Today Jill Stein’s campaign, aimed at securing the Green Party’s nomination for president, sent out a fundraising email with the pitch of “Double Your Green.”  That is, if Stein raises ,000 in donations of 0 or less from 20 or more states, the federal government will then match donations of that amount dollar-for-dollar.  Interestingly, the email contained a map of their progress toward that goal:

See below for a map showing how far along your state is toward qualifying for matching funds:

The sooner we qualify, the better. That’s when we start doubling our green for the Green Party, which means that Dr. Stein can invest twice as much on getting the Greens on the ballot, building our state and local parties, and putting our Green New Deal agenda in the public eye.

As of Monday, February 20th, two states have qualified (CA, MA), one state is close (NY) and four states are halfway there (IL, MD, VA, WI).

Our goal is to qualify in our first 10 states by March 15th.

States that have qualified: California, Massachusetts

3/4 of the way there: New York

Halfway there: Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin

1/4 of the way there: D.C., Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington

Raised something: Every state.

The full email can be read here.

Independent Political Report

The 2011 Texas Legislature slashed the state’s funding of public K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The real motivation for underfunding public education is to replace our low cost public system of education available to every citizen with a high cost private ‘for profit’ education system.

Huffington Post

While for-profit colleges do indeed educate more low-income and minority students than other institutions, this is in large part because support for the traditional alternative, community college, has failed to keep pace with demand.

Though no one maintains a comprehensive list of state funding for community colleges, state and local support for community colleges on a per-student basis declined by 5 percent in 2009 from a decade earlier, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by the Delta Project, a nonprofit research group that studies higher education spending. The total subsidies provided to students by community colleges, including funding from public sources and other outside support, fell by 10 percent over the last decade, on a per-student basis.

The Obama administration has significantly boosted funding for Pell Grants, which are available to low-income students. Over the last three years of the program, the federal government has more than doubled spending on Pell grants, budgeting billion more this year than in the 2007-08 school year. For-profit colleges have captured an outsized share of this pool — roughly 25 percent — despite educating only 12 percent of college students nationwide, according to the most recent federal data.

Had the .5 billion that for-profit institutions received via Pell Grants during the 2009-2010 school year gone instead to fund community college systems nationwide, that money could have created capacity for an additional 629,000 community college students, The Huffington Post calculated, using available estimates for the average expenditure per student. That would represent a 20 percent increase in the number of full-time community college students currently enrolled nationwide.

At California’s community colleges — the nation’s largest system of higher education, serving a quarter of community college students nationwide — an estimated 200,000 students will be turned away from classes next school year, according to the state community college chancellor’s office, following state cutbacks of nearly 20 percent across the entire system. That amounts to more than 7 percent of the entire state’s community college student body, and that does not count those who gave up on plans to enroll due to the difficulties of securing classes.

After accounting for inflation, California is now spending the same amount on community colleges that it did six years ago, despite adding more than 175,000 students in that period, a nearly 20 percent increase. On a per-student basis, the state is spending less this year than it was 15 years ago.

The for-profit college programs that have been absorbing the resulting overflow of students are on average more than five times as expensive as their community college counterparts, according to a Senate report that examined such schools nationally. While only about one in five students at community colleges takes out loans to finance their tuition, four of five students at for-profit two- and four-year schools sign off on loans, according to Department of Education data.

Because of the high costs and high debt loads, students at for-profit colleges are responsible for about 45 percent of all student loan defaults.

In the eyes of public education advocates, for-profit colleges are the inevitable, opportunistic outgrowth of a society that simultaneously rewards those with greater education while it eliminates traditional support for public campuses.

“The economy is essentially telling people that you have to get some kind of post-secondary degree or credential,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “So the demand is growing very fast, and our ability to fund this function is crashing. It’s not just declining, it’s crashing. The public sector is basically getting out of the business, so the costs are shifting to the individual students.”

Read the full article @ Huffington Post

Democratic Blog News

INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT
America Needs a Makeover (The Daily Beast, By Tony Dokoupil, MSNBC/PowerWall)  Interview with Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum:

TF: Right now it’s like the public is having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election. There’s almost no overlap between the two groups. It’s like they’re in a circle and we’re in a circle. What that tells you is that the incentives—financial and political—don’t correspond to the themes of the country.

Which is why you say the system needs a shock, perhaps from an independent third candidate.

MM: It’s not going to correct itself with its own routine procedure. We think an independent candidate probably would not win, but would reveal the existence of a large constituency up for grabs between the Republicans and Democrats, and that would create incentives for each party to try to co-opt those voters by adopting some of those programs.

The Hankster

Rancorous dialogue on the Hill from his own party has irked Gov. Bill Haslam. The Commercial Appeal has the story:

Haslam calls for more civil dialogue in education disputes

By Richard Locker

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

NASHVILLE — After days of highly charged rhetoric in and around the State Capitol, Gov. Bill Haslam said today he’s concerned that a “partisan divide” has deepened in Nashville over the last few weeks that will start to hamper solving Tennessee’s problems.

The governor’s remarks to business leaders here came hours after a Republican state senator warned teachers in a Senate floor speech Monday night that legislative “warriors” are going to “change radically… government schools in Tennessee.”

Borrowing from Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” freshman Sen. Jim Summerville, R-Dickson, said, “We will bend public education to our awe — or break it all to pieces.”

Here’s a clip of Summerville’s speech on the Senate floor:

TN Democratic Party News

The Center for Public Policy Priorities today released some devastating county-by-county analysis of the state budget cuts proposed by Gov. Perry and the Republican controlled legislature:

• Public Education Analysis
• Higher Education Analysis
• Health and Human Services Analysis
• Medicaid Spending Losses Analysis

The public education analysis projects that as many as 189,000+ public education jobs will be eliminated in Texas. Almost 14,000 public education jobs may be eliminated in Collin Co.

The state is short billion, more than one-quarter of the state’s discretionary budget, of which about 91 percent is consumed by public schools, higher education, and health and human services.

Texas already spends less per capita than almost any other state, but Senate Finance Chair Steve Ogden — a Republican who Rick Perry has described as the smartest budget man he knows, and someone he implicitly trusts with the budget — warned today the proposed budge cuts will “decimate public education.“

Texas Republicans would rather put our children’s future at risk than allow corporations to pay their fair share to help build the well educated workforce Texas businesses need to prosper in the future.

Texas Observer: Gov. Rick Perry has repeatedly said Texas’ deficit is “reflective of the national recession’s lingering impact on state revenue.”

In fact, the recession has little to do with the billion budget shortfall. Back in 2006 the Republican controlled Legislature concocted a Rube Goldberg-style [school funding and business tax reform] measure that simultaneously cut property taxes, implemented a new “margins” tax on business and rejiggered the way public schools are financed.

Problem was, as the state Legislative Budget Board pointed out at the time, the plan’s math didn’t wash because the margins tax wouldn’t bring in as much as the Legislature thought. In fact, the board said, it would leave a billion hole in the state budget every year.

The upshot: Perry, who pushed the swap, knew full well he was helping to create today’s “crisis.”

Star-Telegram: A 68-page report released by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs on Monday reveals that Texas will give business .2 billion worth of tax exemptions for sales, franchise, and gasoline and motor vehicle sales taxes for the 2011 fiscal year that ends on Aug. 31, 2011.

Exemptions to the state sales tax, the state’s biggest source of revenue, will total .8 billion for the current fiscal year, Combs said, although some items exempted from the sales tax are taxed from other sources. Gasoline tax exemptions will amount to 3 million. Motor vehicle sales tax exemptions will total 5 million.

“While sales and use tax collections totaled .6 billion in fiscal 2010,” Combs said, “the tax is limited in scope when compared with the total number and kind of transactions in the economy, because of various exemptions and exclusions,” Combs said.

A number of lawmakers are calling for the elimination of at least some exemptions to boost revenue and help offset deep service reductions proposed in preliminary draft budgets. Others say canceling the breaks amounts to a tax increase, which Gov. Rick Perry and Republican legislative leaders have vowed to oppose.

Read more at the Star-Telegram

NYTimes OpEd “Leaving Children Behind” by Paul Krugman:

Consider, as a case in point, what’s happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America’s political future happens first.

Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.

But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.

It’s not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.

But things are about to get much worse.

A few months ago another Texas miracle went the way of that education miracle of the 1990s. For months, Gov. Rick Perry had boasted that his “tough conservative decisions” had kept the budget in surplus while allowing the state to weather the recession unscathed. But after Mr. Perry’s re-election, reality intruded — funny how that happens — and the state is now scrambling to close a huge budget gap. (By the way, given the current efforts to blame public-sector unions for state fiscal problems, it’s worth noting that the mess in Texas was achieved with an overwhelmingly nonunion work force.)

So how will that gap be closed? Given the already dire condition of Texas children, you might have expected the state’s leaders to focus the pain elsewhere. In particular, you might have expected high-income Texans, who pay much less in state and local taxes than the national average, to be asked to bear at least some of the burden.

But you’d be wrong. Tax increases have been ruled out of consideration; the gap will be closed solely through spending cuts. Medicaid, a program that is crucial to many of the state’s children, will take the biggest hit, with the Legislature proposing a funding cut of no less than 29 percent, including a reduction in the state’s already low payments to providers — raising fears that doctors will start refusing to see Medicaid patients. And education will also face steep cuts, with school administrators talking about as many as 100,000 layoffs.

The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?

Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

From the Wisconsin Green Party’s Website:
The Wisconsin Green Party salutes the state’s public workers, and stands in solidarity with their fight to retain full collective bargaining rights with their employers.
The budget crisis facing the state was not brought on by public workers, and if there is to be a recovery, workers, public and private, [...]
Green Party Watch

In the end, after some false starts and rhetorical meandering, the question was simple: Do you believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and contributes to climate change and therefore poses a serious health threat to humans? Al Gore and an overwhelming majority of climate scientists the world over answer a straightforward yes to that question. Most of the Republicans in Congress, however, answer no. Oil and gas climate “researchers” also answer no. Dr. Chris Urbina, the new Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment didn’t seem sure how to answer the question, or at least didn’t know how to answer state Republican senators asking him the question at his confirmation hearing Thursday.

Urbina

“Lots of things contribute to air pollution,” Urbina told Republican Sen. Shawn Mitchell. “Things that we produce naturally are contributing to air and water pollution. Human waste. Lots of things … all of those things contribute to that pollution … natural products [like carbon dioxide] do contribute to pollution … whether one of those products contribute more than any others, I would be happy to come back to talk about this very issue….”

Mitchell wasn’t satisfied.

“Will it be your direction in the office that carbon dioxide is a harmful agent that needs to be restricted in output?”

Urbina wasn’t confident to speak on the matter at the moment.

“I need to look more at the detail of the science. I would like to get back to you on this question.”

The carbon dioxide interrogation started with questioning from Republican Sen. Kent Lambert and ended with questions from Mitchell.

Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

Urbina is not a climate scientist. He is a trained medical doctor and has earned impressive degrees and has even more impressive experience in the field of public health.

Mark Salley, spokesman at the Department of Public Health and Environment, told The Colorado Independent that in the short time he has been working with the new director, the two have not had the time to discuss climate change science. Four hours later, neither Salley nor Urbina has called to answer Mitchell’s yes or no question, this time asked by The Colorado Independent.

Americans are used to seeing politicians back each other down on this issue. They’re not used to seeing professionals back down on this issue or cast about for answers when their work lives are based not on public posturing and rhetorical flourishes but on science.

From the governor’s website announcing Urbina’s appointment to the Department:

Urbina earlier worked in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico, holding positions of Associate Chair and Associate Professor. He also worked for the New Mexico Health and Environment Department as a district health officer.

Urbina continues to teach in introductory public health courses at the Colorado School of Public Health and at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is the current president of the Colorado Public Health Association and serves as a board member for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Denver Metro, the Denver Foundation and at Clinica Tepeyac, in addition to being involved in numerous other local health organizations.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford University and a medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He completed a family practice residency at the University of New Mexico and earned a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Urbina is board certified in Family Medicine and Preventive Medicine.

Hat tip to Colorado Pols for the audio.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Colorado Independent

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn indicated on her campaign website that she has been endorsed by The Tennessean despite the Nashville newspaper’s endorsement for her opponent, Greg Rabidoux.

“Once again Mrs. Blackburn has been caught lying to the public,” Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester said. “That’s par for the course for a politician who has been named one of the most corrupt members of Congress.

“She fails to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and expenses and has the audacity to vote against legislation intended to help create jobs for Tennessee families and provide needed services for our elderly and disabled. She then comes home to smile in front of the cameras while trying to take credit for projects and programs she voted against.

“The hypocrisy of this woman is incredible. Now she tries to take credit for an endorsement she never received.”

Forrester pointed out that Blackburn voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that has saved or created thousands of jobs in Tennessee through projects designed to improve our schools and roads, as well as other critical infrastructure that aids our quality of life. He also noted that Blackburn has sponsored legislation in Washington that would privatize Social Security and Medicare.

“Most people who invest in the stock market understand the risks involved,” Forrester said. “Congresswoman Blackburn evidently doesn’t. Social Security and Medicare are programs that have helped millions of people.

“People pay into those programs and are assured a monthly retirement check and medical care in their golden years. You don’t gamble with people’s lives like that. But Mrs. Blackburn and her Big Business buddies in Washington want to embrace policies that have proven reckless and detrimental to our nation.

“We are climbing out of one of the deepest recessions this country has faced since the Great Depression because of those policies. Mrs. Blackburn seems oblivious to what caused all this. And for her to try to mislead the public about an endorsement is further proof she is out of touch with ordinary Tennesseans,” he added.

TN Democratic Party News

The Lowest Price we could find is  .00 Fascinating picture of American political beliefs on the eve of the conservative revolution. The student revolution was yet to take hold of the Vietnam War effort, but the youth culture was on the ascendent. Particularly interesting at this juncture, when the conservative hold on politics appears to [...]
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