Get Ready For The Edu-Debt Crisis
By Jeff Bryant
Last week the US House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, passed a bill, H.R. 2117, with the misleading title of The Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act.
The title is misleading because the bill has absolutely nothing to do with "protecting academic freedom" and everything to do with making our country more vulnerable to a rapacious campaign to turn America's entire system of education into an enterprise that can be exploited by corporate rentiers.
The GOP: driving moderates to the Democrats
By Peter Schrag
As Spike Jones used to sing about that Strauss waltz – the Danube ain’t blue, it’s green – California ain’t nearly as blue as the political maps have it. It’s purple. We may vote for Obama, Feinstein, Boxer and all those other Democrats, but we also love our Proposition 13, our term limits, and our three-strikes laws.
We got another reminder of our purpleness – and a lot else besides – from Eric McGhee and Daniel Krimm’s elegant analysis of California’s political geography that PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California, issued last month. The report is at http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_quick.asp?i=1007
McGhee and Krimm crunched a lot of PPIC survey data to produce their political artwork, some of which looks like nothing you’ve ever seen.