"Special"

Language is funny. Sometimes words become euphemisms for their opposite. Case in point: special. Special used to mean exceptional or superior. For example, "Special Agent Fox Mulder." But now special has come to mean something completely different, particularly when pronounced that special way.

Last May a special-education teacher in Winona, Minnesota was charged with slapping a student. She has now pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault, resigned her job and will be on a year of non-supervised probation. What exactly happened?

According to a criminal complaint, a classroom aide told Winona Senior High School principal Kelly Halvorsen late last school year that [teacher Theresa] Kersting had slapped a 19-year-old male special-education student in early April after he grabbed Kersting’s glasses and threw them on the floor. Halvorsen subsequently contacted the Winona Police Department, which initiated an investigation. 

According to a police report, the boy is not verbal and was not able to give an account of the incident.

Huh? Why is someone who can't even talk in high school? He's "special."

Special-ed students cost almost twice as much as regular students: in 1999-2000 it was about $12,474 as compared to $6,556 for regular students, which amounted to $50 billion in the United States.

Don't get me wrong: I'm down with wheelchair-accessible schools, extra tutoring for dyslexic kids, ESL classes, free breakfast, whatever it takes to get the little buggers to learn. But "mainstreaming" kids who just don't have the mental capacity to learn at grade level is a waste of everyone's time and money, especially when these kids are extremely disruptive and require their own full-time classroom aide to constantly baby-sit them.

Special ed and the IDEA act used to be a favorite whipping boy in conservative circles, especially in the South, since it was aimed at the problems of disadvantaged minority children. But Sarah Palin's big splash with her Down Syndrome son Trig has muted conservative criticism.

Conservatives like Rick Santorum want to ban prenatal testing for such conditions and force women to bear children who have severe mental and physical deformities. They don't say, however, where people are supposed to get the money for the huge medical bills, the time for all the special care required, and the courage to deal with children who will never grow up, never have a job, never have children of their own, and will ultimately die young, often suffering excruciating pain their entire abbreviated lives.

But dumping these kids in public schools should not be the solution. Don't saddle taxpayers and the public education system with a problem that education can't solve.

I Wonder What Would Happen...

...if a supporter of Barack Obama or the president himself owned a boat and flew the flag of another country.

Seriously, Stuff Like This Is Still Happening?

What does it say about the Republican national convention that the following incident occurred there?

Two people were removed from the Republican National Convention Tuesday after they threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, “This is how we feed animals.”

Sure, there are bad apples in every bushel. But when the party's candidate continues to make jokes about the president's birth certificate, and the Republican propaganda machine continues to lie about recent changes to welfare that the Obama administration allowed states to make in order to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness?

This is supposed to be the most tightly controlled party convention in the history of party conventions. Everyone is supposed to be on message that Mitt Romney is a human being that doesn't bleed greenbacks when he cuts himself shaving.

But some Republicans aren't having it. Ron Paul delegates are furious with the high-handed tyrannical  tactics the Romney people are using to prevent them from speaking. Some Paul supporters were so disgusted with the treatment they have received that some of them shouted, "Romney cannot beat Obama!" on the convention floor.

Was this just frustration with the lousy treatment the Oberst-Gruppenführer running the convention was giving them, or is it one of those accidentally-told-the-truth moments?

Four Biggies Out of Tampa

FactCheck.org has a new page up with four very blatant lies that have come out of Tampa so far this week. They are:

• A misleading statistic about women’s job losses that has grown so stale it is now wholly false. 
• More bogus claims about “raiding” Medicare and the doctor-patient relationship under Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 
• A completely false claim that more than half of the younger generation is unemployed. (Actually, 86 percent who want work have it.) 
• More false claims that Obama blocked the Keystone XL Pipeline. Construction has already begun on the southern leg of the project, and the company says it expects approval for the Canada-to-U.S. leg early next year.

It's pretty sad that they have to lie to such a great degree like this. Why don't they talk about their accomplishments?

If Karl Rove is Saying it...

...then Mitt Romney has a problem.

This is an issue that has hurt Romney because again it’s fed up people who already have an instinct and a suspicion about him [that] he’s a rich guy, [and] must be hiding something. But I’ve also been a little bit mystified about Romney’s response.

We all are as well, Karl.

Shovel To The Head Stunned

I didn't it was possible to cram so much truth into six minutes before!

Just Out of the Gate and Already Out of Gas

Last week Mitt Romney offered an energy plan that promised "energy independence." In reality it was just hot air:

The Romney energy plan, laid out in a 21-page white paper, relies heavily on creating deeper partnerships with Mexico and Canada. Mexico could use technical help to reverse its declining oil production, he said, and "Canada has oil sands. We're going to take advantage of those, and build that Keystone pipeline and work with Canada to make sure we have advantage of their great energy sources."

All told, that would dramatically boost oil and gas production, the candidate said. 

"I will set a national goal of ... North American energy independence by 2020."

So, let me get this straight: Romney's plan to make America "energy independent" relies completely on Canada and Mexico. Any plan based on a direct contradiction of its basic premise isn't a plan, but a big fat lie.

At its core this plan is doomed to abject failure because it focuses almost solely on gas and oil. These fossil fuels are global commodities. That means Canada and Mexico — and every American oil company — will be able sell their gas and oil to whoever offers the best price. And that means we can't be energy independent if China is willing to pay more for our (and Canada's) oil than Americans are. The Chinese will simply eat our lunch. Canadian and American oil companies will make out like bandits, but we won't be able to drive to work without paying an arm and a leg. That is, unless the government restricts or heavily taxes exports of oil. Which we know the Koch brothers won't let happen.

Thus, Romney's talk of "energy independence" by depending on fungible Canadian and Mexican commodities traded on world markets is either hopelessly uninformed about the basic economic laws of supply and demand, or mendacious and deceptive campaign rhetoric.

True energy independence can only come from energy resources that will last for centuries at minimum, that come directly from the United States, which cannot be diverted to foreign countries with deep pockets. Romney's plan fails on all counts: North American sources of oil will be depleted within my lifetime, they come mostly from Canada and Mexico, and booming Asian economies will be able to outbid us for them.

There are, however, energy resources that can provide true energy independence: wind, solar, hydroelectric, nuclear and to a lesser extent, coal. Other forms of energy (certain types of biofuels, but not corn-based ethanol) hold promise but can't be counted on yet.

To be truly independent we need to shift to renewable energy sources for basic electricity generation, long- and short-haul rail transportation and short-haul small vehicle transportation. We should hold non-renewables like coal in reserve for peak-demand power generation, and oil and natural gas for long-haul small-vehicle and air transportation. And as a bonus, we'd also cut down on air pollution, reducing the incidence of asthma, emphysema, heart disease and cancer, as well as reduce the effects of climate change.

This country needs a real energy plan, not Romney's marketing strategy for the oil and gas industry.

Family Values

As the convention in Tampa gets under way today, check out this story from CNN about how excited the industry of dance is that the GOP is coming to town. 

I guess they don't make as much money off of Democrats. What does that tell you?

Acceptable Collateral Damage?

On Friday Jeffrey Johnson shot a former co-worker to death on a New York street. Then he walked to the Empire State Building, still holding the gun, where police killed him. The police also shot nine other people on the street.

This is a tragedy, of course. But it also exposes the fantasy is that guns provide "protection." Every time there's a shooting, like in a movie theater in Aurora, or a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or a strip mall in Tucson, some gun-hawking numbskull insists that lives would have been saved if only more people carried concealed weapons. The shootings on Friday show exactly what would happen if more people were carrying guns: more innocent bloodshed. Or, as the NRA apparently believes, acceptable collateral damage.

The police are trained in the use of weapons in pressure situations. In this case the shooter was standing on the street in broad daylight with a gun (unlike the darkened smoke-filled theater in Colorado). Yet the cops hit nine other people on the street. And the shooter did not even fire at the police:

[Police Commissioner Raymond] Kelly added: “As far as shots being fired yesterday, we had a witness that said that Johnson fired at the police. But the final count of the shells, it appears that that is not the case.”

Why were so many innocent people hit in the crossfire? (Well, since the guy didn't fire at police, I guess it wasn't really crossfire.) Most rounds fired from pistols miss their target. Pistols are inaccurate even at relatively short range and accuracy is further reduced in pressure situations. Bullets often pass through their targets and hit others. Ricochets can give bullets multiple chances to hit innocent victims.

Which means it's almost certain that if others actually did have concealed weapons and brought them out, there would have been many more dead and wounded. There's no way to tell crazed gunmen from pistol-packing vigilantes after the shooting starts: untrained vigilantes would be even more likely than the police to hit unintended targets. And then  the cops, who may have had no idea who the original aggressor was, would start shooting at them. And then the vigilantes would return fire at the cops. And then you have a big pile of corpses in front of the Empire State Building. And the original shooter may simply escape in all the confusion, smoke and blood.

Now, I'm guessing that this happened because mass shootings are in the forefront of everyone's mind. The cops, hearing gunshots in a crowded place, automatically assumed this guy was nutso and trying to take out as many people as possible. But it looks like Johnson wanted only to kill his lone archnemesis. The police apparently used maximum force to stop him as soon as possible, assuming that he was about to start shooting everyone around him.

I'm not going to criticize the cops here because there's still not enough information to know exactly what happened, and what information they had at the time, or exactly what Johnson might have said or done. Eyewitnesses at the scene may have given the cops bad information. We don't know yet, and we may never know.

But the main point is that more guns in this situation could have made a bad situation into a total bloodbath. For that reason, cities like New York, Washington and Chicago should be able to make their own laws about who can have and use guns. Gun laws that make perfect sense in rural Texas and Montana make no sense whatsoever in crowded cities like New York. If you don't like big city gun laws, don't go to big cities.

We should register each gun sale with at least as much rigor as we register voters. And make gun owners take personal responsibility for what happens to the guns they buy.

It's perfectly reasonable for a Texas rancher to carry a pistol, but a gun owned by a New York housewife will almost never protect her. It will far more likely be used to commit suicide, shoot her or her estranged husband during a domestic spat, kill one of her children when they find it loaded and play with it, or be stolen while she's at work and used to rob a liquor store, or kill a cop.

Police in big cities have long fought against liberal concealed carry laws. That's because they know how unreliable guns are as protection, and they don't want to shoot the wrong guy in a already dangerous situation.

Or get shot in the back by some vigilante who thinks he's the second coming of Clint Eastwood.

Breaking Even

If 316,000 jobs are added between now and November 6th, the president will break even on jobs since he took office. Included in their 13 slide display on the basic facts of the Obama economy, CNN illustrates in a very plain and simple way, where the president stands on jobs.

Here's the math: 4.316 million jobs were lost in the first 13 months of Obama's presidency. Since he took office, 4 million net jobs have been added back.

Given that the job losses occurred during the first year of his presidency, it's obvious that he's done a great job cleaning up the mess that was left for him.

The slide show contains several key data points for those of you who truly want to gauge the president's performance and the effect on the economy that his policies have had.