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While Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan prepares to shut down the federal government to prove that government is bad, analysts say the radical agenda of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suffered a major set back today as his good friend incumbent Justice David Prosser was defeated for Wisconsin Supreme Court. The AP unofficial vote count with 100% of precincts reporting puts challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg ahead by slightly more than 200 votes. A recount is doubtless on the way.
In a state that has never unseated a conservative Supreme Court Justice, people power fueled a concentrated effort to deny the Imperial Walker one branch of government. Walker’s opponents hope a Kloppenburg victory will swing the Supreme Court in a more independent direction and set the stage for the court to strike down Walker’s controversial collective bargaining

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled a draft budget resolution for 2012. Ryan’s program would privatize Medicare and gut Medicaid.

In the years that followed, my ex would go to a high-powered divorce lawyer in Manhattan, who would say to him, “Oh, Christ! Not another one. If I had a penny for every time a man comes in here saying that his wife ‘found herself’!” Then, it was wounding: a line of men, teeth bared, baleful gazes, waiting for one of the women before them to try to break through and run. Now, I cheer, and I hope that guy has an office overflowing with pennies.
But for us, divorce did not end up as a pitched, expensive battle in the courtroom over money or custody.
Charlie Sheenesque antics are easy to understand. Growing apart is not.
The night that comes to me is the moment, as good as any other, when I knew it was

They say there is some truth to every stereotype — that generalizations passed down as fact have some universal merit. Models and actresses and their intelligence levels. Pakistanis and their religious zealotry. Veena Malik and her supporters would vociferously disagree on all

College conservatives have a problem. It starts with ‘R’, rhymes with ‘adicalism’, and it’s threatening to erode what popular support conservative ideas have on college campuses across the nation. Radical organizations on the right, in hopes of garnering more attention for their ideas, have resorted to increasingly provocative tactics to spread their message on America’s college campuses. And to some degree, it’s been

Government employees are easy scapegoats. When it’s time to balance the budget, Congress cuts programs and payrolls. Even the president announced a pay freeze this past December and the partisan rhetoric surrounding the potential shutdown often portrays civil servants as villains as opposed to victims.
The reality is that a government shutdown sends people home without pay. That’s right: government employees that find themselves furloughed on Friday night will not be enjoying some cushy paid vacation from

Yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) released a budget resolution for next fiscal year that would slash federal spending by roughly $5.8 trillion over the next decade, while simultaneously cutting taxes by $4.2 trillion, relative to current law. Roughly $1.4 trillion would be stripped from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to finance regressive tax cuts. This proposed House Republican 2012 budget mirrors much of Ryan’s previously floated Roadmap for America’s Future, a plan to gradually eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while eliminating all investment and corporate income taxes. A conservative agenda of redistributing wealth from the poorest to the privileged has been unveiled for all to

In the years that followed, my ex would go to a high-powered divorce lawyer in Manhattan, who would say to him, “Oh, Christ! Not another one. If I had a penny for every time a man comes in here saying that his wife ‘found herself’!” Then, it was wounding: a line of men, teeth bared, baleful gazes, waiting for one of the women before them to try to break through and run. Now, I cheer, and I hope that guy has an office overflowing with pennies.
But for us, divorce did not end up as a pitched, expensive battle in the courtroom over money or custody.
Charlie Sheenesque antics are easy to understand. Growing apart is not.
The night that comes to me is the moment, as good as any other, when I knew it was

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Phillip Greaves gets probation for 'paedophile guide'

April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, and I’d like to honor the importance of this month by discussing a form of sexual assault that is a critical issue still affecting women and girls — acquaintance rape and its lack of prosecution.
While many of us tend to think of “stranger danger” and dark alleys when we think of rape, the reality is that acquaintance rapes account for over 70 percent of all sexual assaults. The nature of acquaintance rape and society’s reaction to it often present further problems for victims beyond coping with what happened to them.
Acquaintance rapes are the least frequently reported type of sexual assault and the hardest to prosecute. Often the perpetrator of the assault claims the sexual contact was consensual, and there are usually no witnesses. The lack of “hard” evidence in acquaintance rape allegations results in many cases being thrown out by law enforcement agencies or

I did not support the U.S. decision to intervene with military force in Libya. The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent. Policies other than military intervention were never given a full

The second rendition of CicLAvia is this Sunday, April 10 from 10 am to 3 pm. If it’s anything like the first one, you can expect to see thousands of your fellow Angelenos enjoying their city in a way that just isn’t possible the rest of the year. They’ll be strolling down the middle of the 4th Street Bridge marveling at the beauty of the river and the skyline. They’ll be skating into Koreatown on 6th Street admiring the architecture of the First Congregational Church and the Korean Philadelphia Presbyterian Church (originally Temple

My first month as a student teacher, as I absorbed the humiliation of my ineptitude, it was not exactly reassuring to discover that the teachers supervising me had, the semester before, declined to recommend that student teacher for a credential. They tried to reassure me that I was doing much better than she had — which I found difficult to believe. She was, they told me, a very nice woman who meant well but didn’t seem to understand the basic objective of teaching — and wasn’t willing to learn it. They said the decision to deny her was a difficult one.
But they had made

We are at a critical juncture in our nation’s educational system. It’s rare to pick up a newspaper today without seeing stories of school closings or massive budget cuts. The future of our children’s education is currently a big question mark, but we can’t just wait around for something to be done about it. While the debate continues about how to reform our education system, a damaging achievement gap — the disparity amongst children from low-income families in under-resourced communities and their more affluent counterparts — continues to persist and widen in our schools.
The achievement gap is more than poor grades; it often puts kids at a disadvantage in comparison to their peers and can set them up for confidence and self-esteem struggles throughout

“I sat in my bed and stared blankly.” “My nerves were overwhelmed.” “I had a raised heart rate, increased anxiety and was panicking.” “It felt as though I was being tortured.” “Emptiness overwhelmed me.”
How would you feel if you had to go without media for 24 hours? A thousand students in ten countries on five continents — from Chile to China, Lebanon to the USA, Uganda to the United Kingdom — abstained from using any media for a full day. No Internet, no newspapers, no magazines, no TV, no mobile phones, no iPods, no movies, no Facebook, no Twitter, no chat, no Playstation, no Wii, no video games.
The five statements above? All from the college students who went unplugged — in Hong Kong, Chile, England, the US and Mexico.
Take a look at the world UNPLUGGED, a new study about how 17-25 year olds use media. The project led by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, together with 11 partner universities at the Salzburg Academy of Media & Global Change in Salzburg, Austria, concluded that students’ ‘addiction’ to media may not be clinically diagnosed, but the cravings sure seem real – as do the anxiety and the depression.
Here’s another a sampling of the almost half a million words written by the students about abstaining from all media for a

The near collapse of the financial system that set off the global crisis was due in part to financial institutions suddenly lacking access to funding markets, and liquidity drying-up across securities markets.
Many financial institutions were unable to roll over or obtain short term funding without sustaining significant losses. This threatened to sink them.
Financial institutions did not factor in how their own responses to a liquidity shortfall could make the entire system shut down and less stable–that is, they underestimated their contribution to systemic liquidity risk in good times, and did not bear the cost of their actions on others in bad times.
It only takes a few institutions to pull the plug on a liquidity-filled bathtub before it runs dry, and the central bank needs to open the spigots again.
The key then is to make sure that firms have less incentive to pull the plug. This requires establishing the right incentives in the good times.
We argue that more needs to be done to introduce macroprudential policies-ones that take into account the big picture of the financial system as a

So you want a government shutdown? Let’s have a real one. If the solons in Congress can’t find a way to find compromise amidst their admittedly huge differences with respect to the federal budget, let’s skip the halfway measures. Shut the whole darn thing down. No maintaining of “essential” services — after all, as the Tea Partiers will tell you, nothing the feds do is really essential to the nation’s

Rahm just doesn’t get it.
Back in February, a group of Chicago Public Schools high-schoolers busted Chicago mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel’s chops in a YouTube video for making false statements about charter schools on the campaign trail:
Rahm had claimed that, outside of two selective enrollment CPS high schools, the seven top-performing high schools were charters. The students didn’t think that sounded right, did some research, and found out that, in fact, none of the top seven were charter schools, and they explained that in their video.
That didn’t stop Rahm, though. He used the same false statement last month at a student forum. The Sun-Times actually ran an inset to the story correcting Rahm’s assertion, a public tsk-ing almost unheard of in Chicago’s mainstream media.
Then, Monday, he did it

It’s that time of year again in Rwanda. April 6th marks the anniversary of the plane crash that triggered one hundred days of genocide in 1994. But in the words of William Faulkner, “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.”
I am traveling across Rwanda with friends from the US, UK and

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no rapport with us. We are therefore capable of knowing neither what He is nor if He is.”
– Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 233)
Ever since Galileo hoisted his telescope to the skies and shattered the myth of celestial perfection, science has relentlessly hammered away at the edifice of religion. Where once science served to explain the ways of God to man, it now explains away the need for God altogether.
Though zoologist Richard Dawkins may perhaps be the most famous atheist among scientists, no branch of science produces more exponents of atheism than

One of the nice things about Republicans when they get into positions of power is that they do our side favors by clarifying very quickly how extreme their ideas are. Newt Gingrich did it in 1995 with talk of sending kids to orphanages and cutting school lunch programs, along with his whining about having to sit in the back of Air Force One and that little shutdown-of-all-government thing. Now Paul Ryan, on behalf of the entire Republican Caucus in the House, is joining Scott Walker and other GOP Governors in doing the same.
With his proposal, Ryan will radically cut and privatize Medicare, ending the guarantee of health care to our senior citizens; radically cut Medicaid and throw it into a block-grant program that will end any guarantee of coverage for the poor, people with disabilities, and many, many children; deliver breathtakingly large tax cuts to the wealthy while raising taxes for the middle class. As far as I can tell, more than 90 percent of his cuts impact either low-income people or senior citizens who are currently middle class but might no longer be if these Social Security and Medicare cuts go

In Egypt, a young woman stood in the streets and screamed for an overthrow of government — then posted the video on YouTube. In Tunisia, “Thank you Facebook” was scrawled on a building during a protest in the capital. In Syria, one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, young people use the Internet to leak footage of police officers murdering demonstrators.
Canada is one of the most computer literate countries in the world, with a high level of social media penetration. How will young Canadians use these tools during the federal election campaign?
Will they use Facebook to organize a 20,000-person rally for a carbon tax, or call a sit-in on one of our dwindling glaciers? Call flash mobs across major cities to protest the funding gap in First Nations education?
Or will total immersion in interactive media redefine the notion of transparency in government? Call them the online cohort: the kids who grew up with 24-hour news cycles, unlimited access to information, and the ability to follow the mundane activities and intimate thoughts of hundreds of friends.
This generation has a sense of entitlement that will demand involvement, consultation and collaboration in the process of governing.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were found in contempt of Parliament for failing to produce detailed spending