Would love opinions on Monday night CNN dem debate

[conyat]

<p>And better access to educational opportunities would do nothing to change those attitudes…</p>

<p>On a more serious note though, domestic violence is not limited to lower income groups. The men who commit domestic violence, even murder their partners, come from all strata of society.</p>

[Vyse]

<p>No, I agree that better education would help eradicate those attitudes, but I get frustrated that African Americans who until recently had a great history of choosing rational leaders over irrational ones-Du Bois over Garvey, MLK over Malcom X have turned to race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton instead of true intellectuals like Bill Cosby Thomas Sowell. I think Obama is a mostly positive influence in that regard.</p>

<p>And while it does happen at all income levels, it doesn’t happen at all income levels proportionally. There’s a reason Scott peterson got so much attention.</p>

[conyat]

<p>

And while it does happen at all income levels, it doesn’t happen at all income levels proportionally.

</p>

<p>You have any actual statistics to back this up?</p>

[Vyse]

<p><a href=“http://justfacts.com/racialissues.essentials.asp#violence[/url]”>http://justfacts.com/racialissues.essentials.asp#violence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[conyat]

<p>I didn’t see anything in that link about domestic violence varying by income level. It doesn’t seem to address domestic violence at all. Or income stratification; the statistics are about race, not income.</p>

<p>It would be interesting to see statistics for fatal domestic violence by income. I haven’t seen anything other than a Boston Globe article about how many rich men they’ve prosecuted for killing their wives.</p>

[Vyse]

<p>You may correct, I’m not finding anything.</p>

[conyat]

<p>Lower income women do report domestic violence at higher rates than higher income women. But there’s no real way to tell if the difference is the reporting vs. the rate of violence. Since homicide is less sensitive to the reporting effect, I would be very interested to see stats on it.</p>

<p>But the rate even for upper income women is still high. All kinds of men batter their partners. Religion doesn’t seem to make a difference either; there’s no difference in the rate of domestic violence between religious groups.</p>

[hereshoping]

<p>

Who is they?

</p>

<p>The bloated, Democratic-controlled, left-leaning, k-12 education bureaucracy (the one which agrees with Hillary’s outlook on how children should be raised), i-dad. But for purposes of this thread (pushing Hillary) we can just pretend that none exists, and that my school district is run by my lil’ ol’ Ozzie and Harriet school board all by their lil’ ol’ selves, and that poor, minority black mothers and/or dads can just march down to that school board and change things on their down-time after they’ve worked a full day. (Likewise we’ll all have a huge say in how Hillary’s preschools will be run and have tremendous input into the curriculum, I’m sure.) Fine and dandy. No problem. I’ll clear the way.</p>

[conyat]

<p>Actually US education policy and bureaucracy for the last 6 years has been in the control of the conservatives and neoconservatives. And while the financial fortunes of crony contractors have improved tremendously, there hasn’t been much change in NAEP scores. </p>

<p>What conservatives seem to be lamenting is that most teachers are Democrats. But there’s nothing stopping Republicans from teaching in the schools, except that they keep finding better things to do with their time, even as they bash the men and women willing to teach our kids.</p>

<p>Sort of like how the College Republicans are gung ho about the war, but if you ask them to fight in it, their knees are bad and their backs are weak.</p>

[Allmusic]

<p>Exactly. Policy makers vs. those who are actually in the trenches, doing the work.</p>

[marite]

<p>

His conclusion then was that more books meant better educated parents, which meant better genes, while reading the cat in the hat was of marginal importance.

</p>

<p>So would it matter that I have a house full of books (better educated parent) if my kids did not open any of them or have me read the books to them (marginal importance of Cat in the Hat?) That is a scary idea. The idea that better educated people have better genes also means that there is little chance at self-improvement through education. Nature trumps nurture, and there is not much one can do about it.</p>

[conyat]

<p>Everything we know about children’s literacy development shows how important it is to read to children, especially texts with patterned language and rhyme.</p>

[Novelisto]

<p>Interesteddad: Don’t get your hopes up for a Republican Youtube debate. So far only two candidates have agreed and one of those, McCain, is having second thoughts. So it might just be Mr. Paul up there all by his lonesome. Apparently, the thought of answering the kind of questions the Democrats were given is giving the Republicans a bad case of the collywobbles. What if somebody asks them what they think of the policies of GWB?</p>

[conyat]

<p>I’d love to ask all the pro-war guys why the per-capita National Guard and Reserve mobilizations rates are so low for the “battleground states” like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Texas, etc., even as soldiers from other states are ordered to go three and four times and serve rotations whose duration the president has called “unacceptable.” </p>

<p>If the Iraq war is as vital as they say, why not have every state bear an equitable burden? Why tread so lightly on the states where your party badly needs votes?</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

MIT doesn’t think public schools do such a bad job. The overwhelming majority (71%) of their admitted students come from public schools.</p>

<p>Only a handful (8%) come from religious schools. That’s even fewer than the % that come from foreign schools. And I’d bet that of the 8%, most are from Catholic schools with good reputations, and not the Protestant evangelicals’ schools.</p>

<p>At Harvard, 2/3 of the students are from public schools.

</p>

<p>Does the conclusion change (a tiny bit) when starting with the total number of schools? Does the conclusion change (a bit more) when starting with the total number of students attending public schools? What is the percentage of public schools in the US? What is the percentage of private schools? What is the percentage of religious schools among the private schools?</p>

[anitaw]

<p>“If it were a choice between saving a frozen embryo that my wife and I conceived vs saving a 4 year old I didn’t know, I’d save the embryo.”</p>

<p>I know this is an older posting and maybe not salient at the moment, but I still find it frightening.</p>

[conyat]

<p>Xiggi, I don’t think it’s any surprise that attending a private school (and the socioeconomic circumstances associated with private school attendance) improves one’s chances at Harvard. </p>

<p>Public school students (90% of the general student population) are somewhat under-represented at Harvard and MIT. Religious schools are about even with their representation in the population.</p>

<p>Non-religious private schools such as Andover and Exeter are indeed over-represented–but public schools have made tremendous gains over the past several decades. If liberals have been in charge of running educational policy over the past several decades, as some suggest, they can be darn proud of the esteem that the top colleges have for their graduates.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/onset?id=819&template=article.html[/url]”>http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/onset?id=819&template=article.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

Graduates of independent schools are over-represented at the top colleges. Almost 90 percent of students attend public schools. Of the rest, about 7 percent attend religious schools, 3 percent private, non-religious
(independent) schools, and 1 percent are home-schooled. Yet some 30 percent or more of the class at the most competitive colleges is
made up of independent school graduates. That is down from 60 percent or more several decades ago, as a result of the enormous increase in talented high school students nationwide.

</p>

<p>Where the public schools really the inferior product they are being made out to be, the top colleges would not be admitting them in such large and growing numbers.</p>

<p>ETA: It’s just not at elite levels either that public school students’ outcomes are improving. The teen pregnancy rate went down dramatically in the '90s, the dropout rate is down, and the % of high school completers going on the college is way up.</p>

[interesteddad]

<p>You know, I’ve got a much more pragmatic way of looking at politics. The way I see it, the job of all politicians is to support and obtain funding for their constituencies. In that way, the two parties are the same. And the choice becomes fairly easy. Do you like the pork one party sends to its constituents or the pork the other party supplies.</p>

<p>My choice would be that pork to teachers and education trumps pork to Haliburton and oil companies that still won’t invest in adequate refinery capacity to serve the United States.</p>

<p>My choice would be pork for Pell Grants rather than pork for Enron. My choice would be pork for science research rather than pork for hedge funds.</p>

<p>Your mileage may vary.</p>

[cheers]

<p>

Obama’s two women can help chip away at those two pillars of Clinton support. He’s got the money and the enthusiasm, but he needs to break through with women and blacks.</p>

<p>Oprah is there to underline the other first in the race: a black senator with a real chance at the White House, at ease with white power but not beholden to it. Michelle is there to underline the same thing, but to add to it a clear sense that this is one black man who has married, stayed faithful and reared two daughters with a self-confident and accomplished partner.</p>

<p>If you’re a woman who likes Clinton in part because she represents an ability to endure the humiliation that men sometimes inflict on their spouses, then Obama is an emblem of the good husband who speaks to the same emotional impulse. Hillary is the wound; Barack is the salve.</p>

<p>The strange thing is that Obama needs this appeal to African-Americans and women more in the primary than in the general election. He has far more appeal to independents and Republicans than Clinton. He has a real base among the latte-swilling upper-middle classes, and a real chance of expanding Democratic party support beyond its usual base. But the core Democratic, female voter still prefers her to him. If he cannot break that pattern, he never gets to test his broader national appeal.</p>

<p>And that, perhaps, is the most striking thing about his candidacy so far. Yes, he has raised more money than Clinton. Yes, he is a freshman senator, not a veteran of the Washington wars for two decades. But he is also a candidate limited by the Democratic base, rather than dependent on it.</p>

<p>I never thought I’d write that about a black man. But that is part of the transformational potential of his candidacy. It could elbow the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson off the stage for ever. But only if he can knock Hillary off first. That’s what Oprah and Michelle must do.</p>

<p>Sometimes it takes a woman. And he’s got two

<a href=“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article2115213.ece[/url]”>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article2115213.ece&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Yup, Michelle’s career, vs Hillary’s. That’s a career a fellow professional woman can understand.</p>

<p>

If you ransack YouTube, you’ll find some grainy videos of Michelle at largely black events, both dressing down and puffing up her husband, criticising his sloppy housework habits but always promoting his realness to black Americans.</p>

<p>She, unlike her husband, has no white parent. Her parents, the Robinsons, were a city pump operator and a secretary. Her brother is an Ivy League basketball coach. But like her husband, she made her way out of modest beginnings and won places at Princeton and Harvard Law School. More to the point, she never shies from these achievements and touts them to black audiences as evidence of what the future can hold.</p>

<p>Like her husband, she also turned her career from a lucrative law practice to public service. Her current job – apart from raising two young daughters – is in public affairs for the Chicago University hospital system. She has a reputation for extreme discipline – the gym at the crack of dawn, and, according to the Chicago Tribune, unmissable Friday afternoon hair and beauty appointments.</p>

<p>She’s also a woman of her generation – supportive of her husband (she was assigned to be his supervisor at the law firm where they once worked together), but also her own person.

</p>

[conyat]

<p>Speaking of pork, we’ve spent billions paying crony contractors in Iraq for projects the Iraqi government doesn’t want. Of 2797 projects that have been “completed” (many of them shoddily), the Iraqi government has agreed to accept only about 500.</p>

<p>What’s worse is there’s apparently very little interest in making sure the project is able to remain in operation once the contractor has been paid for building it. Paying the contractor for building it seems to be an end in itself.</p>

<p>$90 million turbines at a power plant were ruined recently when the Iraqis, who had not received operator training, put in the wrong fuel. Is it any wonder that Baghdad is down to less than an hour of electricity a day?</p>