I hope to have something of considerable substance up about the Chicago teachers’ union strike up in the next three days, specifically looking at the empirical evidence concerning teachers’ unions, student demographics, and academic performance. (For example: complaining about the high school dropout rates at Chicago Public Schools without mentioning that 90% of Chicago’s public …
Tweet It, Like It, Drop Copies of It From an Airplane
Forgive me for posting just to link to something, but I’ve wanted to share this for awhile. It’s a blog post by Greg Laden on the constantly expressed “correlation is not causation” line. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t hear someone online respond to data by saying “correlation does not imply …
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The Party of Petty Resentment
Can you imagine– can you imagine— if a leading Democrat deliberately dissed the intended honorees of, say, Memorial Day? Can you imagine how the mainstream media would report on it? Eric Cantor, it almost goes without saying, has never worked a day in his life. A career politician, as so many haters of government are, his …
Bias Is As Bias Does
Jon Chait’s peculiar, pointless wander through Hollywood’s liberal bias says a lot, I guess, about a lot– about mainstream liberalism’s passionate self-hatred, about liberal commentators’ refusal to straightforwardly express the superiority of their values (as conservatives have done to incredible political effect), and about what a weird form of toothless cultural liberalism New York Magazine now represents. …
Another Casualty of the Administrative Invasion of the University
People are often surprised at how adamant I am that cutting administrative costs is a huge part of making college less expensive. Surely, the administrative costs– which means, to a very large degree, the salaries of administrators and the number of administrators employed– can’t be that much higher than they once were, right? They can …
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William Saletan’s Love for Paul Ryan is Based on Fantasy
In American national politics, it doesn’t get much more extreme than Paul Ryan, or the Ryan-Romney budget. That’s reality. Mitt Romney taking on Ryan as his running mate is like Barack Obama taking on Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich. The Ryan-Romney budget is one of the most extreme policy proposals in the history of our …
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B-b-b-but teh deficits!
Sorry to continue with the deluge of Paul Ryan posts, but– when your idiot cousin inevitably talks about how serious Paul Ryan is, thanks to being such a deficit warrior, please refer him to this handy chart. It was prepared by the indispensable MSNBC show, Up with Chris Hayes. Click the photo for the source.