Not really, obvs, but cheese and rice, sometimes a blurb will make your knee jerk.
Salmon, once nearly extinct on part of the Columbia River, are recovering, to the delight of birds. As a result, those charged with protecting the fish have a new plan: shoot the birds.
And sure, it's easy to agree that primaries for Congressional seats tend to be dominated by small groups of activists, and that this can lead to outcomes like Senator Ted Cruz. This is the dark side of that Margaret Mead line.
But if your best supporting example is that in a state without a "sore loser" law, Joe Lieberman was nonetheless able to get reelected after losing in the primary . . .
Well, I will just say that your argument is unpersuasive, Mickey Edwards, and so here is a cat riding a Roomba, wearing a shark costume, chasing a duck.
The problem is not extremists getting elected, because of the primary process. The problem is Republican extremists getting elected, and that is something the GOP is going to have to figure out for itself. Meanwhile, as you do point out, you can hold up Christine O'Donnell as a counterexample to Ted Cruz -- come the general election, democracy sometimes works.
Also, points to you, sir, for this:
For one thing, the political “center” is not always the right place to be (it certainly wasn’t in the pursuit of civil rights and women’s rights, or on issues like slavery and child labor). Compassion toward candidates who find their political prospects cut short is also of little interest to me.
Interesting-looking movie, notice of which was passed along to me by my pal Wonderment:
COUNTDOWN TO ZERO traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possess nuclear weapons capabilities with others racing to join them, with the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident. Written and directed by acclaimed documentarian Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground, Blindsight), the film features an array of important international statesmen, including Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair. Magnolia Pictures is releasing the film in North America; HISTORY™ has North American broadcast rights. The film was produced by Academy Award® winner and 2009 nominee Lawrence Bender (Inglourious Basterds, An Inconvenient Truth) and developed, financed and executive produced by Participant Media, together with World Security Institute.
Tons of useful-looking links on that page, as well. Among them: an interview of Valerie Plame Wilson by MoJo's Victoria Rossi, titled "How to Dismantle 23,000 Atom Bombs."
I did not know Lawrence Bender produced An Inconvenient Truth. I thought he was "just a Coffee Shop."
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[Added] Also via Wonderment: a review of the movie.
Fascinating article, describing a study that measured the worth of teachers not by tracking test scores as students got older, but by looking at "adult outcomes." The study was done by economists (as opposed to education theorists, or something of that nature). It looked at "the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s." The claim -- not yet peer-reviewed -- is that having good teachers early in life significantly correlates with better success later in life.
Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not.
I've been telling anyone who would listen since at least my first econ course that the single most effective way to improve our education is to make the job of teaching more lucrative, so that you will have more, better people competing for those jobs. So, obviously, this article falls squarely under the heading of Things I Would Most Like To Believe, and I should probably force myself to be more skeptical about it, starting now, at least until the results described have been more thoroughly scrutinized. Still, it is awfully intriguing.
Yeah, it's a bumper sticker, and you know what I think usually think about those, but I always did like this one:
P.S. Here are the slides (PDF) the researchers used when presenting at a recent academic conference.
Way to stick to it, way to stick with it, Senator Franken.
Never let the right-wing noise machine make you ashamed of your own words, or more importantly, your own beliefs.
