“Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.”
–William Beveridge
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As you watch tonight’s Florida primary results, down a shot each time a pundit confuses Mitt Gingrich and Newt Romney.
Oops.
moving to Newt’s moon colony.
They are constantly saying Mitt when they mean Newt, and vice-versa. The same kind of problem they have with Iran and Iraq.
I’ll be drunk by 5:01.
Chris Matthews used to do it all the time and I’ve done it myself. I cured it by using only Bin Laden instead. We’re not good at keeping foreign sounding names straight.
You should still hope that many do. Why? Because new companies are the primary engine of job growth.
Yesterday’s little war wasn’t enough – now it’s going to be carried over through today!
I would like to ask everyone to please drop it.
the Romney Republicans here to just surrender and stop defending the American system of free-enterprise capitalism? No way, Jose, these guys are shaped from much stiffer hair gel!
Damn Gingrich supporters . . .
Including President Obama and his Startup America initiative.
Yep, very Republican to focus on the source of new jobs…
it’s a joke, son. Didn’t mean to ruffle your do.
(. . . kid’s got the sense if humor of Bob Dole . . . )
You gave me too good an opening – I couldn’t resist.
I promise. Before reading this, I responded to responses on the Monday thread but, as of this time stamp, will say no more on the subject.
Yep. (via TPM)
Just to be clear, this asshole is 51 years old.
contemporary GOP choice for the nomination…openly admitting to believe in, you know, science and stuff…if I were his dad, I’d be really pissed off. I mean why didn’t he just flush daddie’s money directly down the toilet?
My husband and I have sacrificed all of our 26 year marriage to send our kids to college. Still, we can only afford about half of what it is costing/will cost, at best. Why? CU Regents keep giving raises to overpaid administration (setting an example for all the schools). This last double-digit increase gave one administrator a nearly $400,000 salary.
This is an OUTRAGE. It is UNACCEPTABLE for only the rich to be able to afford to send their children to college! http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-…
Sooo…the admin is “overpaid” according to you, but underpaid based on their peers at comparable institutions. Hmmm…I wonder which measure the Regents care more about…
and it is not that any chancellor is worth $ 457 K, but it is rather what they can get away with. I just don’t think it is right for Universities to jack up tuition year after year and then pay these exhorbitant salaries.
Costs increasing faster than medical inflation – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
A lot of it is due to pension costs – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Plain and simple.
is people wanting services (like in-state tuition being subsidized) but not wanting to pay for those services. That, combined with the Colorado constitution being the Frankenstein’s monster of legal documents, creates a wholly unsustainable system for funding higher education.
All Nancy is doing by raging at the Board of Regents is pissing on a forest fire.
$400K is roughly the four year tuition of 20 students.
It’s ok to admit that the bitching is over something symbolic, but let’s not pretend that the money that would have been saved by not having a market value salary for an administrator is some huge cost saving measure.
Blaming the CU Regents for tuition being too high is completely ignoring the real problem, which is that the costs have shifted from the State of Colorado to middle class families. It’s truly tragic, but higher ed funding is one of the few things not constitutionally required by the budget. State legislators are required to balance the budget, and our constitutional mess practically requires that education become the major victim of budget cuts in a down economy.
It’s not right, but neither is some contrived populist outrage over administration salaries, which is a petty distraction from the real problem of properly funding higher ed in our state budget.
and true it is not just administrative salaries, but other things as well. CU’s campaign to re-create their logo IIRC cost a ton of money. I also remember when Hank Brown restructured the office of the President and eliminated a bunch of superflous jobs there – it was a good way to lead by example.
Maybe the legislature would be more responsive to higher ed funding if these abuses were curtailed ? Who knows.
From Nancy’s article:
So tuition was increased 3% JUST for salary increases (out of the 9.3% total annual increase). At a time when there’s essentially no new hiring and most other people’s pay is frozen? That’s pretty crazy to me. And the regents quoted in the article all seem to say the CU administration deceived them about how the money would be spent.
Things may be fucked up elsewhere too, and the low state funding for CU doesn’t help, but this just seems wrong. And yes, when things are bad, the people at the top should not be taking the biggest raises (including 14% for the chancellor, which Nancy is right to emphasize because it’s the most egregious).
1/3 of the tuition hike being spent on raises is too much. But, are you saying that University staff should receive zero raises? Austerity is all the rage, but we still have to compete with other university systems who are always trying to harvest top talent from across the country.
because I’m pretty sure sxp is NOT saying that CU staff should have zero raises.
But I’m curious whether 1%, 2%, 2.5%, etc would have been more palatable.
But I’ll wade in and offer my thoughts.
It’s a complicated issue. Of course pay increases in that range would be more palatable, but CU is supposed to be one of the so-called “public ivy” schools. I hope most of the staff and instructors are highly competent as befitting a reputable school. As such, their compensation, and their raises, ought to be reflect both their expertise and the school’s willingness to retain them. I have no idea (nor do I want to research and learn at this time – I’m just interjecting) how well that stacks up to comparable higher learning institutions, which makes it hard to gauge how fair or raw of a deal this is for those paying tuition and other support to the school.
… it looks like Progressive Cowgirl anticipated my point.
Not Wade Norris, of course. Wading into the pool of the discussion…
And learn to live on free tattoos and a car “loaned” to them by a booster who owns a car dealership.
Yes state support has dropped. But the full cost of school has been climbing much faster than inflation for decades. And that is a large part of the problem.
The burden has been shifting from the state to average families for way too long. School is becoming nearly unaffordable, and when students can’t afford the tuition they end up burdening themselves with crazy amounts of debt.
Public universities aren’t being adequately funded in Colorado, and that, unlike overarching national problems that you’re pointing to, is something we can actually do something about.
to pay out of state tuition in Wyoming than to pay in state tuition here. Like Ari, I don’t feel like looking it up right now but wonder if anyone knows whether or not that’s still the case.
I read through the article carefully, and they make a good argument in defense of the salary increases. The chancellor has outperformed expectations in fundraising for the school, and was hired at below market rates initially. The school’s total administrative costs are still 44% below those at comparable schools.
Tuition has been rising faster than the rate of inflation for a long time, as David mentioned. Losing administrative talent won’t stop it from rising further. Neither will a completely free market or further cuts to state subsidies, however. A comprehensive solution is badly needed. In my opinion, that should include more trade schools and adult/continuing education, not just four-year universities. Taxation to fund education might be more widely supported if everyone could see a real, measurable benefit from it, like the availability in their communities of adult education courses that can help them earn more at work.
The only thing Benson loses by not keeping up with payflation is a whole lot of other greedy Republicans working for him.
Benson is the same guy who told me years ago public school teachers are happy to work for almost nothing. “Ask them”, he said, “They always say they’re not in it for the money”. He went on to tell me (over the phone, when he was Chair of the Higher Ed Commission) that public school teachers were overpaid. “All they really need” (paraphrasing)”is to feel valued and appreciated”. If he thinks teachers will work for nothing and still do a decent job, why can’t he find some like them to be Chancellor? Perhaps he needs to stop looking for people to hire in corporate America, and start looking where the real experts in education are — in Academia.
Second, if these people are so good at their jobs, why not task them with their increases being a fraction of the extra money they bring to the university? Let them earn their own pay increases. Working and middle class families struggling to give their kids a better life through education should not have to pay their exhorbitant salaries.
Newt’s timer is ticking down but there’s no MaGyver to defuse this FAIL. The blundering boisterous bombast is pushing into the red and soon Sta-Puft is gonna blow. Damn this is fun!
During the lame duck session this year it looks like Congress will need to address the required gigantic spending cuts, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and raise the debt limit. And they will have to do so coming off one of the most partisan elections ever.
slip below 0%?
Janet Howell brings up the rear, introducing an unsuccessful amendment to require invasive and unnecessary medical procedures for men, just like the Virginia Senate wants to require for women seeking to terminate pregnancies.
Brings to mind the Eggmendment. If women are accountable for the well-being of fertilized eggs in the pro-life utopia, why aren’t men accountable for the quality of their sperm? Sperm damage is passed on to children, so I say put an amendment on the ballot to arrest men for child endangerment if they smoke and drink excessively. Betcha it’d get more votes than the original eggmendment…
Here’s a recent op-ed on 3D printing and its likely evolution.
Go to town.
I only made a request. It takes the cooperation of the poo-flingers to truly end the poo-flinging.
At least not on that subject. But thanks for the link. Very interesting, and dare I say satisfying without being accused of poo flinging, piece.
3D printing is a part of one of the big changes that are transforming the world economy. The world 20 years from now will be Rey different from today – http://online.wsj.com/article/…
I ordinarily wouldn’t waste the keystrokes on a low-traffic blog like Peak (at least not here at Pols), but this is a bit too egregious.
This is a diary headline over there right now:
It then features this video… where such a claim is NOT being made by Obama.
He makes a slip of the tongue which he immediately corrects. Because he caught himself, it’s not even a gaffe. But the Peak headline, which gets tweeted without even the body of the diary for context (never mind the video), falsely reports that Obama claimed 7 times the true number of new jobs.
This didn’t originate with Peak – apparently Drudge began reporting it, albeit as a gaffe (again, it’s not even that) – but this illustrates both their desperation and lack of scruples.
Evidently it will be a long, long wait. Kinda tough to spin it.
McNulty has been teh awesome in his leadership . . . and, oh, Suzanne Williams.
Cancer charity halts grants to Planned Parenthood
They’re hiding behind the bullshit investigation teabaggers in the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations launched last fall as cover.
Don’t donate to the Race – donate directly to Planned Parenthood as a substitute. And tell them about it in an e-mail or something.
If it hits them in the pocketbook – or perhaps even if they only think it will – then they might reverse course.
moves their support directly to Planned Parenthood. Komen needs to see the impact of this very unwise decision.
but that’s kind of a funny subject line. Fuck for the cure!