DEREK THOMPSON: The Scariest Chart In Europe Just Got Scarier. “In March this year, for the first time on record, more than half of the young people in Spain and Greece were counted as unemployed by the OECD, which provided the chart above. Three months later, the situation is still getting worse. Official youth unemployment in Greece and Spain has crossed 51 percent. That’s worse than twice the rate of the entire euro zone (22%) and more than three times worse than the already-quite-bad youth unemployment in the United States and Canada (16% and 14%, respectively).”
Archive for 2012
July 11, 2012
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SHOCKINGLY, RHODE ISLAND WAS LAST: Texas Named America’s Top State for Business 2012.
MARY KATHARINE HAM joins Hot Air.
RACISM IN AMERICAN POLITICS: Liberal group calls Romney too white for blacks to like.
In advance of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech Wednesday to the NAACP, a liberal group headed by a former New York Times reporter and ex-Media Matters executive have produced a video “satire” that claims blacks don’t like Romney, who they dub so white he makes “Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel.”
Pathetic.
DAILY CALLER: I talk about the Higher Education Bubble on Matt Lewis’s podcast.
And hey, it’s not too late to buy the book!
AWOL. Roll Call: Senate Democrats May Skip Appropriations Season. “Amid lingering differences with the House over government spending, Senate Democrats may not pass any appropriations bills before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.”
Hell, they haven’t passed a budget, so. . . .
BUT REGULATORS WILL PROTECT US FROM FRAUD: New York Fed Knew About Problems With Libor in 2007.
APPLYING TITLE IX TO SCIENCE ENROLLMENT: What Could Go Wrong?
Why don’t we apply it to the hiring of elementary school teachers? Men are highly underrepresented there, and children suffer as a result.
KATIE ROIPHE: Preglimony and Pro-Choice Rhetoric: If we ask fathers to support a pregnancy, aren’t we admitting that the fetus is a child?
The interests of protecting expectant mothers do not necessarily coincide with the interest of protecting abortion rights. Once you admit that the father is responsible to a woman carrying his fetus, you are halfway, at least in an imaginative sphere, to admitting that the fetus is a “life.” You are, in theory, extending the idea of “paternity” and implicitly the idea of the child, to pregnancy. (Motro chooses her clunky word “preglimony” carefully to avoid any implications of “child support” but the intellectual connection, the implication that there is a child, and not just a cluster of cells, is there.)
Also, if a man has responsibilities during pregnancy, might he also have . . . dare I say it? . . . rights? Besides the right to cough up the cash, I mean, which most feminists seem happy enough to endorse.
RAND SIMBERG: California Prefers Trains to Nowhere over Rocket Ships. “Progressives” are stuck in the past, ironically.
LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:
Twice as many teachers. Twice as much money. But does anybody believe that a high school graduate today is (as a college student might actually say) “twice as much smart?”
We know they’re not.
We test students all the time, tests like the National Assessment Of Educational Progress (NAEP). And since 1970, these results in math and reading have essentially been flat.
For example, the average 17-year-old’s NAEP score in reading back in 1971 was 285. In 2008 it was 286.
That’s what we got for doubling our education spending.
When you compare the U.S. to countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the results are even worse. Education reform activist Bill Costello points out that our annual “per-pupil spending in 2006 was 41 percent higher than the OECD average of $7,283, and yet American students still placed in the bottom quarter in math and in the bottom third in science among OECD countries.”
The problem isn’t a shortage of money, it’s a shortage of value.
LAWLESS LAW ENFORCEMENT: Houston Student Detained for 12 Hours After Warning Drivers of Speed Trap. Tar. Feathers.
DNC CHAIR DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ’S overseas investments.
THAT STATEMENT HAS PASSED ITS EXPIRATION DATE: Obama in 2010: Raising Taxes Will Lead to ‘More Folks Potentially Losing Jobs.’
CHARLIE SPIERING: Obama is wrong, Bush was outspent by Democrats in 2004.
THE HILL: Questions Mount Over Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s Absence. “Jackson, a nine-term Illinois Democrat, last appeared on Capitol Hill in early June, His office has issued two statements since then indicating he’s on medical leave — the first citing ‘exhaustion’ and the second suggesting his condition is much more severe. The strange episode has fueled speculation about Jackson’s condition and whereabouts. An almost total absence of information — his congressional office will not answer any questions — has created abundant space for rumor and the most extreme conjecture. This has been stoked by an ethics investigation into allegations that Jackson considered lending campaign favors to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) in exchange for the Senate seat then being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.”
WHEN LENDERS FORECLOSE IT’S CRUEL AND EXPLOITATIVE. So what about when government seizes homes for as little as $400 in back taxes?
WELL, IT’S CERTAINLY WORTH A TRY: Can Oral Sex Cure Morning Sickness?
HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: A grade-fixing scandal at TSU: “A Nashville university is embroiled in a grade-fixing scandal. There are allegations that hundreds of grades were intentionally changed, not by students but by Tennessee State University administrators.” Hmm.
IT’S A BYPRODUCT OF THE ALIEN BASE THERE: Strange Vortex On Saturn’s Moon, Titan.
IT’S NOT 2008: President Obama’s NASCAR tickets auctioned, but don’t bring much at N.H. track. “When President Barack Obama turned down free tickets to this weekend’s Sprint Cup race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the track hoped to auction off the ‘presidential’ tickets to raise big money for charity. Instead, the tickets went for less than face value.”
Everything Obama touches. . . .
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ABC NEWS: OBAMA ADVISOR VALERIE JARRETT’S BERMUDA FINANCIAL INTERESTS. Every bit as sinister as Mitt Romney’s.