Preznit Economypants

Steve Benen:
* As of today, the Dow Jones is lower now than it was the day Bush took office in 2001.
I’m not a fan of using the DJIA as a measurement for success, personally, as it doesn’t include quality of life, or, you know, the majority of Americans, but damn. By his own standard [...]

The guy that got the economy right

The New York Times profiles Nouriel Roubini:
On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing [...]

[LCSD] Mary Northern

I just ran across a comment from Mary Northern on last week’s LE editorial. I am, frankly, floored. Speechless. I’m going to try and go through this comment, but know that my initial reaction was something on the order of ‘holy shit’.
Caveat: While it is technically possible this is not actually [...]

Parking at OSU

I have a question: What authorizes OSU to kick everyone out of staff and student permitted parking lots on game days and then charge for those spaces?
I’ve looked at the OSU Parking Services website as well as the OARs that govern OSU parking (yes, they exist, and there’s a fair amount of them), and [...]

Torture!

Just read the whole damn post, but in case you don’t, read this much:
The at-home mission does not take the place of scheduled combat-zone deployments and will take place during the so-called dwell time a unit gets to reset and regenerate after a deployment.
…
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd [...]

Bailout Shenanigans

Tristero over at Hullabaloo has an insight about the bailout BS:
This isn’t about obstreperous Republicans blocking a needed financial bailout because it doesn’t fit some whacked ideology. This is about a campaign bailout. McCain’s campaign bailout.
It’s about winning elections, not governing a country. This, of course, creates problems, since the winner has to actually, [...]

This has been a bad week for politics

The massive financial bailout and the scary shit surrounding it aside, can you believe this shit:
National Review’s Mark Krikorian notes that (1) Washington Mutual became the largest bank to fail in American history yesterday and (2) its last press release touted the fact that it was named one of America’s most diverse employers…
…
While juxtaposing these [...]

[LCSD] Concerned Parent Questionnaire

Lebanon Truth hits the two main problems with the concerned parent questionnaire. The first:
…one of the fundamental polling principles is that you need to question a representative sample in order to obtain useful data.
Even if the people behind the questionnaire tried to do this, there’s no guarantee they’d be successful in finding a representative [...]

[LCSD] Who is funding the anti-recall campaign?

Word has it there are both anti-recall shirts and large (4′ x 8′) signs around Lebanon. Lots and lots of them.
Neither of those things, especially T-shirts, are cheap.
So who is footing the bill? With CARES, it’s obvious – most of their donors have been named. They formed a PAC and followed state [...]

[LCSD] Math Score Comparisons

CARES member Tre’ Kennedy was handing these out at the last board meeting. I’m not going to go in depth, but I did notice a few things when looking them over (click each table to see a larger image):
1) The Sand Ridge scores are not very good. The last two tables in particular [...]

Oops

From the WSJ:
In what is by far the largest bank failure in U.S. history, federal regulators seized Washington Mutual Inc. and struck a deal to sell the bulk of its operations to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
And to think, the nice man who I had to talk to get my money out of WaMu [...]

[LCSD] "In defense of LHS math teacher"

An LHS student writes a letter to the editor. My favorite part:
Mr. Helland not only grades in such a way that gives ample time for his students to better comprehend what he is teaching, but he offers his time as well. He offers his own personal time to help students with individual problems well [...]

[LCSD] City-wide wifi for students

This is awesome:
LEBANON — The city of Lebanon has partnered with the Lebanon Community School District on a project to share Internet access.
Lebanon, having expanded its wireless internet access points to around 80 transmitters throughout the city, will tap into the schools’ fiber optic lines to increase wifi connection speeds.
Increased connectivity will hopefully allow more [...]

[LCSD] Observation

My addled brain is too gone right now to come up with much else, but:
The Lebanon recall election is mirroring national politics in that I see a ton of misinformed people shouting at the top of their lungs and focusing on character assassination more than anything else.
This is not intended as a compliment.

Good column on Obama

From Nicholas Kristof in the NYT:
Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.
In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. [...]