The sun is too hot to stay out. The water is too cold to go in.
What ever happened to Woodward and Bernstein?
The whole Mark Sanford thing is hilarious. The serious stuff is how he tried to screw the kids of South Carolina by rejecting stimulus money for South Carolina schools and teachers, among the most poorly funded schools in the nation.
The NY Times reports this morning:
About six months ago, an anonymous tipster sent The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., copies of e-mail messages supposedly exchanged between Gov. Mark Sanford and a woman named Maria in Argentina.
Reporters sent e-mail back to the originating e-mail address and to the woman, whose e-mail address was included, in an effort to verify that the messages were genuine. They never heard back, and so the paper did not publish them until Wednesday.
They never heard back? Now there’s some serious investigative reporting. Another nail in the coffin of analog media.
If you want to know why I’m for a single-payer health care system then check out today’s AP story on the Congressional investigation of Ingenix. Ingenix is a data base operated by UnitedHealth and is used by most of the health care providers in the country.
In January, UnitedHealth agreed to pay $350 million in penalties for overcharging and driving up patient costs.
From the AP:
More than 100 million Americans have plans that let them see doctors who are not part of their insurance network. For more than a decade, insurers submitted data to Ingenix to determine the typical cost for care received outside their networks. But congressional investigators say companies would deliberately skew data to underestimate the costs of medical services, leaving patients to pay more in out-of-pocket expenses.
Chart by Catalyst.
Chicago Public Schools suspends a quarter of its male black students at least once a year. In a just-published study by Catalyst, data shows that the male black suspension rate is double that of the district average and is the highest suspension rate in the country.
Of course, these are the numbers produced when present USDE EdSec Arne Duncan served as CPS school boss.
The USDE says “this may warrant an investigation” of the issue, but I have to wonder where this will go since the problem was created under Duncan’s leadership of the CPS and he now runs the USDE.
The statistics have stunned local and national educators and youth advocates, who say the disparity may warrant investigation by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Peter Cunningham, assistant secretary for communications and outreach under Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, says the department is interested in having all students treated “fairly and equally.”
“Illinois legislators are cowards,” says Ralph Martire of the Center of Tax and Budget Accountability. I’d say he is being polite.
