By LEONARD PITTS
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

I hear you're pondering a run for the White House in 2012. Last week, you told Fox news it would be ``absurd'' to rule it out.

I'm writing to ask that you rule it in. I very badly want you to run for -- and win -- the Republican nomination for the presidency.

I know you're waiting for the punch line. Maybe you figure I think you'd be a weak candidate who would pave the way for President Obama's easy re-election.

That's not it. No, I want you to run because I believe a Palin candidacy would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.

Continued:

Miami Herald

"That foreign threat might make conservatives sweat so much that maybe, just maybe, they’d consider revisiting the issue."  hahahahahaha

We all know that liberals and conservatives are far apart on health care. But in the way their brains work? Even in automatic reflexes, like blinking? Or the way their glands secrete moisture?

That’s the suggestion of some recent research. It hints that the roots of political judgments may lie partly in fundamental personality types and even in the hard-wiring of our brains.

Researchers have found, for example, that some humans are particularly alert to threats, particularly primed to feel vulnerable and perceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.

One experiment used electrodes to measure the startle blink reflex, the way we flinch and blink when startled by a possible danger. A flash of noise was unexpectedly broadcast into the research subjects’ earphones, and the response was measured.

Continued at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/opinion/14kristof.html 

Extremely helpful video from the Mayo Clinic, no more mouth to mouth

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5huVSebZpM 

Colorado faces a crisis in providing the quality education to our children they deserve, and radicals are preparing for new attacks on our public schools next year.

Last week, former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, speaking to an audience of "Tea Party" right-wing radicals, reportedly called for the abolition of the United States Department of Education.[i] That's an incredibly reckless and foolish idea. The Department of Education administers billions of dollars of direct funding each year for public schools all over the country, including hundreds of millions to Colorado--not to mention direct responsibility for everything from student loan and scholarship programs to accommodation for children with disabilities.

Schools in Colorado are being closed due to a chronic inability to provide for them. Abolishing the Department of Education won't do anything to solve real problems, it's just fringe rhetoric. Sign our petition to Norton, demanding she get serious about education:

http://progressnowcolorado.org/ProtectSchools

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Colorado ranks 40th in the nation in education funding per student. As a percentage of personal income, Colorado ranks an abysmal 49th in our commitment to funding public education.[ii] Our state faces an ongoing fiscal crisis that is likely to hamper our ability to properly meet the needs of our children for years to come. Colorado public schools rely on federal funds to meet the needs of all of our children, from AP whiz kids to those most in need of extra support.

That's the reality, but what do extremist conservatives want to talk about? Radical nonsense. Abolishing the Department of Education. At a time when leadership and innovative thinking is needed more than ever, the right is out of touch with the needs of Colorado's most important institutions.

Sign our petition: tell Jane Norton to get serious about education, not pander to extremists.

http://progressnowcolorado.org/ProtectSchools

We will share your comments with Norton and the media. Thank you for standing up for our children and Colorado's future.

Could $292,000 pay for a college or trade school education, room and board?  Subsidize a young person until they could land a good job?  With the change left over, could it pay to make high school more hospitable to the poor? For public works projects? For more teachers? Research and development?  We ignore the needs of young people at a terrible cost. And yes, it does take a village.  What are the economic effects of 1.2 million high school dropouts per year?  At $7,300 per student, that amounts to $8.76 billion a year, year two adds another 1.2 million students and becomes $17.52 billion, ad infinitum. Can we solve the problem?  Can we afford not to? What can you buy with $8.76 billion?  How about 175,200 teachers at $50 K a pop, that's one teacher for every 7 dropouts.  MC

"The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime."

The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.

Researchers at Northeastern University used census and other government data to carry out the study, which tracks the employment, workplace, parenting and criminal justice experiences of young high school dropouts.

"We’re trying to show what it means to be a dropout in the 21st century United States," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, who headed a team of researchers that prepared the report. "It’s one of the country’s costliest problems. The unemployment, the incarceration rates — it’s scary."

A coalition of civil rights and public education advocacy groups and a network of alternative schools in Chicago commissioned the report as part of a push for new educational opportunities for the nation’s 6.2 million high school dropouts.

"The dropout rate is driving the nation’s increasing prison population, and it’s a drag on America’s economic competitiveness," said Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who is president of the National Urban League, one of the groups in the coalition that commissioned the report. "This report makes it clear that every American pays a cost when a young person leaves school without a diploma."

The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.

Continued at the: NY Times

From the Bob Herbert op/ed, "Igniting the Growth of Jobs"

NY Times

'40,000 teachers lost their jobs in the last year.  16 to 29 year olds, worst unemployment ever since national records have been kept.  One in four black men in Illinois between the ages of 20 and 24 has a job.'

One of the regents of the University of Colorado, Michael Carrigan, told me that Colorado had a return on investment of 40 to 1 for each dollar invested in higher ed. The only figures I could find for Colorado was a 15.07 percent return.  New Jersey leads the nation with 42.32 percent, followed by Massachusetts 39.16, New York 37.82, California 36.53 percent.  All in all a substantial return on investment.  The lowest in the nation, predictably, was Mississippi at 6.49 percent.  Most surprisingly, Indiana is second from the bottom at 7.22 percent

Higher Ed Return on Investment for States

Most significantly, Herbert says this:

""The past," as William Faulkner told us, "is not dead. It’s not even past." The lessons of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s are right in front of us, ready to be studied, analyzed, updated and applied to the present-day needs of the country."

I hate to say this, but we are a country of nepotism, in our unions, our military, in corporations, in government.  Because of this "inbreeding" and counterproductive behavior, we must import the brightest minds/strongest work ethics from around the world to carry our water and be used as if indentured servants.  It is all a vast pyramid scheme where the unqualified extinguish the flames of the most gifted and reap the rewards off the backs of the timid.  Their only qualification?  Being members of the lucky sperm club.  Here's something the "conservative revision" Bible will surely leave out, "As you have done to the least of these......."  The least very much includes the youthful poor, who have no say in the conditions they find themselves in and obviously don't have the attention of those that have the most.  While we argue about war, healthcare, social justice, gay rights, Obama's Nobel Prize, etc., no one considers our most precious asset nor what should be our greatest legacy to them, "Liberty and Justice for all.."  This is what is great about the idea of America, eloquently pronounced in the Preamble of the Constitution, not just to ourselves but to our Posterity,  the word was capitalized unlike the word "ourselves":