman" and skip right to "forgetting the rules" at age 5.

The 5 year old can't forget the rules, because he never knew them in the first place. This is the end of the journey, not the beginning.

For God's sakes. This is obvious. Even if it weren't obvious, we have the minor clue of empirical results-- we've gone from teaching kids how to read to teaching them to be stubborn near-illiterates even into their college years (and of course then until their end of days).

And of course we've taught them to have the Highest of Self Esteem in their near-illiteracy.

I can't help but think this "whole word" teaching system is an attempt to make things easier for teachers. As I said, it's easy to do something when you already know how to do it. I can do algebra, but I don't know if I could teach it. I forget a lot of the reasons why I can do things. I forget the rigorous procedure of doing it, first do Step One, then do Step Two. I tend to just do it intuitively.

So, the hard part of teaching kids to read is not being able to read yourself. For God's sakes, I hope most of our teachers can read. I sincerely hope that -- but I have doubts.

The hard part of teaching kids to read is learning how to do it step by step -- that is, relearning "the rules" which most adults have forgotten because they've internalized the rules so deeply. That's the hard part-- but we're not asking teachers to do that anymore.

Instead, we're just asking them to read words themselves, and know that "orange" spells orange, and have kids guess at the word until they get it right.

That's very easy for an adult to do. Throw any word at this adult, and I Can Read It For You. I don't even need my Education Degree to do so.

But that's not what teachers are supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be teaching kids the step-by-step method of reading words so that they, too, can one day forget about the rules of phonics and just read.

Not just the easy stuff of saying "This word is 'orange.'" No shit, really? Well thank God our education system is full of people who know the letters O R A N G E spell orange.

The more important question is, as Jamie Escalante said in Stand & Deliver: Why?

Once a kid knows the why, he can decode every word he comes across -- without guessing at it.

Alternate Explanation for Whole Word Teaching: I started reading early, by age 3, I think my parents say. I started reading when every time my parents took me to a bakery it had this word outside it:

B A K E R Y

and every time I saw this great little cartoon dog Snoopy it had these strange markings under him:

S N O O P Y

Without being taught that "this letter sounds like this, and that letter sounds like that" I deduced these things, and then started trying to apply them to other words, and found that it... worked. So I started deducing what other strange squiggles might mean.

Now this is a good way to learn, certainly. And some kids will deduce phonics without being taught phonics.

And I'll tell you that as a kid I hated phonics with a white-hot passion. Because it was boring. I already knew, intuitively, that the w made a whuh sound and really disliked being taught this in a formal, rigorous way.

So maybe these people think that by simply exposing kids to words, they too will go through the deduction/experiment/confirmation process and wind up with a deeper understanding of reading than rote teaching of phonics would.

But there are two problems with this. First, the logical objection: If a kid was going to do this he already would be doing it. Kids are exposed to letters and words constantly; if a kid was going to learn to read by deduction and experimentation he already would have. He'd enter school, as many kids do, already reading.

We don't have to teach the kids who know how to read how to read. We have to teach the kids who don't.

Second, the empirical objection: It's not working. Period. Kids are not learning better; they're learning worse.

Maybe some kids are on the cusp of deducting their way into breaking the word code, but they just need help with the first step of it-- like codebreakers, they need a "crib." But if you don't give them that first crib of the phonics of the common words, they won't break the code.

Whatever merits the "force them to commit acts of higher-order deduction" theory might have, they're completely rubbished by the empirical record.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (664)
Post contains 1971 words, total size 11 kb.

Loathsome statist supports loathsome statist in controversy over loathsome statism; film at 11.

If a Mayor can't do things to make his city's populace healthier - what's the point of his job? Bloomberg's 100% right on supersized soda.

What's the point of his job? Time was mayors were thought to have their hands pretty full with financial matters, running the cops, firefighters, metro transit workers, garbage haulers, street repair teams, and education system.

Statists always think this way. I happen to agree: Mayor Bloomberg is 100% right about the deleterious effects of too much sugar. And "too much" is a small amount, as we're just not designed to handle such large quantities of sugar.

What does that have to do with the government making up laws, though?

They really do think this way: The ultimate validation of an opinion is Government Action. If there is no Government Action behind something, it's not really true. Further, if you do not press for Government Action on something, you must not believe in it all that much.

Only Government Action proves your meritorious intention and only Government Action vindicates an opinion.

This world we used to live in, where people believed passionately in things and argued privately that others should believe these things too? Yeah, that world was for the birds. The real way to Show You're Right is to get a loathsome status to encode your opinion into law.

Passing An Law is now the ideological equivalent of Getting Married. Until you Pass An Law, you're just living in sin. You haven't sanctified your relationship with an idea. There is no state recognition of your relationship with the idea.

You're going to want to marry that idea. And many, many other ideas too.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (404)
Post contains 307 words, total size 2 kb.

No.

Don't say that. Take it back.

You wanted it just as much as me.

“This is a joke. We’re wasting the president’s time and ours,” complained a senior White House official who was promised anonymity so he could speak frankly. “I hope you all (in the media) are happy because we’re doing it for you.”

Another said the president was sincerely trying to find common ground with stubborn Republicans. “But if we do it,” the aide hastened, “it won’t be because we had steaks and Merlot with a few senators.”…

Obama's "common ground" is what it's always been: His ultraliberal agenda. Of course Republicans always have the option of just giving him everything he wants; he's always been terribly kind about keeping that option open to them.

But what are the odds they'd actually take that option? Better than you'd think: the further negotiations on Amnesty have produced a plan very similar to the first negotiations on Amnesty, which you hate: instant legal status without any additional border enforcement.

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (226)
Post contains 216 words, total size 2 kb.

First, let me try and avoid some confusion. The post below was about competing budget plans for the government's 2014 fiscal year (which begins on October 1, 2013). Before they can fully focus on that, they have to finish the fiscal year 2013 spending plan via a Continuing Resolution. This year's fiscal year began on October 1, 2012 and Congress only passed a 6 month version that is due to expire at the end of this month.

At one point conservatives had thought the CR fight would be a pressure point to deal with either a debt ceiling hike, entitlement reform, sequestration and maybe even ObamaCare (conservatives didn't want to fund it).

None of that is happening.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and ranking member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) have signed off on the measure, which will be debated on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

“We must prevent a government shutdown,” said Mikulski. “My Vice Chairman, Senator Shelby, and I worked together on this bipartisan agreement that avoids a shutdown, complies with the Budget Control Act, improves the House CR for many critical priorities, and lets us wrap up fiscal year 2013 so we can get to next year’s budget and find a balanced solution to sequester.”

"At a time when many doubt whether Congress can accomplish anything at all, this agreement is a very clear demonstration of our commitment to work together," Shelby said.

...

The deal does not contain any provisions not already agreed to behind closed doors by House Republican appropriators, aides said.

So for all the drama and cliffs, what we basically got was $85 billion in cuts this year in exchange for a $1 trillion hike in the debt ceiling back in 2011. Yes, the sequestration cuts are suppose to be continued into the out years but basically the dueling 2014 budget resolutions covered below reset the conversation.

This is why out-year discretionary cuts are for suckers. Everything begins anew with each fiscal year budget. The only true and meaningful savings are reforms of entitlements, which are the real drivers of our fiscal problems. Evidence has shown, that's simply not on the menu.

I don't want to find a hill to die on. I want the GOP to find one to fight on. If they aren't going to do that because they are outgunned, then stop promising to fight. I guess when you look at everything from the fiscal cliff to debt ceiling to the CR, that's what they've done...waged one long retreat.

The next hill is the debt ceiling in the middle of May. I'm sure they'll make a stand there. Aren't you?

Posted by: DrewM at 08:29 AM | Comments (97)
Post contains 464 words, total size 3 kb.