The Capitol Police, who are currently working without pay, are risking their lives to protect Members of Congress, who are still on the payroll. Here’s the Post liveblog.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
The Stones on These Arrogant Fucks
Here’s giant flatulating West Texas asshole Randy Neugebauer (R-TX-19) telling a National Park Ranger that she ought to be “ashamed” for following orders and putting up barricades to close the World War II Memorial because Randy voted for a shutdown.
One of the two people talking in this video are drawing a Federal paycheck right now, and it sure as hell isn’t the woman who has to put up with Randy’s bullying.
(via Benen)
Glasses or iPads?
If you haven’t been following the Los Angeles School District’s efforts to give iPads to every student in the district, the pilot $30 million program to give 31K devices to kids has been halted because the first thing kids did was, surprise, “hack” them so they could look at porn sites and Facebook. Not surprisingly, the half billion or so dollars that this program would cost (there are 640K students in the LASD) might be spent on other educational technology: (via Kevin Drum)
About 250,000 California schoolchildren don’t have the glasses they need to read the board, read books, study math and fully participate in their classes. About 95% of the public school students who need glasses enter school without them. These students are likely to fall behind and to frustrate their teachers and parents.
To address the problem, Austin Beutner, the guy who wrote that op-ed, started a charity called Vision to Learn, which sponsors vans staffed with eye doctors that go to schools and fit kids for glasses. That program has fit 10,000 kids for glasses. I’m sure they didn’t cost almost $1,000 each.
The $30 million for the iPad pilot program came from LASD’s treasury, but the goal was to solicit private donations for the rest. I’d bet those donations would have been forthcoming if iPads weren’t so obviously unsuited for the task at hand. It would have been yet another example of thinking that high tech is magic, while ignoring how the same money could be spent to really improve kids’ lives.
Also, too: an update from the iPad trenches–kids who have them aren’t using them. I know a couple of teenagers who have an iPad, iPhone and Macbook. They’re either using the phone or the laptop, because the phone is always with them and used as a communication device. The laptop is almost as thin and light as an iPad, and the batteries last almost as long in the newer models, so why not have a keyboard if you’re going to drag out the big device? Based on this anecdotal sample, I’d say a Chromebook is a better fit as a free-for-all-kids device, since it is cheaper than an iPad, has a keyboard, and can probably be locked down more tightly than an iPad. Or you could just make sure the kids have 3 square meals a day, headstart, full day kindergarten, books, glasses, medical care, dental care and after school programs. Oh, and well-paid teachers.
Debaser
George Will, who has been a conservative presence on ABC News for more than three decades, is leaving for the Fox News Channel, the cable news network announced on Tuesday.
A Will/Palin Christmas Special in Alaska is an obvious first show idea for George. Maybe now that Will is working in close proximity with Hannity, we might finally fully understand just exactly why browns and poors are so lazy and shiftless. The possibilities are endless, and with George being a spry young lad of 72, he has at least a decade at Fox to completely ruin what little is left of his reputation as a serious conservative.
A Month of Son
If you’re looking for an alternative to reading about the shutdown, Matthew Baldwin is writing for a month about his son, who has classic autism. Here’s the first post. It’s really good.
Here’s an open thread.
Welfare Fraud
Remember the Obamaphone program that gives undeserving poors the luxury of having their own prepaid cell phone so they can talk to each other while they drive to the store in their welfare Cadillacs to buy t-bones and flat screen TVs? Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s full of cheaters:
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday accused five wireless service providers of obtaining duplicate payments from a federal fund for low-income consumers. The FCC wants the companies to repay the extra money and, in addition, to pay $14.4 million in fines.
The wireless providers allegedly violated rules of the Lifeline program, which has helped people afford basic telephone service since 1985. It was expanded to cover pre-paid cell phone service in 2005 under former President George W. Bush.
This wasn’t chump change, either: over three years, the FCC thinks it can reduce overcharging by $2 billion once the 1.1 million duplicates are removed from the program.
The Girl’s Distracted and It’s Just No Use
If this were a normal day, the headline would be the failure of the healthcare.gov and some state exchange websites under crushing load. For example, New York’s had 2 million visits in the first two hours, and it’s now telling those interested in enrolling to come back later.
Since it isn’t a normal day, a story that would lead the news is pushed aside by serious analysts explaining how, exactly, both sides do it, and why Boehner should become the first-ever bipartisan speaker (which would also make him the shortest serving bipartisan speaker, since it would take about 5 minutes for the Republicans to elect someone else).
So. unfortunately, this nice little bit of spin by Obama will probably be lost in the shuffle, and I thought he put it pretty well:
[..] The reason is because more than one million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning. To put that in context, there were five times more users in the marketplace this morning than have ever been on medicare.gov at one time. That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that’s a good thing.And we’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected. Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.
The real reason that things broke is because a bunch of useless contractors were too busy figuring out how to extract every penny out of the government’s pocket to load test their websites, but Obama’s explanation is a little more palatable.
The Girl’s Distracted and It’s Just No UsePost + Comments (112)