Why Amy, you're positively glowing!

In a flash of original micro-journalistic reporting - for which she is so justly famous - Mary Lahammer tweets yesterday:

Why yes, Senator Koch, Japan is in the Eastern Hemisphere; we're in the Western Hemisphere. That fact alone makes it completely different. When it's day here, it's night there! The inapplicability of Japan's nuclear troubles to reactors here could hardly be more obvious! They're the difference between night and day.

We will give the state senator and leader of the Senate - our own Mrs. Malaprop - the benefit of the doubt and believe that she meant "geologically." As if that really made much difference.

People who have been following the expanding nuclear catastrophe in Japan know the problem with the reactors is not the earthquake per se. It's the fact that backup pumps to circulate water to cool the reactors after they shut down have failed. Let me ask you a few questions.

Have your ever had a power failure at home?  

Does your snow blower or lawn mower start up the first time, every time? 

Have you ever had a flashlight, cell phone, or radio quit operating because the batteries went dead?

 Although these are mundane examples, they are exactly the kind of issues that the engineers in Japan are dealing with now. Only they don't have the luxury of waiting for the power to come back on, taking the mower or the blower to the hardware store, or sending out for fresh batteries.

They are, in other words, screwed.

Last Thursday, could these same engineers have conceived of a scenario from which they could not recover? Of course not. This is, of course, the Black Swan, and I don't mean Natalie Portman:

The [Black Swan] theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

Who does #3, especially, remind you of?

Parenthetically (and pathetically, too!), some of you may remember that King Banaian tried to pin the I-35W bridge failure on the Black Swan. That was a frame up, of course, in view of the mounting evidence of the weakness of the bridge available to the MnDOT before the collapse.

(Gee, I wonder how now Rep. Banaian voted on the nuclear power moratorium? I guess I missed his stirring speech about the Black Swan on the floor of the House.)

But nuclear accidents do fit well within the Black Swan modality. Small - vanishingly small - probability of occurrence, but so catastrophic when they do that the only way to avoid the risk is not engage in the behavior at all. Note, too, that vanishingly small doesn't mean almost never; the current reactor meltdowns in Japan (because that is what is happening) is the third nuclear event world wide in thirty years. And only one out of three had anything to do with "geography."

There are so many ways that a commercial-sized nuclear reactor can go wrong that we literally have not thought of yet. It is titanic hubris to believe otherwise. It would also be titanically foolish to accept the blandishments of a word mangler like Amy Koch for the safety of nuclear power.

Horatio Alger is dead

Katherine Kersten: an avatar of America's ignorance about itself

There is no profit in analyzing Katherine Kersten's latest bowl of tripe in any comprehensive way. But here's a summary:

Anybody who thinks that rich people should pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else is just a despicable layabout.

Yes, people who aspire to be somebody don't think that rich people should pay their fair share.

Why?

Because they plan to be rich someday, too. Katie tell us it is in our DNA:

These folks [examples of fictitious people, like Doug Tice's fancy fishmonger, mentioned in one of his op ed's recently] don't resent people who are more prosperous than they are. They admire higher earners who forged their own success, and they hope that they -- or their children -- will be among them. 

Such aspirations are possible in America, which has been called the greatest "anti-poverty program" in history. [probably by Katie herself]

We don't believe that "birth is destiny" -- a notion that holds people back even in advanced nations like France, which walls off its immigrants and restricts the upper class to those who have attended elite universities.

Oh, those fiendish French. Fie on the French! And we love immigrants!

My favorite of the three people that Katie makes up in her column is the engineering student:

Most of us know a college student who earns a pittance at his part-time job, but has -- say -- a promising engineering degree, and plans to parlay it into a productive and economically rewarding career. This young man doesn't resonate to calls for higher taxes on "the rich."

You can tell Katie made him up because - beyond Katie's general reputation for making things up - she uses the word "say."

But I've got some bad news for our pocket-protected eager beaver: the US ranks close to the bottom among several developed nations in economic mobility. Here's a chart from the link:

 Let's see, we beat the Brits, but they still have a monarchy. We're actually behind France - yes France - and Germany. But my favorites are the three leaders: Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Dens of socialist inequity, every one of them.

If there was a poll of the nation with citizens who think they have the most economic mobility, you can bet it would be the United States, including Pocket Protector, above.

Graphic by the great and imaginative Avidor

What this blog needs is a picture of my Mom

So here it is, my 78 year old mother attending her first protest rally on Saturday in Madison. It was her idea, too. Drove from Milwaukee with my brother and sister to meet up with the other sister at the State Capitol to protest the Walker administration's recent moves. To quote one sister, "I had other plans, but we had to change everything and take my mother to a rally with a hundred thousand other people." She's a lifelong member of the Communications Workers of America, married to a member of the International Union of Elevator Constructors. I understand she had a blast.

Who’s insuring this?

A photo on the New York Times website this morning:

Here’s the lede:

TOKYO — An explosion at a crippled nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Saturday blew the roof off one building and caused a radiation leak of unspecified proportions, escalating the emergency confronting Japan’s government a day after an earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of the country’s northeastern coast. 

An explosion occurred at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan after the earthquake. More Photos » 

Japanese television showed a cloud of white-gray smoke from the explosion billowing up from a stricken reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Saturday afternoon, and officials said leaks of radiation from the plant prompted them to expand the evacuation area around the facility to a 12-mile radius. 

Government officials said that the explosion, caused by a build-up of pressure in the reactor after the cooling system failed, destroyed the concrete structure surrounding the reactor but did not collapse the critical steel container inside. They said that raised the chances that they could prevent the release of large amounts of radioactive material and could avoid a core meltdown at the plant. [emphasis added]

It could have been worse! It may well get worse.

The post title is to encourage you to think of who would insure your losses if such a thing happened in a neighborhood near you. Your homeowner’s insurance carrier? Nope. Nuclear hazards are excluded.

I don’t have the link at the moment, but as a matter of federal law, a nuclear plant must carry ten billion dollars in liability insurance. Sounds like a lot.

(Update: The liability insurance carried by nuclear plants is a mutual insurance company owned by the plants themselves; no commercial insurer will touch nuclear plants. I mentioned that in an earlier post but need to make that explicit here.)

Until you try to think of what the value of all the real estate in, say, the Twin Cities metro is.
In theory, the federal government is the “excess” carrier for losses above the ten billion. If you think the Social Security and Medicare are political footballs, imagine what dealing with nuclear disaster liability would be like. Meanwhile, you still have to make the payments on the hacienda that you can’t inhabit for 200 years.

The probability that Minnesota state Senator Julie Rosen and the rest of the eager beavers in the Republican caucus will bring (or brought) up this angle in hearings is pretty small. But the nuclear hazard represents a monumental socialization of a private business’ risk.

And then they came for me

Here’s the lede from a William Rivers Pitt op-ed in Truthout yesterday:

On this day, it behooves us to remember the words of Martin Niemoller.

"First they came for the communists," he wrote, "and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."

And not only Hitler’s Germany, but Mussolini’s Italy abolished trade unions:

On October 28, 1922, after the Fascists had marched on Rome, Mussolini secured a mandate from King Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947) to form a coalition government. In 1925-26, after a lengthy crisis with parliament following the assassination of the Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924), he imposed a single-party, totalitarian dictatorship. His corporative state came to terms with Italian capitalism but abolished free trade unions.

Trade unions are basically banned in Saudi Arabia. Franco’s Spain? Nope. No trade unions.

In fact, you will find that a lack of trade unions is a feature of repressive regimes:

Hence authoritarian power is unlimited in scope. It is all embracing. The government asserts the right to control and regiment every phase of life. In a democratic society power is distributed among plurality of groups. There exist professional associations, trade unions, business organizations and religious institutions like Churches, Mosques and political parties. These institutions keep each other in check thus protecting political freedom. The democratic society encourages competition among political parties and they inhibit monopolies of power. In authoritarian societies there tends to be near total centralization of power in the hands of few.

It is easy to see why authoritarian regimes don’t like trade unions. They’re democracy in the workplace and democracy anywhere is an anathema to a dictator.

Photo of Governor Walker  from the linked Truthout op-ed.

Keep your eye on this fellow

Because you won't want to miss what he brings to the legislative process. By way of the Minnesota Independent, we learn about the enlightened views of Freshman Representative Gruenhagen (R 25A):

[T]here is nothing more destructive — or, one of the most destructive things to a society in term of our women and children and even having economic consequences — is when the male sex drive is released in an uncontrolled and undisciplined way. There — you can’t print up enough money to take care of the consequences of that. So I beseech you as a man to expose the lies that have been permeated through our schools and our culture and of course we know Hollywood is brainwashed disciples of Dr. Albert Kinsey. I use the word "doctor" reluctantly. He’s a filthy, perverted, unscientific liar and his research needs to be exposed. Other than that, I don’t have a lot of opinion on the subject [Laughter]

What's stranger, that the "male sex drive" is one of the most destructive forces or the attacks on researchers who did their work half a century ago? Bluestem Prairie has been on to this gentleman's odd ideas for some time now, as evidenced here and here.

KKK: not from Somalia

From Congressman Keith Ellison’s testimony before Peter King’s HUAC committee this morning:

The best defense against extremist ideologies is social inclusion and civic engagement. FBI Agent Ralph Boelter, head of the Minneapolis FBI, illustrates my point. He led a large scale probe into counterterrorism involving local Somali-Americans heading overseas to fight with a terrorist organization. He is now coming to D.C. to become the Agency’s deputy assistant director in charge of counterterrorism.

Boelter’s strategy: To fight extremism, the Agency needs to establish sincere relationships with the community. “We had to be able to show people they could trust me, trust us,” Boelter said of the local community.

FBI Agent Boelter “showed a side to the FBI that people don’t see,” said Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan. “They needed that. They needed a little more to make their case. And it paid off because of the connections he made. People came forward. He became somebody that they were willing to go to.”

This is an especially difficult task with immigrant groups from countries where talking to the police is a seriously bad idea.

Rally to Save the American Dream in St. Paul 2-26-11

I thought it was be  good day to rerun this one:

Rally to save the American Dream in St. Paul

That was then, this is now.

Kurt Zellers, November 3, 2010, speaking about the upcoming legislative session: "If it isn't about jobs, improving the business climate, it's not a priority."

Nice words right after an election where the Minnesota GOP bent over backwards to avoid answering questions about reproductive freedom. But just this week, Speaker Zellers decided that all that budget and jobs and recovery stuff was no longer the priority and he's decided what is: The "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," House File 936.

The most reported provision is the prohibition of any abortion 20 or more weeks post-fertilization, with no exception for rape or incest. (Proposed Minn. Stat. 145.4144, Subd. 1.) The only exception is for "a condition that so complicates her medical condition as to necessitate the abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or to avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." (Id.) There is also no exception for a fetus that so deformed that it will never survive, an example of which can be found here. Representative Zellers has been kind enough to allow the removal of a dead fetus, but only if the "child" has "died as a result of natural causes in utero, accidental trauma, or a criminal assault on the pregnant woman." (Minn. Stat. 145.4141, Subd. 2.)

But there's much, much more in this bill.

First off, if someone can qualify for these few exceptions, the law requires that any post-20 week abortion be done so it "provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive..." (Minn. Stat. 145.4144, Subd. 2.) No word yet on who picks up the medical costs of any surviving fetus. Maybe they'll be like those Snowflake babies and people will step forward and adopt them and their hundreds of thousands of dollars of NICU bills.

One important provision we're not hearing much about is the bill's stealth "personhood" provisions. In proposed Minn. Stat. 145.4141, Subd. 10, there is a provision that declares that under Minnesota law that an "'Unborn child' or 'fetus' means an individual organism of the species homo sapiens from fertilization until live birth." (Emphasis added.) "Personhood" measures have proven highly unpopular with voters, but this bill sneaks it in with no public debate that I've seen yet.

Because of its ban on abortions after 20 weeks, there is naturally a requirement that a determination of gestational age be made in every case where a woman is seeking an abortion, not just the ones that are 20 weeks post-fertilization. (Minn. Stat. 145.4143.) This provision is little more than a stealth sonogram provision, not unlike the one proposed in Texas recently. And like the one in Texas, it contains no exception for rape, incest, or age.

The bill also contains a series of dubious scientific "findings" that are intended to support the debunked concept of "fetal pain." (Minn. Stat. 145.4142.) All of which are total bullshit.

But what ought to offend anyone who feels they ought to be able to live their life without the officious intermeddling of the busybody down the block, the bill creates a cause of action that allows certain people other than the woman and her doctor to go to court if they think an abortion that violates this law has taken place. Proposed Minn. Stat. 145.4145, Subd. 2 (b) states as follows:

A cause of action for injunctive relief against a person who has intentionally violated sections 145.4141 to 145.4148 may be maintained by the woman upon whom an abortion was performed or induced or attempted to be performed or induced in violation of sections 145.4141 to 145.4148; by a person who is the father of the unborn child subject to an abortion, parent, sibling, or guardian of, or a current or former licensed health care provider of, the woman upon whom an abortion has been performed or induced or attempted to be performed or induced in violation of sections 145.4141 to 145.4148; by a county attorney with appropriate jurisdiction; or by the attorney general. The injunction shall prevent the abortion provider from performing or inducing further abortions in this state in violation of sections 145.4141 to 145.4148.

This garbled section appears to mean that if some busybody thinks that you might have had an abortion that violates this prohibition, that busybody can go to court to seek an injunction against your doctor to prevent the provider from doing it again. But not to worry, Minn/ Stat. 145.4146 would provide "protection of privacy in court proceedings." Unfortunately, the only person whose privacy is automatically protected is the busbody, who "shall [bring the action] under a pseudonym." As for the woman who thinks that her medical decisions ought not be fodder for court proceedings against her doctor? Her anonymity is not automatic, but rather must be determined by the judge hearing the case, and even then only after the judge makes "specific written findings explaining why the anonymity of the woman should be preserved from public disclosure, why the order is essential to that end, how the order is narrowly tailored to serve that interest, and why no reasonable, less restrictive alternative exists." Unless the woman who had the abortion convinces a judge otherwise, her name is going to be made public, but the busybody who initiates a court proceeding about the woman's medical procedure is allowed to proceed under a fake name.

And if you want to challenge the constitutionality of this offensive intrusion into your health care decisions? The Pawlenty-stacked Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over any constitutional challenges.

So much for the promises of Speaker Zellers that anything other than jobs and improving the business climate isn't a priority.

Drinking Liberally Minneapolis-St. Paul presents

An evening with Mayors Chris Coleman and R.T. Rybak, Thursday evening, March 10, 2011. Our gathering starts at six and the program with the Mayors will begin at seven. Here’s a little description of what to expect.

Description of Mayors’ Night at DL Minneapolis-St. Paul

We’ll be at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis. See you there.

 

N.B. Blip.tv seems to be loading a little slowly; you may wish to let the entire 2:00 minute video download before viewing it.

Something even the dimmest bulbs should understand

This is the law that Tom Emmer and Michele Bachmann are complaining about.

From a post at A Tiny Revolution.

Campbell's law redux: Systemic cheating edition

Kudos to the researchers at USA Today newspaper, who investigated standardized test scores in six states, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Ohio. In each case the research found substantial numbers of statistical "anomalies" (read: cheating):

The newspaper identified 1,610 examples of anomalies in which public school classes — a school's entire fifth grade, for example — boasted what analysts regard as statistically rare, perhaps suspect, gains on state tests...There were another 317 examples of equally large, year-to-year declines in an entire grade's scores. 

To people used to the standard narrative this story may seem shocking, but to people familiar with Campbell's Law these results are to be expected. Cheating is the natural result of a process that elevates testing from a diagnostic to a policy tool.

Some of the cheating is openly defended by the practitioners. One superintendent told the newspaper about how his district's strategy of education revolved around teaching kids how to pass tests:

"Yeah, we do that. Everyone does that in America," he says. "There's no secret about the test. It's a standards-based test. We teach to the test."

In California, where hundreds of regular public schools are closing while hundreds of charters are opening the scandal is particularly severe. One hundred twelve such "incidents" were investigated and reported in just the past two years.  In Los Angeles the founder and executive director of a six school charter system "had orchestrated widespread cheating on 2010 tests."

Despite these scandals

"California dropped the audits two years ago because of record budget deficits. And the state no longer collects data on which schools show unusually high rates of erasures on answer sheets — sometimes a clue, experts say, that either students or school officials might be cheating. Total savings: $105,000."

So in a time when test scores are being used to judge teachers, principals and superintendents to an unprecedented degree, scrutiny of those scores is being reduced. Meanwhile cheating has become systemic. California saved $105,000 by discontinuing efforts to ensure there wasn't widespread fraud. That same year the Gates foundation spent $45 million on a  bogus study that aimed to prove that teacher quality could be determined by the test scores of their students. The longer the education deform movement goes on the more absurd it becomes.

On losing credibility

The fate of fibbers

In this morning’s Star Tribune, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan [indistinct muttering under breath] had a glowing op-ed about Minnesota’s new alternate licensure statute, signed yesterday. One of the things he glowed about was this:

Teach For America, the nation's best-known alternative certification program, has made teaching a hot profession again for an entire generation of bright, committed college graduates. But to operate in Minnesota, TFA had to receive a special waiver.

Of course, now it will be much easier to bring in these five-week wonders to a low income school near you.

But as is so often the case when I read absurd remarks like this, it puts me in mind of something that Rob Levine wrote:

TFA teachers are worse than regularly-certified teachers

"...studies indicate that the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers."

And as always, Rob has the goods to back him up.

TFA teachers can catch up, but most of them are gone before they do. (They only actually commit to teach for two years.) The TFAers aren’t entering a profession; it’s just a little resume builder. Many TFAers probably don’t even realize they’re pawns in a much bigger political game.

But here’s the point. When you catch someone in an audacious, barefaced lie in court, it destroys his credibility for anything he says.

And Arne Duncan is a liar.

Vallay of deception

I don't know if Vallay Varro, the executive director of MinnCAN is ignorant, a liar, or both. Either way she takes readers of the Star Tribune on a fantasy ride in an op-ed this morning. Give Varro credit: she's a master of deceit, playing on conventional wisdom that has demonized school teachers for decades. Almost nothing that Varro writes in her op-ed is true, but it sure sounds like it could be. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote, liars have an advantage over truth-tellers:  They are free to say what listeners have already been conditioned to believe.Thus Varro can tell this whopper without batting an eyelash:

Decades of research have confirmed that teachers matter more to student success than anything else.

Uh, no. That's not even close to being true.  "Decades of research" have confirmed that the number one predictor of student success is their parent's income. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of educational achievement is fundamentally linked to factors outside of schools. The remaining 30 to 40 percent is divided between the school, classroom and teacher. Half of that is due to the school itself. Only 15 to 20 percent is linked to the classroom. How much of that remaining 15 to 20 percent is linked to a specific teacher is an open question. Previous Star Tribune anti-teacher propaganda has at least had the decency to use the caveat that teachers are the most important factor in learning within the schools. But not Varro. She for some reason feels the need to extend the lie.

Varro then builds off her wrong assertion that the path to higher educational achievement is primarily dependent on teachers, making unproven claims about teacher quality:

The top 20 percent of U.S. teachers produce learning gains for their students that are three times those of the bottom 20 percent. 

Varro pulled that one out of thin air. Attempts to rank teachers by their students' test scores have proven remarkably unreliable, as many researchers have pointed out. A teacher who scores in the top 20 percent of such rankings one year could easily be in the bottom 20 percent the next.  A study titled Review of Learning About Teaching by Jesse Rothstein found that

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher’s estimated “value-added”—computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students—as a measure of teaching effectiveness...

...value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.

The rest of Varro's column rests on the false assertions that teachers are the most important factor in student learning, that their "performance" can be accurately computed from the test scores of their students, and that 20 percent of teachers don't do their jobs well. From there it's an easy logical leap to assume that if we could replace the "lowest performing" 20 percent of teachers with 20 percent of the "highest performing" teachers educational gaps would disappear. Garbage in, garbage out.

Hailing a recently passed bill in the Minnesota legislature loosening teacher standards, Varro writes approvingly of Teach For America (TFA):

".. through proven programs like Teach For America and others, we can really begin to recruit the next generation of our nation's leadership into Minnesota classrooms."

Teach for America is anything but a "proven program." The reality may be just the opposite. Studies have shown that TFA teachers produce significantly worse results than conventionally trained teachers for math and reading students in the first few years of their careers. Additionally 50 percent of TFA teachers leave by the end of their second year, 80 percent by the end of their third year. Their short tenure imposes financial and educational burdens on the school districts that hire them. How can TFA recruits be the leadership in our classroom if they don't even stay in the profession?

There's also one other curious thing about TFA in the column. Varro writes about how MinnCAN is "calling for legislation" (remember, MinnCAN is a501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity) that

"...would implement a five-year probationary period to prevent effective teachers from unfair tenure decisions based on too little data and prevent ineffective teachers from premature tenure."

This provision would have the effect taking tenure away from many traditionally trained teachers for at least two years, while not affecting TFA teachers in any way - by the end of their third year 80 percent are gone, and by the fifth year hardly any of them are still around. In at least one state cohort (Louisiana) only four percent remained after five years.

Finally, Varro's illogical and ignorant op-ed raises a troubling question: Doesn't anyone else wonder why we would take advice about how to educate our children from people who literally cannot think straight?

No irony here

A tweet in Hot Dish Politics’ twitter feed from Mitch this AM:

And moments later, one from the Monkee:

Mayors’ night at Drinking Liberally!

The next Drinking Liberally meeting, on Thursday, March 10th, with be a two-fer, a double header, a twin bill, a . . . well, you get the idea. Chris Coleman, the Mayor of St. Paul, and R.T. Rybak, the Mayor of Minneapolis, will both be featured guests. They’ve each been to Drinking Liberally before and made excellent and well-received presentations.

The topic for the evening will be city budgets, local government aid, and the legislative session currently underway.

And if that isn’t enough, we’ll start the evening with a round of Mayors’ Trivia. Mayors Coleman and Rybak will each bring some questions about the history and politics of his respective city to put to the crowd. There will be prizes (small) and instant fame for, and admiration of, the winners.

Drinking Liberally meets on Thursday evenings from six to nine PM at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis.

The program with Mayors Coleman and Rybak will start around seven.

Sue & Mitch: manure salespesons of the year

A tweet by any other name would smell as ripe:

The number, of course, came from a Department of Administration flak in the Walker administration. The truth, naturally, is different:

My office is one block from Capitol Square in Madison so I’ve spent several lunch hours among the crowds inside and outside the building. For over two weeks tens of thousands of demonstrators concerned about changes to collective bargaining arrangements proposed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have marched around, passed through and occupied the building 24 hours a day, setting up an indoor community complete with first aid and information stations, child care, sleeping quarters, a family respite wing, a speaker’s stage at the center of the rotunda, live entertainment, and a steady stream of food called in by people around the world. The number of demonstrators camped out overnight in the capitol building has ranged from over a thousand to a less than a hundred in recent days after police were ordered to restrict access. During daytime hours crowds inside the building have reached shoulder-to-shoulder capacity. On weekend days crowds on Capitol Square have reached 50-70,000. Images and video of raucous crowds drumming and chanting in the rotunda have flooded websites. On day ten of the ongoing protests Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz estimated that around 500,000 people had spent time in the building.

"Keep our house clean" sign in the capitol building.

This incredibly heavy use raises concerns about the impact of such crowds on the fabric of the building itself. Last Friday night I walked through the building to see the impact thousands of protesters were having. The Wisconsin State Capitol is a typical early-twentieth-century Beaux-Arts state capitol – monumental and cavernous with a soaring rotunda and marble and granite finishes everywhere. It was designed by the New York firm of George B. Post & Sons and completed in 1917. The building is noted for its decorative program, featuring sculptural groupings in each of the four wings, and dome paintings and mosaics by nationally prominent artists. Chambers and caucus rooms feature rich furnishings and hardwood finishes and are decorated with art and antiques from two former capitol buildings on the site.  In the late 1990s and early 2000s a full restoration/rehabilitation was completed.

This is a from a post by Jason Tish, the executive director of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation and a local field representative for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Here’s another report from a television station in Madison:

MADISON (WKOW) -- The Department of Administration now says the damage estimate at the state Capitol could be $350,000.

At a court hearing Thursday over access to the Capitol, the DOA estimated the cost to be about $7.5 million.

The DOA says that was a "high-end" estimate. They say the $350,000 would cover a crew to perform "very limited" restoration on the marble as well as landscape restoration, according to an AP report.

DOA originally said it could cost between $60,000 and $500,000 just to assess the building's condition. [emphasis added]

Protester numbers inside the Capitol have peaked at around 5,000.

The Wisconsin Department of Administration – Governor Walker’s Administration – was clearly just making it up in court. And Mitch and Sue were happy to pass it along.

Mitch or your lyin' eyes?

The mantra of education deformers is to find "what works" and replicate it. They are fixated on numbers and statistics about "education gaps," "value-added measures," test scores, and closing "low performing" schools.

But what to do when the numbers don't go their way? Honest advocates might admit their rhetorical opponents have a point and go from there. Mitch Berg has a different idea: distract with sophistry and denial and hope nobody notices that he's made a fool of himself.

Case in point: Almost a year ago I cataloged the lengthening list of charter schools that have crashed and burned in Minnesota. I didn't have to do much research for the post - the Minnesota DOE has a publicly available spreadsheet of all the charter schools that have been closed in the state with a brief reason for their closures.

My post also added as an addendum a Strib story about the the "state's lowest-performing 32 schools." At the time I wrote:

Of those, 11 are charters. That means 11 of 154 charter schools are failing, a failure rate of seven percent. Twenty one of the failing 32 are regular public schools; there are 2,485 regular public schools in the state,  giving a failure rate of  less than one percent.  So by the Minnesota DOE's own numbers, charter schools in Minnesota are failing at a rate seven times greater than regular public schools.

So by the Pawlenty-run Minnesota DOE's own standards, fully seven percent of the state's charter schools were among the worst 32 performing schools in the state; only one percent of regular public schools were cited in the 32.  It's really not hard to do the math. Mitch Berg knows that these statistics drive a stake into the heart of arguments for more charter schools, which is why he must try to find a way around them. But there is none.

The other day Berg noted my comparison of the different school failure rates, but went on to say that (emphasis added):

Which, if you think about it, is a really pointless statistic.  Charter schools can fail - and sometimes they do. ...If they are badly-managed, they can close ..What happens when a district school, or an entire district is badly-managed?  They ram through a tax levy (and if the DFL gets its way, they won't even have to ram it past voters) and fix things...

I won't bore you with the rest of Berg's post, which is just obfuscation and misdirection.  So what if charter schools can be closed and regular public schools cannot, which, by the way, isn't true, either. Ever heard of North High School?

The Minnesota DOE report wasn't about closing the "lowest performing" schools - it was merely about which 32 schools in the state, according to graduation rates and test scores, were the lowest performing. Period. Hard stop. A charter school was seven times more likely to be on that list that a regular public school.

I understand that this is a disheartening reality for Berg, given the propaganda that he and his fellow advocates routinely spread about the wonders of charter schools. Arguing for a system of education that produces results that are seven times worse than regular public schools is a daunting task.  This might be fun political fighting for Berg and his cohorts, but how many children are they willing to sacrifice for a failed experiment?

I'm guessing a lot because the real issue for the deformers is not about achievement gaps, or helping poor and minority children do better in school. The real issue for Berg, et. al. is the privatization and commercialization of public education and the destruction of teachers' unions. And for those ends, no amount of sophistry is too much.

Pushing the Jews into the sea

Well, not exactly.

This is from a Facebook page about the Palestinians. You might want to read Lebensraum Revisited.
A thump of the tail to Charley Underwood.

Indiana wants me!

Lord, I can’t go back there. That’s a problem, of course, if you’re the Secretary of State:

Secretary of State Charlie White, the top election official in Indianapolis [meaning the Capitol of Indiana], is facing seven felony counts, including voter fraud, perjury and theft, all connected to what a prosecutor said was an attempt to hold on to his seat on the town council even though he was living outside of his designated district.

Spotty, is he a Democrat or a Republican?

What do you think, grasshopper?

According to the report, the Republican White has already admitted to the facts sufficient to constitute the offenses, unless he was insane.

Of course, Spotty, it isn’t against the law if you’re a Republican.

You know, grasshopper, you’re right, but Indiana has voter ID. It should have saved this man from his forgetfulness.