Don’t let the door hit you on the way out Arlen! Specter gives final Senate floor speech, from Shira Toeplitz, Politico [1]:
Ever the prosecutor, Sen. Arlen Specter delivered a critical attack of partisan politics in his self-described “closing argument” Tuesday morning on the Senate floor.
The speech capped Specter’s 30-year career as the longest-serving senator from Pennsylvania. In his final words on the floor, Specter called for civility in the chamber and bemoaned the lack of moderate Republicans remaining in the world’s most deliberative body.
Good-bye and good riddance. No more Scottish. Arlen you were supposed to have been a United States senator and not a member of the House of Lords. Too bad you could not remember.
How much is a college diploma worth? From Robert Weissberg, American Thinke [2]r:
For more than a half-century, government has tried to close racial gaps in educational attainment. Sad to say, those gaps have proven intractable. Nevertheless, the impulse remains as heartfelt as ever (perhaps due to its financially lucrative character), but the emphasis is now shifting from actual learning to equality of graduation rates. President Obama has spoken of adding 5 million graduates to the workforce by 2020, and credential-mania is now all the rage. This shift is a disaster in the making; imparting knowledge is commendable, but just handing out diplomas is harmful deception. A cynic might aver that the shift from knowledge to graduation rates is a tacit admission that the gap-closing
While I do not have a college diploma, I have worked on the same line with people who had college diplomas. Y9u get a job not by flashing a college diploma, but rather by convincing a prospective employer that you offer a skil set which he needs.
From Jenice Armstrong, Philadelphia Daily News [3]
I ASKED A 17-year-old I know what he thought about Kwanzaa and he said, “That Jewish holiday?”
Uh, no.
Clearly, his high school hasn’t embraced the multicultural thing and isn’t teaching students about the 44-year-old Afrocentric holiday. But I don’t knock his ignorance because the truth is that Kwanzaa has never caught on with the majority of black Americans. At the same time, though, it has grown in mainstream acceptance as evidenced by the Kwanzaa postal stamps and greeting cards.
Kwanzaa. We will always have Festivus.