StrangeSox

If you haven't seen it, check out some of the sparring that Robin and others at Crooked Timber did with some of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians over workplace coercion. There's a pretty big rabbit hole of links and posts to follow, but there's a lot of good reading.

I never said it was a spending issue. I never said that bad teachers weren't also protected by tenure. What I did say is that it's laughable to still be clinging to the idea that good people aren't fired from their jobs and, if they are, that they can find gainful employment without going through some major hardships. Especially in 2012, especially in education. It's flat-out ridiculous. On top of that, teacher tenure is not unique to the US (32). South Korea and Australia are both at or near the top of educational rankings and have tenure systems. So, clearly, it can't be tenure itself that is the problem. It could be that the specific implementation of tenure in some counties or districts is flawed, but the general idea of granting teachers tenure is not why the US lags in education.

Here's a timely piece! http://coreyrobin.com/2012/08/30/were-goin...-their-ass-off/

He made a dumb, misleading-at-best argument, that's all.

That's not relevant to my argument against the silly idea that good teachers would never be fired without tenure or, if they were, that they'd quickly be rehired.

You're right, good people are never fired and left struggling to find work in the "real" world.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 01:08 PM) And yet because of tenure, can't happen. Well that's exactly the point! Tenure isn't some evil system set up to protect bad teachers. It's meant to protect all teachers from management.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 01:06 PM) SB, how exactly is Romney doing something illegal? He's doing something that the federal government hasn't outlawed yet. That's not illegal, that's just smart. Hypothetically if I were to not pay Illinois sales tax on Amazon purchases, you'd be claiming that i'm doing something illegal even though the federal gov't hasn't mandated that I do that (ignore the state law that is in the courts right now). How is me not paying that tax until i'm told to shady/unethical/illegal? I believe you're supposed to report those purchases now regardless and that the new law is making a stronger enforcement mechanism. So, technically, illegal. Romney may not have done anything illegal (his 2009 tax returns would reveal if he was part of the UBS amnesty or not), but he took every possible loop hole and advantage he could to pay as little as possible. I guess I'll never understand that sort of pathological obsession with amassing huge sums of wealth. I find those sorts of actions immoral, but they aren't illegal, unfortunately.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 01:04 PM) If the entire 1% were paying 100% in taxes, we would still be running deficits. I know that it won't get said in this thread, but taxation isn't our biggest problem here. Taxation is a huge problem, along with all of those unfunded wars Republicans wanted, and the never-ending defense spending expansion on top of it. We have two problems that are ballooning spending right now: automatic safety net spending because unemployment and poverty still suck and the demographic problem of the worst generation, the baby boomers. Fix the economy back to full employment, end the wars and raise taxes and our budget is pretty much fine. I know your solution is to gut government spending, but I think we need to only look across the sea to see how silly notions of austerity are.

I don't think too many people, when presented with Crimson's timeline, would find Paul Ryan's line of attack very credible.

Letting administrators fire the good ones because they want to cut costs is awful for your kids, too.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 12:15 PM) Nice trying to lawyer speak around your original post. At the end of the day you proved my point. People do everything they can to pay less taxes. If you want an honest discussion about it, drop the self-righteous and hypocritical hyperbole. No, they don't. Most people go to some lengths to take deductions and reduce their tax burden. Very few people, even among the wealthy, go to the lengths that Romney has.

Plenty of people who don't suck at their jobs are fired every day. The tenure system isn't perfect, but I've had pretty much this exact conversation with jenks before regarding teachers or unions or some other source of workplace rights. It's a pretty common theme to worker organization opposition; people see their own situation as less-than-ideal, and when they see some other group with more rights or protections, they want to drag them down instead. Instead of asking "why don't I have the same benefits?" the impulse to to make everyone equally inferior and powerless in the labor market. This is great for the wealthy owners and upper management, but terrible for the rest of the working class.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 11:36 AM) I'm not really lamenting that fact, i'm just pointing it out. Nor do I think we're all stuck in a bucket because the government doesn't guarantee everyone X amount in salary a year, regardless of their performance or skillset. I want my kids' school to be full of qualified teachers, not teachers that just happened to be average enough to make it through until they were tenured. I had that in my high school with numerous teachers and it sucked. I would have preferred a younger, more energetic teacher who was thrilled to teach kids over an old crotchety teacher just going through the motions. You ask: why should teachers have more protections than I do, where I can be fired today without notice and without compensation? I ask: why shouldn't you have the same protections that teachers have so that you can't be fired today without notice and without compensation?

Crabs in a bucket can't escape because they pull each other back down into the bucket. You lament that teachers have more protection from firings than you do, but your preferred solution is to eliminate those protections for teachers instead of working for them for yourself. Crab mentality.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 30, 2012 -> 10:48 AM) Re: the tenure thing, why should teachers be given more protection than any other employee? I'm an attorney, I can get replaced any second. Where's my protection? Why do teachers deserve more than me? We all have the ADA to protect us, why isn't that enough?

both sides!

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 29, 2012 -> 09:03 PM) There is going to be a significant blown call in week 1, you can book it. A random thought popped into my head this morning: what if the replacements are being this terrible on purpose in order to bolster the refs' leverage?

Ryan's hero is Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand would have favored letting all of GM shut down in bankruptcy as they were a failed company. Any sort of bailout should be seen as the moocher class stealing from the rightful owners of capital, her ubermensch Galtian titans of industry (or failed engineers, artists and philosophers, whatever). The President should bear no blame for the failing of a private enterprise and the shuttering of their factories. At least, if Ryan were intellectually honest, that'd be the position he holds. Instead, he criticizes Obama for not bailing GM out enough and having the Janesville plant close as was decided in 2008.

If only Obama had more-bailed out GM with federal dollars! Oh, wait, that doesn't make sense. Ryan, the brilliant intellectual policy wonk, would never make such an incoherent criticism, right?!

Two Florida Republicans Want Law Allowing Gun Owners to Shoot 'Illegal' Voters

It's true, I have been owned.

How about him whining about Obama not taking up the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission despite having voted against it himself?

Richard Posner has a pretty scathing review of Scalia's latest book and of his textualism in general

FACT CHECK: Convention speakers stray from reality Paul Ryan Bets on the Ignorance of America Dispatches From the Republican National Convention Entry 13: Here’s a list of some of the whoppers that Paul Ryan served up Wednesday night. The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?