Did He? Or Didn't He?

Charges of sexual harassment have surfaced against another Black right-wing, conservative. (Remember Clarence Thomas?) Herman Cain has been busy denying the charges and arguing that he is unaware that any money was given to the two women involved in the charges. Reportedly a five figure payoff was made.

Cain claims liberals are behind the charges, but any one of the people he's currently running against in the Republican primaries has more to benefit. My money's on the Mormon. Can't trust those cult types. (See The New York Times' story.)

Good Advice for Pennsylvania: End the Death Penalty

The New York Times makes the case for ending the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania, where "208 men and women are currently on death row, but no one has been executed since 1999 [and] only three people have been executed since … 1976."

The Times editorial focuses on the ineptitude of court appointed defense lawyers, thus pointing out, among other things, that the vast majority of people accused of capital offenses are far too poor to afford their own lawyers.

Why Is Herman Cain Leading in the Republican Polls?

Unlike Michele Bachmann and Ricky Perry and Mitt Romney, dag gonnit, people jest like him! (Check out the Washington Week podcast.)

I say it's about time we hire a CEO to run this country. Give him a big stock option worth millions, so when he completely screws things up we can fire him and he can buy his own island and afford to hire his own army to guard it. Everybody knows gov't would run so much better if it were run like a company. The CEO could hire and fire whomever he pleases without worryin' 'bout no stupid consensus. Why would you want your gov't to actually try to please people when it should just be doin' the right thing, which is what I want it to do, and to heck with you. Jest as long as we make lots of money so's the CEO can be paid enough to be a part of that top 1 percent.

A CEO, after all is going to look around to see what's unproductive; that is, doesn't bring in sufficient income, and order them to start making the company a profit are he'll close'm down.

Ooops! There goes the military. Our armed forces makes lots of money for the private sector, but they sure don't bring in much, and they're still the largest single part of the federal budget.

Oil Companies Continue To Record Massive Profits:

Responding to pointed questions about record setting profits, big oil has stated that American retirement plans own large shares of the companies.

Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil are big winners, showing profits up nearly double from last year. According to The New York Times, their profit margins are up. In case the terminology confuses you, that means they're buying crude oil for less but not passing the savings along to the consumer. Hmmm, where have I heard that before?

More on income inequality:

The Washington Post quotes Erin Currier, project manager with the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project on the matter today: "The amount of growth of the top 1 percent is shocking. But the piece that is missing is income mobility, and what we see there does not reflect the American dream. We're not seeing equality of opportunity."

The Flat Tax Is the Answer to All Our Problems, Right?

During the past thirty years, the tax on the wealthiest Americans, the top 1 percent, has steadily been reduced. Wealth, Ronny Rayguns promised us, would trickle down.

The truth is that over the past thirty years is that the top 1 percent has seen their wealth double, while the rest of us are still earning the same amount of money. (Thus the key to American productivity: The rich earn more while the workers work harder and earn less.)

(See The New York Times' "Top Earners Doubled share of Nation's Income, Study Finds" explaining the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office.)

And, oh, yes, the flat tax—all the flat tax proposals would result in the richest Americans receiving another tax cut. But that's only fair; they're creating all the wealth, right?

Today's Must Read:

Richard Cohen tries to come to terms with OWS in today's Washington Post. Claims by the right that the movement (is it is one) is anti-Semitic prove to be nothing more than a right wing red herring. Cohen travels to the site and can find no evidence, neither can the Anti-Defamation League.

My favorite Cohen analysis follow:

Occupy Wall Street has become an event for its own sake, a destination for the aimless. It is something that occurs on countless iPhone cameras, a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums. The nostalgic scent of pot wafts occasionally through the air, and I feel so much younger. This, I’m sure, will bring an end to the Vietnam War.

On a given day, I decide that Occupy Wall Street is about nothing and then I decide it is the Herman Cain campaign in aggregate, just a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans. Then I decide it is an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including — by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation — the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

If this doesn't make you laugh, you need your battery checked.

Must Read:

The world is about to reach the 7 billion mark in population (or maybe it already has; it's impossible to know for sure), and the ramifications of the massive population growth witnessed over the past two hundred years can no longer reasonably be ignored.

Mathematical biologist, Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, presents the problems we'll face before this century is out in today's New York Times. This is a must read for anyone who believes we should actually have our eyes open.

For an additional story, see Juliet Eilperin's "Population growth taxing planet's resources" in today's Washington Post.

What do they know that we don't?

The high tech geniuses in Silicon Valley send their kids to schools

without computers!

Apparently, around three-fourths of the computer nerds running companies like Google know that computers teach their kids, especially the preteens, nothing. Many of these kids attend the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where gadgets of all kinds are forbidden. This backward thinking educational institution actually believes in hands on learning, with plenty of personal interaction.

(See today's New York Times.)

Henry Blodget Explains the OWS:

CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider, Henry Blodget, posted four interesting charts in an attempt to explain what the Occupy Wall Street folks are angry about:

1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression



2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high





3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.




4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near an all-time high

Who's Herman Cain?

Gail Collins thinks she's able to tell us, or tries to shed some light in today's New York Times. The Herminator is apparently mostly a self-promoting, self-help sort of guy. Kind of a "bait piece" promoter of nose-to-the-grindstone and you-can-be-anything-you-want-even-if-you-have-no-known-abilities sort of person. We all love that. It's the American dream.

One of these days I'm gonna run for president too. As soon as they bring back the Know Nothing Party. I don't know what they stood for, but I guess that's the point.

The People Who Own the Tea-Party:

The Washington Post recently ran a story on the Koch brothers, the people who are financing the grass roots groups collectively known as "The Tea-Party." The story reads like an encyclopedia on corrupt corporate behavior. The irony that a grass roots movement can so easily be bought out by a corporation should not be missed by even the slowest learners.

Catching On:

Asia is outstripping the U.S. in education. They are mad for computers in the classroom on the Pacific rim, but so is the U.S., so why are the Asians so much better at math and creating engineers than the U.S. is?

Some of you will claim it's all genetics, Asians are simply born more mathematically inclined. Nonsense! There's simply no evidence of that.

Americans have been buying a bill of sale on computers and educational software for some time now, yet test scores and, more importantly the shear number of engineers we produce, have steadily declined. What's up with that?

The difference is cultural. China, Japan, Korea, all are on their way up. These countries have a unified culture of demanding achievement from their students. In the U.S. the culture is an expectation of privilege. Our young people are supposed to be successful as a matter of birthright. You got born in the shining city on the hill, and therefore you are owed success.

And about those computers, that "teaching technology," just keep in mind that administrators of all types, shapes, and sizes gain power directly from the size of their budgets. The computer stuff costs on average three times as much as books do.

Currently, there is no evidence that students learn any better as a result of using computers and computer software than they do from using traditional methods. The only people asserting otherwise are those who have a vested interest in having us believe the contrary; i.e. the computer and software makers and, of course, at least some administrators whose budgets are enhanced by doing so.

See today's New York Times for an excellent article addressing the fallacy that computers and software will improve education.

NOTE: The most important part of having students be familiar with computers is that they will likely need to use them in the work place. It's as simple as that. Being able to create a spreadsheet doesn't make you smarter at math, it simply makes you a more skilled worker. And that's good, but don't expect your test scores to automatically go up.