What lies behind us, and what lies before us are small matters
compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Pelosi compared Obama's immigration executive order to the Emancipation Proclamation: did he pardon unauthorized aliens jailed in Mexico?
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) November 22, 2014
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(The Mackinac Center for Public Policy). According to the Michigan Department of Education, Covert High School is among the lower rated in the state. According to the Mackinac Center's just-released report card, it is the top-ranked conventional high school in Michigan.
That's because the state's "Top to Bottom" rankings punish schools for having low-income students.
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/20760
Even if socioeconomic factors explain some of the variance in behavioral outcomes, these factors are irrelevant from a teacher standpoint because they are beyond his or her control. I'm for anything measuring reliable, valid student performance (absolute and incremental), and it's important to diagnose and correct learning issues in core language and math skills in a timely fashion. To deal with at risk schools, we might look at longer school days/years, more utilization of educational software etc. But we should resist efforts to curve performance; ultimately, learning is an individual, not socioeconomic phenomenon.
(Catholics for a Free Market). Big thing in the US, right now. There's a chance that the president will issue an order that would stop initiation of violence against people for the non-crime of moving across political borders without permission from government. The American conservatives are losing their minds over this. Apparently, they believe the government should centrally plan immigration, because something something jobs
There's no good argument against the partial immigration amnesty except that it doesn't go nearly far enough. The constitutional protests are weak. The moral arguments are bankrupt. This could be the most heroic act of a president since Carter's pardoning of draft dodgers.
I'm a fusion libertarian-conservative, and I fully reject the rubbish of Gregory and others who confuse the distinction between conservatives and right-wing authoritarians. I personally favor liberalized immigration; however, Gregory is out of his mind when he hypes the Fascist-in-Chief's "courageous" decision. There was nothing heroic about a politically motivated action that did very little to promote migration beyond the hemisphere.
(IPI). Illinois' unfunded #pension liability is so large today that it would take three years of a complete government shutdown, during which the entire general fund went toward pensions, just to break even. More here: http://illin.is/1v40PIH
Now first of all, I am hardly a fan of the Democratic legislative whores in Springfield. But this self-righteous, self-interested take-away-the-legislator-pensions-not-mine crap is populist rubbish. There are only a few hundred at most former legislators drawing a pension--that is small potatoes compared to the number of other public employees. From the Washington Times:
"Yet the number of six-figure pensions TRS has been doling out has increased 24 percent this year compared to last, with about 6,000 retired educators collecting more than $100,000 annually, according to records obtained by Open the Books, an online aggregator of local spending that tracks educator salaries, pensions and vendor spending.
"The group’s Labor Day report found more than 100,000 retired Illinois educators had been paid back what they invested into the system just 20 months after leaving work, a financial burden linked to union collective bargaining, which can cost taxpayers $2 million or more per teacher over the course of retirement.."
Pensioners paid their fair share month after month after month for their entire working career. State Legislators failed to fund their share and also gave The Chicago Board of Ed Pension Holidays " year after year after year! Money that should have gone into pension funds was allocated to other budgets and spent - never to be reallocated to the pensions. Now state legislators want to balance their monetary woes on retirees backs! Let's look at the state Legislators retirement packages now. Don't touch mine!
No, they did NOT earn million dollar retirements. Parasites think the majority of taxpayers with no pensions owe them more than they could make in social security....
(additional comment)
I don't know how many times I've had to repeat to financially illiterate crony unionist trolls that the Illinois pension system was not set up properly to fund what was promised--the system was not designed to pay over half final pay for up to 30 or more years in retirement; for many Illinois retirees, they will earn more in retirement than the median household income or many young state workers. I don't care how many times the state didn't kick in their 6% or so match: your pension fund is not going to earn enough to pay more than a fraction of that 30 years.
(Reason). Here are 6 responses to Obama's immigration decision that stand out as goofy, at best.
Article is a little too weighted against Republican statements. You forgot to include Nancy Pelosi's statement comparing Obama's decree to the emancipation proclamation.
Pelosi compared Obama's executive order on immigration to the Emancipation Proclamation. What does that mean--he pardoned unauthorized immigrants jailed in Mexico?
(Reason). What do you think about President Barack Obama's immigration plan?
As a libertarian-conservative who believes strongly in free markets and free trade, including liberalized immigration, I would be supportive of enacting legal status of long-term alien residents, but we need temporary work visa reform, more rapid family reunification, and expanded, more regionally balanced immigration, and policy should be reformed through Congress, not be declared by unilateral Presidential edict. There is nothing in his plan which could not have passed Congress; the GOP balked at the path to citizenship vs. legal residency.
The problem is Obama's politicization of the issue; he specifically waited until after the midterms because he knew the executive order did not have popular support. Do we not remember where the administration threatened to release undocumented aliens detained by Arizona troopers after the Arizona immigration bill? That one of the earliest responses of the administration to the sequester was a release of imprisoned aliens? That "prosecutorial discretion" has been cited for years by ICE under Obama? The administration has been caught manipulating statistics, e.g., treating returns as deportations.
These actions do nothing to treat the real reasons for illegal entry including the absence of a viable temporary worker program and inadequate quotas that delay family reunification or crowd out merit-based applicants, including new technical advanced degree graduates, and Obama has probably scotched relevant reform efforts by the new Congress to address immigration. This authoritarian impulse of blackmailing the Congress with executive orders unless they capitulate to his preferred legislation to pay off political chits is unconscionable. This guy did not prioritize immigration when he had a supermajority in Congress.
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