Incarceration Nation
Most of us here already realize that the US has about 1/4 of the world's incarcerated prisoners, about 2.8 million people total. But imagine you treated that population as its own country. That helps put some of the data in context, as you can see in this piece at Alternet. The article has a map with the intensity of the color of the state matching the rate of incarceration. No surprise, the sta
Eugene Robinson on The GOP’s growing divide
The Republican Party, which should have the wind at its back, enters 2014 in disarray bordering on open warfare. That is how the Pulitzer Prize winner begins this column in today's Washington Post The "should" can be derived from the recent CNN poll showing a 5 point preference for a generic Republican over a generic Democrat for Congress, at 49-44, a significant turn-around in the last
12-26-13 teacherken at Daily Kos: Public Education Under Siege
Daily Kos: Public Education Under Siege: Public Education Under SiegeIn an important postrevolutionary essay on education, eighteenth-century journalist Samuel Harrison Smith wrote that the free play of intelligence was central to a democracy, and that individual intellectual growth was intimately connected to broad-scale intellectual development to the "general diffusion of knowledge" a