Krugman Blog: Latvia and the Romney Record

June 11, 2012, 3:32 PM
Latvia and the Romney Record
OK, not a connection you expected anyone to make. But there’s something there.

You see, there has been some back and forth over Romney’s job creation record as governor of Massachusetts. The truth is that governors don’t have much impact on such things, but for what it’s worth, MA job creation was lousy. The response of the Romney people has been to cite the state’s low unemployment rate when he left office; the response to the response is that this was due to people leaving the state.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with labor mobility; but driving down unemployment by getting people to move someplace else isn’t exactly a recipe for national recovery.

Which brings us to Latvia, where unemployment, though still very high, has come down. But this has a lot to do with a huge fall in the labor force, driven to an important extent by emigration. From Eurostat:


Again, nothing wrong with labor mobility — but if Latvia is supposed to be a role model, somehow having all of Europe move to someplace else in Europe doesn’t quite seem like a sustainable proposition …

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/latvia-and-the-romney-record/

Men Probably Too Hormonal and Moody to be Trusted with Important Financial Decisions

News from the world of science with some pretty grim implications for the global economy as it currently exists: men — rational, level-headed, decisionmaking men — aren't actually very well equipped to handle important financial decisions at all; it's like they're getting the male equivalent of their periods, but all the time. In fact, men are so beholden to their volatile hormones that their prominence in the world of finance may actually doom the whole system to inevitable, testosterone-fueled collapse.

A new book postulates that the nature of financial markets combined with the physiological effects of testosterone make for a veritable clusterfuck of overreaction, which ends up exaggerating both good and bad news and artificially prolonging both booms and busts. This conclusion is based on research that analyzed traders' spit during several market sessions which found that men working in the high-risk, high-reward setting of the world of finance experience hormone fluctuations that could seriously interfere with their ability to make good decisions. Per Bloomberg,

Betty White pays Obama a visit at the White House

By Michael A. Memoli
5:18 p.m. CDT, June 11, 2012

President Obama's schedule Monday included lunch with Vice President Joe Biden, meetings with his Treasury and Defense secretaries, and interviews with a handful of local news anchors.

He also found some time for Betty White.

A White House official confirms that the 90-year-old actress spent a few moments with the president, characterizing it as a courtesy call while she was in town to speak at the Smithsonian.

And to say thank you for being a friend? The "Golden Girls" star has said she's firmly committed to the Democrat's reelection this year.

more
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-pn-obama-betty-white-20120611,0,2895051.story

http://www.wdbj7.com/news/wdbj7-photos-wdbj7-at-the-white-house-monday-20120611,0,2560563.photogallery

http://www.wdbj7.com/videogallery/70405952/News/WDBJ7-catches-Betty-White-getting-a-tour-of-the-White-House

Toon- Summer Job

Irritable bowel, ulcerative colitis linked to intestinal fungi

By Thomas H. Maugh II
June 8, 2012, 9:44 a.m.
Bacteria in the gut play a crucial role in human health, and imbalances in bacterial populations can contribute to many disorders. New research suggests that fungi, though not as common in the intestines as bacteria, may also play a role in causing and modulating disease.

The results could lead to new treatments for conditions such as irritable bowel disease, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. An estimated 1.4 million Americans have some form of irritable bowel disease, which can cause inflammation, ulcers in the bowel, abdominal pain, diarrhea, bleeding, fatigue, weight loss and loss of appetite. An additional 30,000 cases are diagnosed annually.

An estimated 100 trillion individual bacteria reside in the intestines -- more than the number of cells in the human body. They play crucial roles, such as aiding digestion of food, producing necessary vitamins and suppressing the growth of harmful microbes.

But according to Dr. David M. Underhill of the Inflammatory Bowel and Immunobiology Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, there has been little corresponding study of fungi in the intestine.

more

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fungus-irritable-bowel-20120608,0,4122971.story

L.A. teacher reviews should include student achievement, judge says

Source: LA Times

In a tentative ruling that could potentially transform California teacher evaluations, a Los Angeles judge ordered the L.A. Unified School District to use student academic progress in reviewing instructors.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant upheld claims by a group of parents that the district was violating a 40-year-old state law, known as the Stull Act, which requires that teacher evaluations include measures of how well pupils are learning what the state expects them to know each year. The law was amended in 1999 to specifically require the use of state standardized test scores to measure student progress.

But Chalfant did not order the district to use student test scores in evaluations. Which specific measures are used, how they are incorporated into performance reviews, how the different elements are weighted and how administrators are trained in using student performance measures “may well be a matter subject to collective bargaining,” he wrote.

The ruling, while tentative, lends significant legal clout to a growing movement to use student test scores as part of a teacher’s performance review. Several states have begun incorporating them into teacher reviews and the Obama administration is also pushing school districts to use them.


Read more: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/06/la-teacher-reviews-should-include-student-achievement-judge-says.html

Monday Toon Roundup 2- The rest

Trump




Voters




Rights



Drug War



Bubbles



Banksters




Drones

Monday Toon Roundup 1- Politics

Toon: The "People" have Spoken

Killings by police in L.A. County jump sharply

Source: LA Times

by Joel Rubin and Sarah Ardalani, Los Angeles Times
June 10, 2012

The first deadly encounter of 2011 came quickly for police in Los Angeles County, when an officer killed an armed burglar on the second day of the year. The last person to be killed by police that year was shot a few days after Christmas in Palos Verdes after he allegedly beat his elderly father and pretended to point a gun at officers.

Between these ill-fated bookends, 52 other people throughout the county were shot fatally by police throughout 2011 — significantly more law enforcement killings than the county typically experiences. Compared with the prior year, the 54 deaths amounted to a nearly 70% increase.

The high number of killings last year underscores a pronounced jump in the overall number of occasions in which officers fired their weapons at suspects. For example, the 63 shootings by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2011 were a nearly 60% increase over the previous year.

The rise in killings by police is all the more notable because it occurred at a time when the overall number of homicides in the area had fallen to historic lows. With 612 people killed in the county last year, nearly 1 in every 10 such deaths occurred at the hands of law enforcement officers.




Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cop-shootings-20120610,0,6928432.story