More like this, please

Mark Dayton stands up for students, teachers and schools: 

Dayton criticizes new teacher licensing bill
February 17, 2011

St. Paul, Minn. (AP) — Gov. Mark Dayton is criticizing a plan for an alternative way to license new teachers that is now moving through the Legislature....Dayton says the bill doesn't do enough to guarantee that teachers licensed under the proposal would have enough grounding in the subjects they will teach.

He says it is also essential that nonprofit groups that would be allowed to train new teachers partner with existing colleges of education. The bill currently has no such requirement.

And my new favorite David Schultz sums up 30 years of Republican politics:

The basic GOP message on the economy, taxes, and the budget has been smoke and mirrors for 30 years. It has been about cost shifting, fund raiding, program bleeding, living on past spending approaches. It has been about blaming government waste, immigrants, and lazy welfare cheats as the cause of the financial problems we face. It has been about ignoring how the demand for tax cuts to benefit the wealthy have forced a hemorrhaging of the deficit at the national level. It has been about Pawlenty pushing through a law counting inflation for revenue purposes but not for the purposes of state expenditures.

It has been about simply being dishonest about the reality of the budget crisis we are facing. It is about constantly postponing to the future the problems with the present budget and spending scenario. It is about them saying that we do not have a revenue problem but a spending problem. It is about them clinging to a faulty supply theory of economics that is no more than a gloss for tax the poor and give the rich a free lunch.