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Sunday, June 24, 2012
Microsoft Surface, Windows Phone 8, Ikea TVs, Clear Potato Chips and More... [The Best Stories Of The Week]
Invasorpress: #Cuba El campe?n peg? dos veces http://t.co/C9KnBMo9
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Saturday, June 23, 2012
Donald Wagner: New California budget reflects wrong priorities
State budgets reflect state priorities. For most Californians, those priorities are protecting funds for education and public safety, while putting people back to work. A good budget recognizes and furthers those priorities. If not, it deserves a swift rejection.
Democrats in the Legislature have passed a budget for the coming fiscal year. That budget failed. It may reflect the priorities of the ruling party in Sacramento, but it does not reflect the priorities of the people.
State Sen. President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento,left, discusses the agreement reached with Gov. Jerry Brown to finalize California's budget, at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday June 21, 2012. Although Democrats passed the main budget bill on a majority vote last week, the governor pressed for deeper cuts to welfare and other social services amid a project $15.7 billion budget shortfall. Steinberg said the agreement makes changes to four social programs to minimize the impact on the poor. Seated second from left is state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chair of the Senate budget committee.
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Our public education system gets no relief in this new budget from the fiscal woes of the past few years, despite the fact that Republicans in the Assembly put forth a comprehensive plan to avoid any further education cuts. Meanwhile, education remains targeted for 99 percent of the billions in "trigger cuts" in the event voters reject Gov. Jerry Brown's tired and uninspired effort to yet again raise taxes.
Government has an undeniably proper role in protecting the public. Yet, after the governor's dreadful public safety "realignment" idea was passed by the Democrats last year, dangerous criminals have been removed from state prisons, pushed down to the counties, and ultimately onto our streets. The failed budget does not undo that decision. Nor does it provide the funds necessary to protect the public in the face of the increased threat. Public safety and the ability of our court system to perform its constitutional duties are at significant risk.
These are not the only defects in the budget. While it declines to adequately protect education or the public, it also fails to tackle any of California's long-term problems. The Legislature did nothing to lighten the state's crushing regulatory burden on businesses and entrepreneurs so they can put people back to work and grow the economy. It did nothing to curb California's significant public-employee pension problem. It did nothing to give schools and community colleges relief from costly, oppressive state government micromanagement through the Education Code.
Finally, and incredibly, the state also spends more in the budget this fiscal year than last. That's right. Spending is actually up this year.
Times are tough, and we have a multibillion dollar deficit that makes it impossible, according to the budget writers, to protect funding for education or public safety. Yet, General Fund spending in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year is 6 percent higher than General Fund spending in the current year, which ends June 30.
In addition, total spending, according to the governor, is projected to increase 29 percent over four years.
Will your family's spending grow 29 percent the next four years? More importantly, will your income grow 29 percent the next four years, so you'll have the money to pay for the governor's new spending?
The governor certainly plans to have the money ? your money ? and he knows how to get it. He intends to fuel this bloated spending with a massive $45 billion tax increase. And, if the tax-increase ballot measure, education bears the overwhelming brunt of the retaliation through trigger cuts.
Budgets really are about priorities. Californians tell us that theirs are to put people back to work while protecting education and public safety. We should listen, and should budget accordingly. Unfortunately, those are not the priorities in the Democrats' failed new budget.
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Once-Banned Bird Flu Study Yields Sobering Findings
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Illinois Football Recruiting: DT Bryce Douglas Accepts Scholarship Offer
Plainfield Central defensive tackle Bryce Douglas is following in his father's footsteps. On Friday, the incoming high school senior accepted an offer to spend his college years in Champaign playing for the Illinois Fighting Illini.
Douglas is 6-foot-2, 315 lbs. He also had an offer from Central Michigan and received interest from Boston College, Northwestern and Purdue.
Douglas' father Bruce is former Illinois basketball player. The defensive tackle was in Champaign for a lineman camp. He received an offer after the camp and immediately accepted.
Illinois currently has the 21st best recruiting class in the country according the Rivals. Douglas sounds like a kid who wanted to be in Champaign all along.
"I've been around Illinois for as long as I can remember," Bryce Douglas said. "I spent so much time at games and at different events at Illinois it just feels like home to me. Illinois was the one offer I was really hoping for, and to get that offer just blows me away. Both of my parents went to Illinois, and now I can follow in my parents' footsteps at Illinois."
For updates, stay tuned to SB Nation Chicago. For more in-depth coverage of Illinois recruiting, check out Hail to the Orange.
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Jeb Bush: Party elder statesman or 2016 candidate?
MIAMI (Reuters) - He's the non-candidate they never stop talking about.
Ever since Jeb Bush left the Florida governor's mansion in 2007 with favorable ratings after two terms, speculation has swirled about his political future.
The chatter has only gotten louder this year amid the Republican Party's "veepstakes" - despite Bush's repeated insistence that he is not in the running.
Bush appeared to put the issue to rest in a recent series of interviews with various media outlets in which he criticized the direction of the Republican Party and said that both his father, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan would "have a hard time" getting along with the party today.
When he said he supported a modest tax increase along with spending cuts to help reduce the federal debt, Bush joked, "This will prove I'm not running for anything." Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, and the party leadership oppose any and all tax hikes.
Comments like these have only fueled speculation that Bush is positioning himself to run for president - in 2016. According to this scenario, his breaking with the party on issues such as taxes is meant to stake out a platform that will move it back to the moderate center and away from more divisive social issues, while also seeking more common ground on issues such as education and immigration.
The best argument for doing that, of course, would be if Romney, running on more conservative positions, fails to unseat President Barack Obama this year.
"Jeb Bush is following a pattern we see with ambitious presidential candidates," said Jamie Chandler, a political scientist at Hunter College, New York. "Just like Romney did in 2004, he's raising his public profile and increasing his speech activity now for a potential run in four years."
If Romney wins, Bush would be a likely cabinet candidate, perhaps as education secretary, said Chandler. But any presidential ambitions would have to wait until 2020. By then he would be almost 68, just a year younger than Reagan in 1990, the oldest U.S. president to be sworn into office.
Not everyone is convinced Bush has such a game plan. Some of the people who know him best say he is not that calculating. They say he is speaking out because he is deeply loyal to the Republican Party and worried about the issues he holds dear.
"It's more about helping the cause than helping himself. He will always call it the way he sees it," said Jorge Arrizurietta, a top Republican fundraiser in Miami and a former adviser to Jeb Bush. "I can't tell you that he's got a master plan, but there is a broad consensus in the party that Jeb should stay involved and consider a run at the right moment."
Bush declined to be interviewed for this article, citing a busy schedule, including a speech on Thursday in Orlando to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials where he received a rapturous reception.
Speaking at the same event, Romney got a noticeably less enthusiastic welcome, though he softened his stance on immigration, appearing to borrow from Bush's advocacy for a more compassionate position toward the nation's 11 million undocumented aliens.
A CONSERVATIVE LEADER ON EDUCATION
Bush's conservative record in government gives him more "flexibility" to speak freely, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "He's got a record that's appealed to the base. That overrides any apostasy on the campaign trail."
Bush secured his bona fides with social conservatives in 2003 with his controversial order to reinsert the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a brain-injured woman who had been in a coma for 15 years. The family was divided over whether to keep her alive, but right-to-life activists pushed the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bush made his biggest mark as governor in education policy, securing a number of reforms with a conservative slant. He signed a measure giving public schools an annual grade based on student test scores and rewarded them with state funds accordingly.
He encouraged charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically run by private corporations, and instituted a statewide voucher program - later struck down by the state Supreme Court - that let hundreds of students in failing public schools enroll in private and religious schools at taxpayer expense.
The state has posted strong growth in reading and math scores, according to recent federal data, with most of the gains coming during the Bush administration.
The website run by his Foundation for Excellence in Education calls his education record as governor "perhaps the greatest public policy success story of the past decade."
Yet a close look at that record suggests a key ingredient of his program was one the party faithful might not be keen to embrace: a huge increase in state spending on education.
Bush had the good luck to govern in the years before the economic crisis and the home mortgage debacle devastated Florida. During his administration, average state funding per student rose from $5,000 in the 2000-01 school year to $7,126 in the 2007-08 school year.
He spent tens of millions training teachers, sending reading coaches to elementary schools and creating summer reading camps.
AT HOME IN MIAMI
Raised in Texas, Bush attended the prestigious Andover boarding school in Massachusetts before he went to the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated with a degree in Latin American Studies.
The large public university in Texas may have been a better fit for Bush than an east coast Ivy League school, such as Yale, where his father and older brother, George W. Bush, studied.
"Jeb doesn't feel as comfortable in that kind of New England patrician environment," says Roberto Martinez, the former U.S. attorney for Florida's southern district, who has known Bush since their days at Andover.
Bush met his wife, Columba, while teaching English in Leon, Mexico, and their three children were raised in a bilingual household.
Jeb was always regarded as the son most likely to carry the Bush brand into the next generation. In 1994 he was running for governor in Florida while brother George was running in Texas. Their parents flew to Miami on election night, expecting to celebrate Jeb's victory over Democrat Lawton Chiles. Jeb lost by a narrow margin, and his parents had to dash to Austin to mark George's upset of incumbent Governor Ann Richards.
By the time Jeb captured the Florida governorship in 1998 his brother was already eyeing a presidential run in 2000.
Friends say Jeb's attitude toward politics remains ambivalent, and that he prefers to remain above the fray. In 2007 he was happy to leave behind the often petty politics of Tallahassee and return to private business in Miami.
Before running for governor, Bush was involved in a number of entrepreneurial ventures in South Florida. Since leaving office he has dedicated himself to rebuilding his family finances, going into the real estate business with his son, Jeb Jr. He also has lucrative directorships on several corporate boards, including Tenet Healthcare, and has immersed himself in the two areas of policy he cares most about: education and immigration.
"Jeb wants to be a leader on the big issues of the day ... Whether he's influencing the 2012 debate or the 2016 debate, or even 2020, that's not the question," said Chuck Cobb, a close friend of the Bush family and former undersecretary of commerce in the Reagan administration. "Does Jeb want to be a leader? Yes. Does Jeb have to be the leader of the United States to do that? I think not."
HAVE ISSUES, WILL TRAVEL
His education work gives Bush a platform to proselytize fellow Republican lawmakers and governors. He has been to a dozen states over the past 15 months to promote the "Florida formula," in the process establishing a network that would serve him well in a national campaign.
Bush "has turned into a kind of Johnny Appleseed of education reform, carrying ideas around the country and planting them wherever he can," said Chester Finn Jr., an education policy analyst and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington.
One of those ideas, which resonates with the party base, is to aggressively promote the idea that teachers unions are impediments to reform.
Education could be a way for Bush to build political coalitions, since the cause of improving America's schools crosses party lines.
Bush has praised current Education Secretary Arne Duncan for pushing reforms including more charter schools and more rigorous teacher evaluations. President Obama heaped praise on Bush during a joint appearance at a Miami high school last spring.
Lately, Bush has been heavily promoting virtual schools and online courses, which can save states money but have a mixed track record on student achievement.
Bush's foundation, which has made online learning a major focus of its work, gets much of its funding from companies and philanthropies tied to companies that would profit from expanded virtual schooling. Backers include online education companies Apex Learning, GlobalScholar and K12 Inc, and technology companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft.
That doesn't sit well with Bush's critics.
"So much money is spent on virtual schools that make his friends wealthy, while at the same time schools are having to eliminate art, music, P.E., guidance counselors, nurses, all in order to pay for all the tests" called for under Bush's education reform agenda, said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, a teachers union.
LATINO ADVOCATE
Bush's passion for immigration reform might also get him in trouble.
"It would be incredibly stupid over the long haul to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote," he told the Hispanic Leadership Network conference in Miami last year, noting that failure to take Hispanics more into account was hurting the party.
Yet his support for educational opportunities for undocumented students could be a liability in some primary races.
Winning the party's nomination for president depends on "voters in primary states," says veteran Miami congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban-American Republican who hired Jeb Bush as her campaign manager for her first congressional bid in 1989. "There's no big structure that will anoint anyone. Romney had to win it fair and square in every primary, and Jeb will have to win it that way too."
Even though they have their differences, Bush has earned the respect of the Tea Party. "Jeb Bush is a very solid conservative and a likable guy. Many people like me wish he was president," says Florida Tea Party Chairman Everett Wilkinson, a Palm Beach County political consultant.
Some Democrats also admit to a sneaking regard for him. "I think he is the most dangerous Republican candidate," says Freddy Balsera, a public relations consultant in Miami and Hispanic adviser to the Obama campaign. "He's a real conservative who understands Latino voters better than even many Latino elected officials," he added.
Hispanic voters were deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and blame George W. Bush for the recession. But by 2016 that may be less relevant.
Certainly, Jeb's family remains proud of the Bush brand. His granddaughter, born last year, was named Georgia H.W. Bush.
"I know that there's Bush fatigue right now, but I think Jeb can overcome that," says Ros-Lehtinen. "I hope that he runs for president. I think that's where he belongs."
(Editing by Douglas Royalty)
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Vicki Larson: 'Till Death Do Us Part' or 'Till The Kids Part?
My son's high school graduation was a sea of faces filled with a mix of joy, exhaustion, sadness and uncertainty -- not just the 18-year-olds', but their parents'.
Despite the crappy economy and college cutbacks, the kids are going to be fine. I can't say the same about the parents, however. How many of the married couples that day, a good portion about to be empty-nesters, will still be married for their kid's college graduation? My gut says not too many.
We've done our job. We raised our kids to young adulthood and spent the majority of those 18 years focusing on them, dealing with the unrelenting daily demands of parenting. Once the kids are happily settled in their college dorms, many of those married couples will head home to a house that feels unusually big and quiet, perhaps lonely, loveless and sexless. If they haven't been putting energy into their own relationship -- and there are many parents guilty of that -- many will feel like there's a stranger, or an enemy, sitting across from them at the breakfast table.
And many will divorce.
It's hard to navigate what authors David and Claudia Arp call "the second half of marriage" -- the years after the kids leave. The growing divorce rate among baby boomers has jumped by more than 50 percent over the past 20 years.
But instead of wringing our hands about so-called gray divorces and seeing those long-term marriages as failures, perhaps we should consider marriage as more "till the kids part" than "till death do us part." The partner we need in our 20s and 30s, when many of us are looking to settle down and raise kids, may not be the partner we need in our 50s, 60s and beyond, when we're free to explore new passions or reinvigorate the ones we gave up when the kids came along.
Not to say that everyone wants kids; many couples happily are childfree. But many do want kids, and let's be honest: when we're ready to nest, few would opt to marry, say, a world-traveling risk-taker who works just long enough to fund his or her next adventure. Most of us are looking for someone who's more stable and reliable, and willing to contribute his or her share of the childcare and household chores as well as financial obligations. But the world-traveling risk-taker may be just the person we want as our companion and lover once we're empty-nesters.
Why can't we have both?
We can, especially if we agree to such an arrangement before we walk down the aisle to say "I do."
About a year ago, my JetBlue seatmate and I started chatting. He'd been living with his girlfriend for seven years, he said, and they were about to get married. Why get married after so many years of happy cohabitation? I asked. "Because we want to have kids," he said, acknowledging the many tax breaks for married parents, "and we're only promising to be together until the last one's off to college."
Perhaps that should have shaken me, but it didn't -- they're exactly the kind of couple for whom Susan Pease Gadoua and I are writing "The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers." They hadn't ruled out staying together past that, but all they were committing to was that they would not divorce before the last child turned 18. They were making a conscious decision and commitment to make their marriage work during their kids' crucial years instead of blindly agreeing to a promise a good 50 percent of us cannot keep -- marriage until death.
A few months after that conversation, Mexico City's Democratic Revolution Party proposed legislation that would allow renewable marriage contracts of no fewer than two years. Two years wouldn't be long enough for couples who want to have kids, but an 18-year contract would be just about right.
Of course, because we don't have renewable marriage contracts yet, my seatmate and his then-bride-to-be were marrying the old-fashioned way -- with a marriage license -- and when those 18 or so years end they will still have to dissolve their marriage the old-fashioned way too, by divorcing. But imagine how much easier it may be for them to part ways should they decide to do so because of their level-headed agreement; no need for lawyers or mediators, no ugly drawn-out divorce, no custody battles. Not every breakup has to be a "failure," especially ones that are mutually agreed upon. That doesn't mean that kind of arrangement would always end without some friction, especially if one partner wants to continue the marriage and the other doesn't. But there's also the possibility that each will happily choose the other again -- how lovely is that?
We're living longer than generations before us did, and "till death do us part" could mean 60, 70 years together instead of 20 or 30 years. For those who have found the one person to live with contently through the first and second halves of marriage, great. But there's nothing wrong in acknowledging that for some of us -- perhaps even the majority of us -- a marriage that works happily through the parenting years is all we desire, and that dissolving a marriage after that isn't a failure or a result of not understanding what "hard work" and "commitment" is, accusations many of us who divorce face. No, it's because our needs in a partner when we are raising kids often are different than our needs when those kids have left the nest, and that's true for both men and women.
Can't we just be honest about that and move on?
Follow what's happening with "The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers" and participate in the conversation on Facebook. A version of this appeared on Vicki Larson's personal blog, OMG Chronicles.
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