ZAID JILANI, - Think Progress
Stephan: Remember the admonition: look at what they do, not what they say? This is how completely upside down our values have become in spite of the 'family values' claptrap currently flooding the media. That describes a fact-free propaganda fantasy. This is the fact-based Jonathan Swift reality.
The conservative governors who were elected across the country last November have championed huge cuts to public education spending while resisting efforts to raise revenues from the wealthiest among us. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) proposed cutting millions of dollars from the public education budget, and this week the GOP-controlled state senate passed a ‘contentious K-12 budget that cuts $470 per student from school districts.
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Stephan: I think this is a pretty good projection of the short term, absent some transforming event.
WASHINGTON — Here’s a recipe that does not a strong recovery make: wages are stagnant, Americans are spending more of their hard-earning money on basics like food and fuel and housing can’t seem to rev up.
Consumers spent more in April, the Commerce Department said on Friday, but after discounting for higher food and fuel prices, spending barely budged and after-tax incomes were flat for a second straight month.
Meanwhile, pending sales of homes tumbled far more than expected in April to a seven-month low. The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index dropped 11.6 percent to 81.9 in April, the lowest since September. Pending home sales lead existing home sales by a month or two. Economists polled by Reuters had expected pending home sales to fall 1.0 percent.
Consumer spending rose 0.4 percent, reflecting a surge in the category that covers food and gasoline, areas which showed big price gains last month. Excluding price changes, spending rose a much smaller 0.1 percent. Incomes rose 0.4 percent but after-tax incomes adjusted for inflation were flat for a second straight month.
Analysts are worried that weak income growth and big gains in gasoline and food prices are leaving consumers with little left to spend […]
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STEPHANIE PAPPAS, Senior Writer - LiveScience
Stephan: This says so much about American culture, and the inability of the right to understand the importance of immigration, and a sane immigration policy.
Immigration is a boon to American science and math, a new report asserts, noting that 70 percent of the finalists in a recent prestigious science competition are the children of immigrants.
The report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va., states that many immigrant parents emphasize hard science and math education for their children, viewing those fields as paths to success.
Statistics supporting that belief: According to a recent Georgetown University study on the value of undergraduate majors, the lifetime median annual income for someone with a bachelor’s degree in engineering is $75,000, compared with $29,000 for a counseling or psychology major. [Infographic: Highest-paying College Majors]
That study found that the highest earners are petroleum engineers, with median annual earnings of $120,000.
Only 12 percent of Americans are foreign-born, the NFAP report says. Even so, children of immigrants took 70 percent of the finalist slots in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search Competition, an original-research competition for high school seniors.
Of the 40 finalists, 28 had parents born in other countries: 16 from China, 10 from India, one from South Korea and one from Iran.
‘In proportion to their presence in the U.S. population, one would expect only one […]
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JOSHUA KURLANTZICK, - The New Republic
Stephan: If we had spent a fraction of the money we have spent on war on education, clean water, decent sanitation, and similar low cost programs in the Islamic world democracies would be prospering, and we would be seen as benefactors not oppressors.
Joshua Kurlantzick is Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
As the revolt that started this past winter in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya, and beyond, dissidents the world over were looking to the Middle East for inspiration. In China, online activists inspired by the Arab Spring called for a ‘jasmine revolution.
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IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: Opening the floodgates of corporate money in this way completes the process begun by Citizens United. If this stands we have now permitted the open purchase of the Congress.
Reagan-appointed federal Judge James Cacheris just ruled that corporations have a constitutional right to contribute money directly to political candidates:
In a ruling issued late Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Cacheris tossed out part of the indictment against two men accused of illegally reimbursing donors to Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns.
Cacheris says that under last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court case, corporations enjoy the same right as people to contribute to campaigns.
The ruling is the first of its kind. The Citizens United case had applied only to independent corporate expenditures, not to actual campaign contributions.
Today’s decision extends beyond the egregious Citizen United decision because Citizens United only permits corporations to run their own ads supporting a candidate or otherwise act independently of a candidate’s campaign. Cacheris’ opinion would also allow the Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industries, for instance, to contribute directly to political campaigns.
If today’s decision is upheld on appeal, it could be the end of any meaningful restrictions on campaign finance – including limits on the amount of money wealthy individuals and corporations can give to a candidate. In most states, all that is necessary to […]
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