6-3-14 CPI Buzz Posted

AP does a story on Supremes’ retention election NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The coordinated campaign of three incumbent Tennessee Supreme Court justices announced Monday that it has raised $600,000 for the effort to keep them on the bench for eight more years. The effort called Keep Tennessee Courts Fair is made up of the retention committees of Justices Connie Clark, Sharon Lee and Gary Wade, who are on the ballot in August. “The outpouring of support from Republican and Democrats who recognize the importance of supporting our Tennessee Constitution is just phenomenal,” said campaign manager Brenda Gadd. “They know that we must not minimize our Constitution, and that keeping politics out of our courtroom is crucial.” While only one justice has ever lost a yes-no retention vote in Tennessee, Republican state Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey has been spearheading an effort to persuade voters to reject the three justices, each of whom was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has named two new justices to the high court bench, but they won’t be facing retention votes this year. If even one of the incumbents loses, it would shift the balance of the court that will name the next state attorney general. Click Here For More US Supreme Court refuses to hear Murfreesboro mosque case The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of a group of neighbors who tried unsuccessfully to block the construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A board member of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro said he was hopeful that Monday's announcement by the court will bring unity back into the community. "We're relieved, we're excited, we're happy," said Saleh Sbenaty. "We always believed in our justice system, and we believed that justice would always prevail in this country, and we had no doubt that the Supreme Court would make the right decision." Sbenaty said outsiders have come into Murfreesboro with a national agenda against Islam. The decision, he said, brings to a close the years long case. It's not clear what opponents of the mosque will do next. Click Here For More Pam Strickland: Ramsey not leaving partisanship at door Well before Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey began making front-page news with his lop-sided campaign against the three state Supreme Court justices who face retention votes in August, Chief Justice Gary Wade’s fraternity brothers had begun a campaign in Wade’s defense. In an April 23 letter to alumni members of Phi Delta Theta, Jim Harb says that when he first heard that Wade would be facing the retention vote, he was certain that he would be retained. “After all, his exemplary judgment and legal scholarship, his scrupulous dedication to keeping politics out of the courtroom, and his commitment to the rule of law, should easily prevail over any organized opposition — or so I thought,” Harb wrote. What he didn’t know, Harb continued, was that “there would be political interests on the state level that would interject partisan politics into the retention vote,” taking aim directly at Wade and Justices Cornelia Clark and Sharon Lee. Click Here For More The Common Core Curriculum Void Right now, America's schools are in a sprint. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards. That means new learning benchmarks for the vast majority of the nation's young students — millions of kids from kindergarten through high school. And, for many of them, the Core will feel tougher than what they're used to. Because it is tougher. It's a seismic shift in education meant to better prepare kids for college, career and the global economy. But new standards as rigorous as the Core require lots of other changes — to textbooks, lesson plans, homework assignments. In short: curriculum and the materials needed to teach it. And that's the problem. Right now, much of that stuff just isn't ready. Before we get further into the problem, let's be clear: The Common Core is a set of standards, not curriculum. There's a difference. Standards are goals we set for kids. For example, one Common Core math standard says fifth-graders should be able to use place value understanding to round decimals to any place. Curriculum is what teachers do every day in the classroom to achieve that goal. Again, different. But, if you change standards, you've got to change curriculum too. And that's the challenge right now with the Common Core. Because most states have made big changes to their standards, forcing districts and schools to do the same to their curricula. Click Here For More Tennessee Lawmaker Searches For Way Around EPA Rules Proposed new federal rules requiring power plants to cut pollution elicited emotional responses from people on both sides of issue. Critics called the EPA's rules "Obamacare for the air" and said the rules will kill jobs and raise energy prices. Supporters said the rules are needed to combat global warming. The rules require states to reduce carbon emissions by 30% before 2030. In Tennessee, that puts the focus on the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA operates 11 coal-fired plants in the southeast - seven of them are in Tennessee. TVA has already announced plans to shut down several coal fired units including the entire plant at New Johnsonville. It's part of TVA's shift away from coal, but it is still reviewing the impact of the EPA announcement. TVA has already pledged to spend a billion dollars to add scrubbers at the Gallatin coal plant, a move that will keep it open, but at least five other plants will be completely or partially closed as TVA moves toward natural gas and nuclear energy. The newly proposed rules may force more changes. Click Here For More Tennessee Governor To Navigate Divisive Issue Of Prescription Drug Abuse Tennessee ranks second in the nation for the amount of prescription painkillers sold, and studies show one out of 20 people age 12 or older in the state is misusing them. Gov. Bill Haslam and the state’s top mental health official Doug Varney are calling prescription drug abuse a “widespread epidemic,” and they plan to lay out their strategies on tackling the problem Tuesday. So far, divisions have emerged over the the best solution. Earlier this year, the state legislature discussed repealing a law that some say gives physicians too much leeway to prescribe potentially dangerous pain relievers. But Julie Griffin of the Tennessee Medical Association told lawmakers that doctors were split on whether repealing was a good idea. “Tennessee Medical Association has about 8,000 physicians, and on most issues we agree pretty unanimously,” she said. “On this issue in particular, we have members on both sides.” She said more restrictions on doctors could send patients to pain clinics, which might not prescribe drugs appropriately. A state spokesman says the governor’s plan won’t recommend specific changes to the law, although it may influence legislation in the future. Click Here For More Call for carbon emission cuts expected to hit Tennessee hard But many business groups and conservatives denounced it as the imposition of a "national energy tax" on an already-struggling American economy and said it would cost jobs. In the coming months, the federal agency will be taking comments from interested parties — especially utilities and environmental groups — with the rules not due to be implemented until 2015 and with states having until 2016 to comply. "The new safeguards not only protect our health and communities, but they will also spur innovation and strengthen our economy. By moving to 100 percent clean energy sources, we'll create tens of thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars in new investment," said Scott Banbury of the Tennessee Sierra Club. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, said EPA acted "because Congress failed to." "I haven't seen the new regulation yet, but I am hopeful it will insure against any more harm to the planet. Every nation needs to join our effort," Cooper said. But congressional Republicans and business advocates had a different take. "Today's regulations issued by EPA add immense cost and regulatory burdens on America's job creators. They will have a profound effect on the economy, on businesses, and on families," said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Brentwood, vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the regulations were a continuation of "the Obama administration's war on coal." "This rule is another tax on the American taxpayers and will lead to higher electricity rates and fees," she said in a statement. Assessing where Tennessee and TVA stand in regard to the new rule will require separating environmental data for the state from system-wide data for the federal power authority, which serves six other Southeastern states and nine million customers overall. Click Here For More Crockett Policy Institute http://www.crockettpolicy.org/

Quote of the Day

"If he had any knowledge of the lack of health and medical facilities in the hills of Kentucky," Cook says, "he'd know it's a problem we need to solve. For Mitch McConnell to decide the new health program is not good for Kentucky—it tells me he's not looking out for his own constituency."

Former KY Senator Marlow Cook, the man who gave Mitch McConnell his first job in politics

President's Speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Ouch! (Hee, hee...)

From Our "Lamar's Fibbing Again" Dept: The Minimum Wage By The Numbers

Senate Republicans successfully filibustered the minimum wage hike in the US Senate yesterday, in spite of the vast majority of Americans being in favor of the hike. Bob Corker is looking like a temporary statesman here as he was the only Republican who voted to end the filibuster. Lamar said "Surely Senate Democrats could come up with a better jobs program than one that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would destroy 500,000 jobs." I've had problems with Corker's dishonesty in the past ("We need to fix Social Security to reduce the deficit"), but Lamar has told a whopper! This is a complete misrepresentation of what the CBO study projected and Lamar knows that. Lamar may or may not remember that the last year that Republicans were in control of the Senate America lost 4.3 Million jobs under Republicans' jobs program. Lamar may remember that but he hopes you don't. The CBO says it is "possible" that raising the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs "created" by between 100,000 and 1 million. The study also says this: "The CBO acknowledges that the employment impact could be essentially zero." Here's some more stuff Lamar leaves out... 16,500,000 workers would receive a raise directly from the minimum wage hike. Another 8 million Americans would see their wages rise as a result of a rising tide lifting all ships. This wage increase would help the economy right now! Republicans hate helping the economy when they aren't in power. That's why they filibuster. 88% of minimum wage earners are adults trying to support themselves and their families. Republicans leave out everything good and focus on the tiny kernels of bad in everything Democrats try to do to improve the American economy and the lives of working Americans. Here's the economists take on the wage increase. They don;t get why Republicans are filibustering against something that will help a majority of Americans...But I do!

Institute for Southern Studies Dishes the Dirt on What's Happening Around Here

The Institute for Southern Studies does good work looking into how things are going around the South, checking the facts, and boiling it all down to something useful. There are bunch of interesting factoids in the current newsletter. 97% of all climate scientists accept that human activity is screwing up our planet. Zero NC Senatorial candidates "believe" in climate change. Of the four nuclear reactors being built in the United States right now, how many of them are behind schedule and over budget? All of them! The GOP has blocked funding for a CDC study into gun violence. No study..No violence, right? There's a ton of other stuff in this newsletter. Here's the full newsletter. Think about joining their email list and maybe tossing them a nickel or two.

Bryan College as Stalking Horse for Education in Tennessee

The faculty of Bryan College are standing up and willing to take a bullet in a stand that biblical interpretation and teaching must adjust to what science and unfettered critical thinking add to our body of knowledge. To do otherwise would make Bryan College an institution of lower ignorance rather than higher learning. It is time for our educational institutions at all levels to understand that Darwin's Theory on the Origin of Species is far more defined and researched that the Theory of Gravity. Failure to accept the theory of gravitation will not cause you to fall off the planet and go spinning off into space. Failure to teach evolutionary theory will, on the other hand, place a barrier of dogmatic ignorance in front of the students of Tennessee. Bryan College is shrinking into irrelevance in its embrace of unsubstantiated dogma. It is time for that to change.

After all, if an institution as dogmatic and authoritarian as the Catholic Church can adjust to the fact that, yes, the Earth  goes round the Sun and not the other way around, then perhaps Bryan can include obvious fact into its teachings as it prepares students to go out into the world.

 The Times Free Press has a piece you should read.

And this one

Read: "We Need to Stop Lying To Our Children"...An Interview With Anne Druyan

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will premiere Sunday, March 9, 2014 (9/10pm ET/PT) on FOX.

  Sagan’s original creative collaborators—writer/executive producer Ann Druyan and astronomer Steven Soter—have teamed with Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad) to conceive a 13-part series that will serve as a successor to the Emmy Award- and Peabody Award-winning original series.

Anne Druyan was Carl Sagan's wife for 20 years, until then end of his life. I hope you will read the entire interview which took place in 2007 during the worst of the Bush years as America continued to erupt in a fatalistic tribalism that pits the right against the left with no one in the middle. Druyan sees the problem from a realist's perspective; It is not this person or that person, it is the failure of our society to embrace a fact and critical thinking based method to solve our problems. This is an excerpt that boils it down, but I hope you will read the entire interview and think about it.

Excerpt:

 To begin, we need to stop lying to our children and start speaking honestly about the things we don’t know, and the things that remain a mystery to us. I think we need to be honest with our children that we die, that life is finite not infinite, and that this is it and it is really precious. If we did that maybe people would treat life as being something prized instead of as something that can be taken without concern. Also, we need a new curriculum for science and it should be like this: when children first come to school, in preschool or kindergarten, I think the teachers should take them aside and welcome them to join the generations of searchers, to induct them into the great wonders and mysteries of science as a way of seeing everything. Not 20 or 40 minutes of boredom a few times a week, but as a way of seeing everything. They should teach critical thinking to the smallest children as a type of keys to the kingdom. We should teach the story of the history of science— of the courageous men and women who have given us this precious knowledge—in a way that gives full expression to the romance and valor and imagination that was involved. And I think if we were to do that, I think it would be possible that we would not be a schizophrenic society: completely dependent on science and high technology, yet completely fearful and mistrusting of it.

SKEPTIC: On your first point about lying to our children, are you talking about religion?

DRUYAN: No, I am talking about everything. Children want to know about death, and I think we lie about death, and I think that is a very damaging thing in the long run. It dooms them to a perpetual infantilism. I think our present attitude is an expression of a lack of confidence in our children: that this reality is too unbearable for them to be able to deal with. Actually, I think it is all the more unbearable because we lie so much about it. If we were truthful about it, then not only might it be less unbearable, but also it might be possible to live more fully than I think we are able to do with this burden of dishonesty.

Read it all!