February 22, 2016

Monday Toon Roundup 1- Primary Fallout

February 21, 2016

Corporate reformers wreck public schools

Both parties embrace all the wrong education reform ideas. Why is it so hard to invest in kids and teachers?
NIKHIL GOYAL

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in November 2008, I was grinding my way through the eighth grade, my final year at John F. Kennedy Middle School before I was to move up to high school. While I followed the election closely, the candidates’ positions on education policy weren’t of much interest to me. And at the time, I didn’t give any thought to how my school experience could be different.

Among many progressives and liberals, there were flickers of hope that Obama’s election signaled the prospect that his presidency would lead to the reversal of the No Child Left Behind Act and Bush-era policies. It sure seemed that way once he named Stanford professor and NCLB critic Linda Darling-Hammond to head his transition’s education policy team.

But then in December 2008, any remaining optimism suddenly vanished. The president-elect appointed the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and his friend (and basketball pal) Arne Duncan to the post of secretary of education. A report by the Broad Foundation, a group that has financed anti– public education reforms, noted that Obama’s election and the appointment of Duncan “marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.”

As head of Chicago schools, Duncan shook up the system—in a disturbing manner. He bounced kids around from school to school to make it appear as though schools were “turning around.” He did not confront the effect of poverty on learning in a city system where 80 percent of schoolchildren live below the poverty line. He dumbed down standards, misleading the public when he pronounced that test scores had improved. He shuttered “failing” schools, replacing neighborhood schools with charters, often financed and run by fat cats and corporations. This is the man Obama put his faith in to run the Department of Education of the most powerful nation in the world.

more

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/21/corporate_reformers_wreck_public_schools_billionaire_foundations_and_wall_street_financiers_are_not_out_to_help_your_kids_learn/

February 21, 2016

America’s shameful state of decay: Sanders is campaigning on rebuilding the country’s infrastructure

Infrastructure. Not a very exciting word, and certainly not one to whip up the hysteria of the electorate in an election year. We have other words for that: immigration, terrorism, religious extremism or Russian aggression. The usual suspects.

Yet, perhaps the word “infrastructure” will become more exciting if we unpack it, learn what it is – and understand that it is not any external cause that most threatens America, but instead decades of negligence to the very “infrastructure” of this nation. There is that word again: infrastructure. But, what does it mean?

A short list will suffice: water treatment, roads, bridges, public housing, passenger and freight rail, marine ports and inland waterways, national parks, broadband, the electric grid, schools, hospitals, government buildings, dams – in other words, to use a medical metaphor, the conditions for the healthy life of a nation.

Perhaps the people of Flint, Michigan, and the increasing number of cities affected by the lead poisoning crisis know better than most the critical importance of the timely maintenance and transformation of our nation’s infrastructure.

On Jan. 27, 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the “Rebuild America Act,” which was meant to begin to tackle decades of neglect. At the time, Sanders explained the intentions of the bill: “For too many years, we’ve underfunded our nation’s physical infrastructure. We have to change that and that’s what the Rebuild America Act is all about. We must modernize our infrastructure and create millions of new jobs that will put people back to work and help the economy.”

more

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/21/americas_shameful_state_of_decay_sanders_is_campaigning_on_rebuilding_the_countrys_infrastructure_will_it_work/

February 21, 2016

Black S. Carolina Voters Tired of Being 'Stuck'

y Salena Zito
February 21, 2016
KINGSTREE, S.C.- Janice McKnight knows what it feels like — the nearly indescribable weight and isolation — when the American dream fails.

“It's so hard to express how it feels, other than to say I just have this overwhelming sense of being stuck,” she said.

She daintily picked over a late lunch at Brown's Bar-B-Q along U.S. Route 52 in Williamsburg County. A rural county that is more than 65 percent black, Williamsburg routinely holds one of the state's highest unemployment rankings; nearly 30 percent of its residents live in poverty.

McKnight lives on disability; she has just spent the morning at her weekly dialysis treatment. Neatly dressed in a purple blouse with silver jewelry, she is slow but powerful in describing life in the county seat.

All around, evidence of decayed manufacturing is overwhelming. “Jesus Saves” signs dot the road every mile or so, as do small churches offering clever signs to persuade the traveler to walk inside.

“I don't want both of my kids to stay here and continue this feeling of being stuck,” she said, describing the emotional and financial toll of poverty. “I am trying to encourage them to move out.”

more (good read)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/02/21/black_s_carolina_voters_tired_of_being_stuck_129734.html

McKnight is the voter Hillary Clinton is supposed to have locked up — female, older than 50 and black — except she isn't: “Oh no, I like Bernie Sanders. When I hear and watch him speak about the issues, there is an authenticity that he truly believes what he is saying.”

February 21, 2016

Yep!

February 20, 2016

Long lines, too few ballots at Dem caucus locations

Mark Robison,

Democratic caucus-goers in Northern Nevada are reporting a wide range of problems from long lines and chaos to being turned away and too few paper ballots. (This story will be updated as reports come in.)

• Shaw Middle School: Antoinette Jacobs described the caucus scene for her precinct as a “fiasco.” One person for Bernie Sanders and one person for Hillary Clinton were allowed to speak for one-minute each, with no time for questions or discussion, she said.

“The undecideds had to decide after hearing those two people with nothing else,” she said, adding that the bulk of the time was used to read letters celebrating the Democratic Party from people such as Harry Reid and Catherine Cortez Masto.

“We had about 26 in a classroom,” Jacobs said. “There were four for Bernie, four undecided and 18 for Hillary. ... We got three delegates out of that and Bernie none out of that.”


more

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2016/02/20/long-lines-too-few-ballots-dem-caucus-locations/80666630/

February 20, 2016

SEIU paints Clinton as $15 minimum wage supporter in Nevada fliers

By ANNIE KARNI 02/20/16 03:20 PM EST

LAS VEGAS — Ahead of Nevada's Democratic caucuses, the Service Employees International Union is distributing literature to members touting Hillary Clinton's support for its main campaign: raising the federal minimum wage to $15. But Clinton, who won SEIU's endorsement in November, has not actually endorsed a federal $15 minimum wage.

“Hillary Clinton supports our fight for $15 and a union,” read the SEIU fliers, which were distributed in English and Spanish. The literature also featured quotes from Clinton supporting New York’s proposal to raise wages for fast-food workers to $15 an hour.

But Clinton has said since the beginning of her campaign that she backs a federal minimum wage of $12 an hour.

“As president, I will work to raise the federal minimum wage back to the highest level it’s ever been — $12 an hour in today’s dollars — and support state and local efforts to go even further,” Clinton wrote last week on Medium. She wrote that she “strongly” supported the efforts of low-income workers to fight for $15 an hour.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/hillary-clinton-service-employees-international-union-219541

February 20, 2016

The nastiness from Camp Weathervane continues

Former Dem official: 'Go f--- yourself, Bernie'
By Harper Neidig

A former deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) on Friday lashed out at presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in a post on Medium titled "Go f--- yourself, Bernie."

The post was in response to Sanders implying that rival Hillary Clinton was praising President Obama in order to "win support from the African American community where the President is enormously popular."
"It’s not just Black people that love Obama. The President is 'enormously popular' among all Democrats. Welcome to the Party," former DCCC official Brandon English wrote in his post.

the rest
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/270121-former-democratic-official-go-f-yourself-bernie

There is a member of DU with that same name, but hasn't posted in quite a while….

February 20, 2016

NASA’s new telescope will have a view 100 times bigger than Hubble’s (Not James Webb, new!)

Are we alone in the universe? What is dark energy? These are two of the biggest mysteries of our universe, and NASA’s new space telescope hopes to answer them both.

The US space agency announced yesterday (Feb. 18) that its Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST)—originally just a study—will move forward into project phase. WFIRST will have the same precision and power of the Hubble Space Telescope, but with a field of view 100 times greater. It can capture millions of galaxies in a single image. Try wrapping your head around that.

In a press release, NASA outlined WFIRST’s two main tasks: to answer “fundamental questions about the structure and evolution of the universe,” and to “expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system.”
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By investigating the former, NASA hopes to learn about a mysterious force in our universe called dark energy. For decades, scientists theorized that the universe—which had been expanding since the Big Bang—would eventually decelerate. In the 1990s, though, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe wasn’t slowing down at all—it was accelerating. Today, it’s believed that some unknown, “dark” type of energy is responsible for speeding up the universe’s expansion rate.

WFIRST will measure the distances of thousands of supernovae, which can help NASA map how the universe is expanding. It will also examine the positions and shapes of millions of galaxies in order to track nearby dark matter—the invisible matter that makes up most of the “stuff” in the universe.

more

http://qz.com/620446/nasas-new-telescope-will-have-a-view-100-times-bigger-than-hubbles-and-could-solve-key-mysteries-of-the-universe/

The more eyes the better….

February 20, 2016

Researchers demonstrate 'quantum surrealism'

New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there's a catch - the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from "realistic" trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed "surrealistic."

In a new version of an old experiment, CIFAR Senior Fellow Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) and colleagues tracked the trajectories of photons as the particles traced a path through one of two slits and onto a screen. But the researchers went further, and observed the "nonlocal" influence of another photon that the first photon had been entangled with.

The results counter a long-standing criticism of an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the De Broglie-Bohm theory. Detractors of this interpretation had faulted it for failing to explain the behaviour of entangled photons realistically. For Steinberg, the results are important because they give us a way of visualizing quantum mechanics that's just as valid as the standard interpretation, and perhaps more intuitive.

"I'm less interested in focusing on the philosophical question of what's 'really' out there. I think the fruitful question is more down to earth. Rather than thinking about different metaphysical interpretations, I would phrase it in terms of having different pictures. Different pictures can be useful. They can help shape better intuitions."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-quantum-surrealism.html#jCp