Donald Trump ~ STFU

(CNN) - Donald Trump – who has a habit of picking personal fights with anyone who publicly challenges him – is now targeting legendary actor Robert De Niro, whom Trump says is "not the brightest bulb on the planet."

"I like his acting, but in terms of when I watch him doing interviews and various other things, we're not dealing with Albert Einstein," Trump said on Fox News Monday.
The comments follow recent remarks from De Niro to NBC News, during which the Academy Award-winning actor suggested Trump was acting "crazy."
"I won't mention names, but certain people in the news in the last couple weeks, just what are they doing? It's crazy. They're making statements about people that they don't even back up," he said in reference to Trump. "Go get the facts before you start saying things about people."
"It's like a big hustle. It's like being a car salesman," he added. "Don't go out there and say things unless you can back them up. How dare you? That's awful to do. To just go out and speak and say these terrible things? Unless you just want to get over and get the job. It's crazy."
Trumps harsh response follows a similarly vitriolic lash out at Jerry Seinfeld, after the comedian, citing Trump's birther claims against President Obama, canceled his performance at a charity event organized by Trump's son.
That prompted Trump to write a strongly worded letter to Seinfeld, in which the potential presidential candidate knocked Seinfeld's recently-cancelled show on NBC.
"What I do feel badly about is that I agreed to do, and did, your failed show, 'The Marriage Ref,' even though I thought it was absolutely terrible," Trump wrote. "Despite its poor ratings, I didn't cancel on you like you canceled on my son and St. Jude. I only wish I did."
Trump also took aim at Karl Rove last week after the former Bush strategist said it was unwise for the potential presidential candidate to question the president's citizenship:
"Karl Rove has a loser issue... [he] is the man that ran Bush into the ground," Trump responded. "Bush finished so weak that we ended up getting Obama. He ran the man into the ground."

It's All Over but the Shouting. And Screaming. And Burning.

Judgement Day  (The Sarah Connor Chronicles)

That's right, folks.  Last night, April 19, 2011, at 11:11pm Eastern time, it is told that the Skynet system went online, (at least according to the Terminator franchise.)

And ... Skynet first becomes self-aware tomorrow, April 21, 2011.

We are DOOMED!

Gunning for Power

"Administration Working To Forge Gun Control Compromise"

The Washington Post reports the White House "announced Monday that the administration is starting a series of sessions with leaders on both sides of the gun control issue to try to reach compromise on legislation to reduce gun violence." The meetings "come after President Obama called Sunday for greater enforcement of gun control laws and better background checks. ... Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group started by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is expected to be involved in the discussions, but administration officials will also reach out to groups generally opposed to tighter gun restrictions." ....

NRA Declines To Participate In White House Talks The New York Times says the National Rifle Association "is refusing to join the discussion - possibly dooming it from the start, given the lobby's clout with both parties in Congress."

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And THAT is what's wrong with the system.

Statistically Doomed

This is despicable. It is wrong and aggravating and an example of EXACTLY what will happen all over the country. We will look back on this period of time in decades to come and mark it as a period of reactionary failure by those in charge of the system. Children of this era will in fact lose ground educationally.

No system will retain talented and competent teachers – because those that are in fact talented and competent, no matter how dedicated, will not stand for it. For all the abuses of the systems that have been put in place (and yes, there are many), you cannot avoid the “real” and ”practical” in favor of pure statistical analysis.

We have seen it, and are constantly arguing it in the area of health care quality measures. These companies rate entire hospitals and systems and services in statistically incorrect manners. Yet paint it as the end-all and be-all , with uber-complicated formulas and oversimplified pretty graphs…. And they sell it (for their own profit) as a tool for people to “choose” which hospital to go to. When pressed, they point to a one-line caveat in tiny print at the bottom of a web page that supposedly exonerates them from responsibility.

We also have seen it in baseball, where Moneyball originally was touted as the perfect way to quantify players’ performances. And over time, it has been proven that it does not work like that – that the accurate measurement of performance is NOT so clinically analyzed.

And because of politics & cronyism and bad appointments, the people that are put/elected into power are NOT knowledgeable in this area. These people are sometimes (often) NOT the sharpest tools in the shed. Add to that the fact that the citizenry is biased, reactionary, and over-emotional on the subject …. And mob mentality takes over.

We have set ourselves up to ruin the HELL out of the system & the kids who must go through it.

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Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie

By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 6, 2011 The New York times


No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30.
Related in Opinion

Though her principal praised her work, Stacey Isaacson received a poor ranking in a statistical model used by New York City schools to evaluate teachers.
“She’s very dedicated,” said Tejal Bahtt, a fellow teacher. “She works way harder than I work. Yesterday I punched in at 7:10 and her time card was already there.”
Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.
Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. “I know that this year had its moments of challenge — you always handled it with grace and presence,” the principal wrote on May 4, 2009. “You are a wonderful teacher.”
On the first day of this school year, the principal wrote, “I look forward to being in your classroom and seeing all the great work you do with your students,” and signed it with a smiley face.
The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.
“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”
You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.
According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.
This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”
That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.
She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.
“I love teaching,” she said. “I love my principal, I feel so lucky to work for her. But the people at the Department of Education — you feel demoralized.”
How could this happen to Ms. Isaacson? It took a lot of hard work by the accountability experts.
Everyone who teaches math or English has received a teacher data report. On the surface the report seems straightforward. Ms. Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students were predicted to get a 3.69 — based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.
What you would think this means is that Ms. Isaacson’s students averaged 3.57 on the test the year before; they were predicted to average 3.69 this year; they actually averaged 3.63, giving her a value added of 0.06 below zero.
Wrong.
These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as “the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”
Right.
The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”
Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.
The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.
Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.
In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.
But that is only a guess.
Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.
Teachers are eligible for tenure in their third year. To qualify, a teacher must be rated “effective” in three categories: instructional practices, including observations by the principal; contribution to the school community; and student achievement, including the teacher data report. Ms. Isaacson was rated effective on the first two.
The past chancellor, Joel I. Klein, imposed new policies to make tenure harder to earn.
In an e-mail, Matthew Mittenthal, a department spokesman said: “We are saying that a teacher’s tenure decision should simply be delayed (not denied) until that teacher has demonstrated effective practice for consecutive years in all three categories. The alternative is what we’ve had in the past — 90-plus percent of teachers who are up for tenure receive it. Do you think journalists deserve lifetime jobs after their third year in the business?”
The view seems to be gaining support.
However, the number of years that it should take to earn tenure does not get to the heart of the problem.
The tougher question, says Ms. Isaacson, is how to create a system that will fairly evaluate teachers, whether it is used to grant tenure or lay off teachers. “I don’t have a problem looking at teachers based on merit,” she said. “Every job I had, I was evaluated based on merit.”
Marya Friedman, a sophomore at Bronx Science, describes Ms. Isaacson as brimming over with merit. “I really liked how she’d incorporate what we were doing in history with what we did in English,” Marya said. “It was much easier to learn” — which, of course, is what great teachers strive for.

R.I.P. JD & Holden... You Always Held to Your Principles

'Catcher In The Rye' Author J.D. Salinger Dies At 91
by Neda Ulaby - NPR

J.D. Salinger, pictured in one of the few existing photographs of the author. The 1951 portrait was featured on the original dust jacket of The Catcher in the Rye.

January 28, 2010
The famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger has died at his New Hampshire home, his literary representative said in a statement. He was 91 years old.
Jerome David Salinger retreated to a New Hampshire farmhouse in 1953, a few years after he published the high-school classic The Catcher in the Rye. And there he stayed, for the next 50-plus years, scowling at photographers who dared snap his picture.
'I Refuse to Publish'
Salinger's published works include Nine Stories, a short story collection, and Franny and Zooey, a novella about one of his favorite fictive subjects, the sensitive Glass family. His last published work was a short story that took up almost the whole New Yorker magazine in 1965 — though rumors have Salinger stashing reams of unpublished fiction in a vault.
Salinger rarely explained himself, though the interview requests never ceased. In 1980, reporter Betty Eppes sent her picture along with her request. She was granted one of the only interviews the author ever gave.
"He said, 'I refuse to publish,'" she told NPR in 1997. "'There's a marvelous peace in not publishing,' he said. 'There's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.'"
Catastrophe in the Background
Salinger came from a Jewish-Scots-Irish New York family who imported meat. In the 1930s, he worked briefly as a cruise-ship entertainer. Then came World War II.
"He was a writer formed by the 1940s," says Andrew Delbanco, director of American Studies at Columbia University. "He participated in D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge. There's a sense to my ear in The Catcher in the Rye and stories [of his] that catastrophe lies in the background of everything he feels and writes."
One of his most popular stories, "For Esme — With Love and Squalor," deals with a soldier on leave who finds solace in a conversation with a 13-year-old English girl. Many of Salinger's shell-shocked heroes click best with children, an allegation that was thrown the author's way as well.
Salinger "celebrates their innocence and beauty in a way that to our sensibility is almost unnerving," says Professor Delbanco. Another favorite, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is about a troubled honeymooner who plays with a little girl in the ocean before killing himself. The protagonist of "Bananafish" is Seymour Glass, the Glass sibling featured most often in Salinger's stories about that peculiar family. Published stories about the Glasses had already established Salinger as a minor literary star by the time he published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951.
'Holden's Indignation ... Struck A Nerve'
The Catcher in the Rye, starring the disaffected adolescent Holden Caulfield, was an instant success, though it puzzled some reviewers. Long before it became a staple in American high schools — and ever since — screenwriters, novelists, actors begged for the rights to adapt it. Salinger seemed appalled by the attention and withdrew to New Hampshire shortly after its publication. He steadfastly refused to sell the rights to anything he ever wrote.

But the book's popularity soared out of sight as counterculture became mainstream culture in the 1960s, according to Delbanco.
"Holden's indignation, his sense of the world, really struck a nerve," he explains. "Everybody carries with them the impulse to say no. [It's] the dissident impulse that is powerful in American culture and literature."
Delbanco traces that impulse from America's first immigrants through Emerson and Thoreau to the Beat writers who were Salinger's contemporaries. He says Salinger empathized with young people as outsiders, and romanticized their straightforward, "non-phoney" impulses.
The title of the book comes from the protagonist's dream to keep everyone from growing up — to preserve the childhood grace Salinger idolized and resist falling headlong into adulthood:
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in a big field of rye and all. ... Thousands of kids, and nobody big at all, nobody big but me. And I'm standing on the edge of this crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to come and catch them. If they start to fall ... and don't look where they're going. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.
The Catcher in the Rye inspired censors, assassins and innumerable ordinary readers, who found in Salinger's hopeful yet disillusioned heroes an uncompromising kindred spirit.

Schadenfreude ....

NOT that it will matter... He'll be back once again to address his narcissistic desires.

And ESPN willbe there to enable.

No Really...Pull My Finger..."

Here's a portion of the article in the Projo today regarding the state employees unions' fight to prevent shutdown days because the state can't afford it....


"PROVIDENCE — State government will open on Friday after all, as a result of a temporary stay issued by Supreme Court Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg that put the kibosh on the first of Governor Carcieri’s 12 government shutdown days.
State workers in matching green T-shirts cheered outside the courthouse. But the celebration was short-lived.
Little more than an hour after the judge ruled, Governor Carcieri said the judge left him “with no option but layoffs.”
He said layoff notices would go out within a week to the last 1,000 union and non-union people hired, which presumably would include the state’s new Medicaid director and education commissioner. “It should greatly disturb every state employee and every Rhode Islander that labor leaders are willing to sacrifice people’s jobs so they can maintain their stranglehold on the citizens of this state,” Carcieri said."


That last sentence by the governor is SPOT ON. No, really.... that's fine. People who are in the unions pay their dues and the union leaders say they are there "to protect their members". Well..how is the choice of MORE for some and ZERO for others ANY kind of fair representation
or protection. It shows arrogance, power-hunger, and a severe lack of common sense. Of course, in THIS state, the unions are so entrenched that people actually PUT UP WITH THIS.
The legislature is elected and charged with making a budget. In RI, the legislature is ruled by democrats. They DIDN'T create a budget that the state can live within. In fact, they increased spending. Now the REPUBLICAN governor - a lone member of his party in this sea of Democrats - must do something.

(from the projo) "The 12 shutdown days are a key part of (governor) Carcieri’s response to the $67.8 million in unspecified savings that lawmakers directed him to produce in the new state budget they adopted in June. While leaving the actual cost-cutting decisions to him, they required “reductions of 6.25 percent of recommended salary and benefits.” "


He proposes 12 shut down days.... even suggesting that employees could work out WHICH days so that it would be to their benefit AND allow the state services to stay in operation. But the unions fight it. And so now their must be layoffs.
And the ignorants of the state will say it's because of the governor, because, well, he IS a Republican. Right. Her eat the center of legislative and elective Democratic corruption.
How lame. How disgusting.