Sarah Jarosz via NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts
w/ fiddler Alex Hargreaves and cellist Nathaniel Smith
w/ fiddler Alex Hargreaves and cellist Nathaniel Smith
Federal prosecutors told Gov. Bob McDonnell last week that he and his wife would be charged in connection with a gift scandal, but senior Justice Department officials delayed the decision after the McDonnells’ attorneys made a face-to-face appeal in Washington, according to people familiar with the case.
Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, told the McDonnells’ legal teams that he planned to ask a grand jury to return an indictment no later than this past Monday, people familiar with the conversations said.The legal teams for Vaginal Bob and Lady McDonnell met with a Deputy USAG and got something of a reprieve. Nobody's talking about it, but it could be just the usual delaying tactic of pleading for the indictments to be postponed until after McAuliffe's inauguration. That way (per conventional wisdom), we can pretend that the stench of corruption is totally (and only) attached to these two people, and doesn't point directly at a political system that's growing into a full-blown institutionalized scheme of coin-operated politicians.
The governor and his wife, Maureen McDonnell, would have been charged with working together to illegally promote a struggling dietary supplement company in exchange for gifts and loans from its CEO, the people said.
On the final day of the statewide recount in the race for Virginia’s attorney general, Republican Mark D. Obenshain conceded to Democrat Mark R. Herring, the certified winner of the Nov. 5 election, ending what Obenshain called “a vigorous and hard-fought campaign.”
Herring’s victory gives Democrats all five statewide offices — governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the two U.S. Senate seats — for the first time since 1969.Herring ended Election Day with a margin of less than 120 votes, and the recount as of yesterday had him up by a little over 900.
“The recount is almost over, and in this contest it’s become apparent that our campaign is going to come up a few votes short,” Obenshain said Wednesday afternoon at a news conference at the state Capitol, his wife, Suzanne, and daughter Tucker by his side.
“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.’”
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.
(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.