Gosh, I bet there will be an uproar when Arizona refuses to hire teachers from anywhere in the Deep South because their English is "heavily accented"!

Because that will have to happen if they're sincere about just wanting kids to learn by hearing proper English, right?

* The Arizona Department of Education...

And in other news, the same Department of Education has instructed school districts to dismiss all non-Caucasian teachers from classrooms where students are still learning "whitey-ness."

Paid for by Carly for California

lolz!

Let's see, can the federal government put the financial genie back in to the bottle? Hmmmm...

I do like the idea is "toughening up", too bad the Dems didn't feel "tough" while single payer was on the table!

The Al Gore joke is totally awesome. But I can see why he turned it down...probably just a bit too far over the edge for that time. Nowadays, you might just get away with it.

AZ Dept Educ -- Jesus H Christ! That bunch of bloody cultural imperialists. Free Baja Arizona!

[...] teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English."

That one is really funny, given that US does not seem have a single "Standard English", the way UK does (Received Pronunciation, or RP, used by BBC) and that pretty much everyone here has some sort of a regional accent (in my area, there seems to be no difference between "pin" and "pen", for example). And, given that one continues to learn -- language as well as everything else -- throughout one's life, it means that all teachers and all children are affected. Sheer genius.

In other news Tom Delay will be dancing into a criminal court soon. :)

and more
Political Theatre

@ exlibra

Actually and regrettably, strong regional accents in the US are getting rounded off and homogenized over time. Its the pervasive influence of broadcasting.

Ellsberg

Another absolutely must read film review by the S.F. Chronicle's Mick LaSalle:

...he was the government's worst nightmare: A former Marine officer, a military adviser with access to the highest government officials, and a government researcher who knew where all the bodies were buried. Ellsberg knew McNamara. He knew Kissinger. He knew everybody. He was a true believer, with the courage to spend two years in Vietnam getting shot at, because he wanted to see the situation for himself. ... And then he stopped believing.

In a transformation that wasn't just political but spiritual, Ellsberg went from being a man unafraid of getting killed in Vietnam to a man unafraid of spending the rest of his life in prison, so long as the truth got out. In another time and culture, a story on this scale would deserve an opera...

In addition to Ellsberg, the other hero of this documentary is the American press. After the New York Times was forced, by court injunction, to stop printing the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post picked up the ball, and then other newspapers followed suit - all of them mighty names in American journalism, most of them struggling today just to keep afloat. Anyone with any doubt as to the importance, in a functioning democracy, of American newspapers - with working newsrooms full of professional, paid journalists - needs to see this movie.

@ efgoldman (19:34)

Well, as a general rule, I don't watch the TV and don't listen to the radio but, sometimes, I do catch a segment of the news while my husband's watching. And I can tell you that our local news are still delivered with an adenoidal twang which makes the whole barely understandable to anyone not familiar with it.

I love regional variations; they make the language richer. But, I don't think they belong in the media or in the classroom. Of course, I'm prejudiced on that score, because that's how I grew up. I'll never forget a conversation my Mother had with a kid in the Tatra Mountains. She couldn't understand him, so she asked him if that's what he was taught in school. "Oh, no" he said "in school, we learn Polish. But away from school, I speak Mountain."

With the Gulf imploding with this oil spill, in this tragedy, where is the president? Is he even gonna do a flyover?

Where is his concern? Where is his compassion?

Big oil slick, getting bigger by the hour, looks like we'll have more oil added for the next few months...

..oh yeah, getting close to hurricane season. Fun, fun, fun.

Where is his concern? Where is his compassion?
Posted by: marybel on April 30, 2010 at 10:10 PM

Compassion? Compassion for whom? This is not Katrina, where Bush was gobbling McCain's b-day cake, while New Orleans was being wiped out and hundreds were dying.

Now that BP has stopped lying about the enormity of the spill, everyone who can do anything about it -- from the officials who can assess the different aspects of the situation to the Coast Guard -- is there. I expect the President is monitoring the situation and making decisions. Maybe he'll even do a flyover, to satisfy carping morons like you, though I cant see how such an empty gesture would help.

Drill! Baby drill!

Ooooo, I see Marybel has read the morning memo from the GOOPs.

If there was technology to get right down to that 5000 foot hole and put a stopper in it, it would have been done in day 2, if not the end of day one.

What, you want Obama to fly over it in Air Force One and look down on it like Bush II, did?

Really?

I'm serious?

What do YOU think Obama SHOULD be doing that he is NOT doing?

"teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a problem with this.

School is a place to learn proper language. Spanish teachers should not have an accent, either. They should speak very, very good Spanish.

And when those kids go to pass the Standardized Tests, they better at LEAST know good grammar.

Gulf State Governors talk Guy Fawkes, secession, and intrusive big government, but will expect to be handsomely assisted by the rest of us for their oil spills and tornados. That's the kind of intrusiveness they can live with.

Sorry about the environment and all, but libs seem to have quickly forgotten - unlike the mine disaster - that 11 workers were killed on that rig.

Glad to see Haley Barbour, the Guv, stand up for BP - Said he can't see one thing they have done wrong, especially, the fact that none of their campaign checks for him have bounced.