Today's Quote

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Ann The Man Coulter

What she said:

“By the way, Republicans don’t have a problem with women. They have a problem with unmarried women who think, ‘No, we don’t need national defense, we need our birth control paid for.’ [...] And why? Because single women look at the government as their husbands. [They say] ‘Please provide for me, please take care of me.’”

Coulter is a single woman.  Coulter pisses on other single women for "being dependent on Government" - "please provide for me; please take care of me", etc.

If you substitute 'GOP' for 'government', then it becomes clear that Ms Coulter is slagging herself.

Just another self-loathing 'conservative' who hates herself for being who she is.

For any 'conservatives' out there who are starting to get wise to the Long Con that Repubs are running; who would like to get back to a better spot on the political spectrum; who just wanna be regular humans again?  First thing ya gotta do is get Ann Coulter's dick outa yer mouth.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Seriously Stoopid

From Little Green Footballs:

Kotaku reports that a Tea Party group in Florida posted a picture from the game Bioshock Infinite on their Facebook page.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Bioshock Infinite is a game that takes place in a 1912 in a flying city by the name of Columbia. It’s run by a man who is a cross between Bryan Fischer and Pat Buchanan. The place is a racist, sexist theocracy. When I played the game it seriously creeped me out.

So these Tea Partiers took an image from what is essentially a condemnation of their stance and posted it as a serious display of their beliefs.

These are really stupid people.

Blue Sunday

Gotta be a way to move forward, but it seems like somebody's always dragging us back.

Yes, West Virginia - There is A Santa Claus

Swedish Meatballs

By way of a piece by Charlie Pierce, here's a Reuters story pointing up one of the big problems with Privatized Schooling - something that everybody seems to understand -  except of course the boneheads making the decisions:

(Reuters) - When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system.
School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.

"I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.

In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden's secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

--and here's Charlie's closing graph--

There is, of course, a lesson for the United States here, and very likely a lesson to which nobody will pay attention. If you allow a system in which public education is privatized so that some people can make a buck on it, then making a buck is going to become the primary raison d'etre of the system. (See also: health-care.) The more ungainly the scramble for profit, the less your educational system has to do with, you know, actually educating people.

If there are decent jobs in and around the school districts, then the neighborhoods improve.  Better neighborhoods make for better schools.  Better schools make for a better labor pool.  A better work force makes for a better economy, which makes for more jobs in local neighborhoods, and then... oooh, look - then it starts over; it's almost as if all those things are interconnected.

But wait - it's not like the "boneheads making the decisions" are really all that dumb.  They're very much aware of the probability for any given enterprise to fail, so then we're left to wonder - is this just a matter of blind corporate avarice driven by a narrow ideology, or are we looking at a concerted effort to beat people down?

All Lies In Jest

The Boxer (cover) --Shawn Colvin and Allison Krauss




Another'n from Ms Krauss - Can't Find My Way Home (Blind Faith cover):

So, That Sucks

Some not very flattering things about KIPP (a charter school franchising scheme) are coming out.

From Schools Matter:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A Manhattan mother says her 5-year-old son was locked in a padded room at school, leaving the kindergartner so traumatized he had to go to the hospital.

Taneka Hall said the “safe-calm room” at KIPP Star Elementary School in Washington Heights is used while children are placed in “time-out.” But as CBS 2′s John Slattery reported, she believes the discipline is abusive.On Dec. 3, Hall’s son, Xavier, who has had behavioral problems, was put in the room — which is padded with a window in the door. The charter school would not provide CBS 2 with a photo of the room.

Hall said Xavier was in the room alone and grew more agitated.“So they put him in the safe room, and there in the safe room, he then peed on himself and didn’t allow any teachers to come inside, so they decided to call 911,” she said.

Xavier was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to be examined. The mother said the padded room, which he’d been in before, frightened him...

I don't know exactly what a really good teacher would or should do with a kid who's having a tough time getting a handle on certain of his internal impulses, but I think maybe locking him in a padded cell ain't it.

A 5-year-old.

In Solitary-Fucking-Confinement.

They say KIPP stands for Kids In Prison Program.  I guess now we know why they say that.

Music

Don't Get Around Much Anymore --The Ink Spots

Today's Pix