Month: March 2012

Good clean hits

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I just would like someone to explain to me why this is just fine, but decent people are still supposed to shun Michael Vick:

The Washington Redskins had a bounty system for big hits on opponents under former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams that was similar to the one revealed by an NFL investigation of the New Orleans Saints, four players who played under Williams said Friday.

Three of the players described a coach who doled out thousands of dollars to Redskins defenders who measured up to Williams’s scoring system for rugged play, including “kill shots” that knocked opposing teams’stars out of a game.

“You got compensated more for a kill shot than you did other hits,” said one former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Of the four players interviewed, only Philip Daniels, a former defensive lineman, was willing to be quoted on the record. He defended Williams’s coaching. Daniels now serves as the team’s director of player development.

Players said compensation ranged from “hundreds to thousands of dollars,” with the biggest sum any player received believed to be about $8,000.

“I never took it for anything [but] just incentive to make good, hard plays,” said a current player, who requested anonymity. “But I’m pretty sure it did entice some guys to do more to a player than normal when it came to taking them out. I mean, that’s cash. Let’s just be honest about it.

“If you took the star player out, he’d hook you up a little bit.”

Virtually Speaking tonight

~ susie

8 pm eastern | 5 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking A-Z: This week in liberalism. | Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd discuss current evens from the perspective of movement liberalism.| Plus What Digby Said. And last week’s post-show notes. Follow @Stuart_Zechman @JayAckroyd Listen live on BTR. Beginning midnight, listen here.

9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd | Jay talks with filmmakers Frances Causey and Don Goldmacher about Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? the night before it opens at The Quad Cinema in NYC for a week long run, against the backdrop of a growing worldwide populist democratic movement. @1Basil1 review here. Follow @HeistDoc @FCausey @donnyg1941 @JayAckroyd Listen live and later on BTR.

Why Dems have a problem with young voters

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Rick Perlstein for Rolling Stone:

I have a young friend I’ll call Cecil. Cecil graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college on the East Coast in 2006 with a degree in political science. A lot of his friends were involved in political campaigns, and so, looking for work, he thought he’d try it, too: “You want to be involved in something that’s trying to make the world a better place. Something that’s mission-driven,” he says. So he got a job as a field organizer for the senate campaign of John Tester, the populist Democrat. That election won, burned out, he drove to California and got a job waiting tables.

Then came Barack Obama, and Cecil fell in love. “The war thing was big,” he remembers. “I had a friend who went to Iraq and died. Obama’s whole opposition to the war was very important to me.” He packed up his car and drove all the way across the country to become an Obama organizer in New Hampshire, then Maine, then Vermont. Because he was good at it, he was named deputy field director in Oregon, then one of two deputies in a crucial Midwestern state. After the election, in Washington, he was one of the principles in setting up a major new national progressive activist group.
Continue reading “Why Dems have a problem with young voters” →

Major tornado outbreak

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Stay safe:

The threat for damaging winds and tornadoes is increasing across the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys. Stay alert of the dangerous storm situation.

A Potentially Dangerous Situation Tornado Watch has been issued for southeastern Missouri, southern and central Illinois, central and southern Indiana and western Kentucky. The National Weather Service issues a PDS Tornado Watch less than a handful of times a year.

Multiple lines of severe storms are erupting from northern Alabama through central and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.

The real reason?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This certainly sounds like a big factor, if not the main reason, for Snowe’s decision not to run for reelection. Maybe it was the final straw, since Snowe was also facing a primary challenge from the Tea Party:

Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.

Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe’s decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican’s frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband’s legal entanglements had a role in Snowe’s sudden and surprising decision, which left her with more than $3 million in her campaign coffers and her party without a Senate candidate less than three weeks before the filing deadline for Maine’s June 12 primary.

According to the senator’s most recent financial disclosure form, she and her husband, former Maine Gov. John McKernan Jr., have investments worth between $2 million and $10 million in Education Management Corp., a Pittsburgh-based company that operates for-profit higher education institutions. McKernan is chairman of the board of directors of the company, now embroiled in a lawsuit in which the federal goverment, 11 states and the District of Columbia are seeking to recover a portion of the $11 billion in federal student aid that the education firm has received since July 2003.

Originally filed in April 2007 by a pair of whistleblowers, the lawsuit alleges that the company violated a federal law that prohibits schools from paying admissions officers based on the number of students they recruit and enroll. [Note: This is one of the illegal practices I saw where I worked. I found out after that my company was previously cited for this and was operating under a federal compliance order. Didn’t matter, they did what they wanted.] Those numbers can affect a school’s revenues because more students mean a school is potentially eligible for more federal aid dollars. The whistleblowers alleged, and provided documents indicating, that they were paid bounties for the number of students they enrolled.

The Justice Department’s decision to intervene on Aug. 8 made the lawsuit, which had been under seal, public. In its complaint, Justice alleged that Education Management Corp. submitted “knowingly false, misrepresented, and/or improper certifications” to the Education Department, stating that it did not offer enrollment incentives to its admissions officers. Without those certifications, students enrolling at the the company’s schools, which include Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University, would not be eligible for federal financial aid.

The complaint names Snowe’s husband, noting that in December 2006, while he was the company’s chief executive officer, McKernan personally signed certifications that Education Management Corp.’s schools complied with the ban on offering compensation to admissions officers based on the number of students they recruit.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Anthony J. Guida Jr., who serves on the board of the for-profit schools’ trade association, the Association of Private Colleges and Universities (aka lobbying arm) is also a senior VP for regulatory affairs at EDMC. He was also appointed to the United States Department of Education’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance by… Nancy Pelosi. His term expired in 2011.

The company’s CEO is Todd S. Nelson, the former CEO of the University of Phoenix. While there, he signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education for “systematically and intentionally” breaking the federal rules against paying recruiters for students. What a job reference, huh? The New York Times also states:

Education Management, which is 40 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, received more than $855 million in federal student aid in 2003-4, and more than $1 billion in 2005-6. According to the complaint, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, it received more than $2.2 billion in federal student aid, representing 89.3 percent of its net revenue.

Perhaps that explains why the Obama administration caved on earlier promises to make for-profit colleges deliver on their promises to students – because so many well-connected people on both sides of the aisle were carefully interwoven throughout these very profitable organizations:

The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Continue reading “The real reason?” →

Diet soda, strokes and heart attacks

~ susie

It’s also a risk factor for pancreatic cancer. Sorry!

Back in 1990, the National Institutes of Health began funding a long-term study of stroke and cardiovascular risk factors among of urban adults. Known as the Northern Manhattan Study and housed at Columbia University, the project enrolled thousands of people from the community and subjected them to medical testing while recording their food-consumption habits.

Among its results, a surprising one has emerged (recently published paper available here): people who drink at least one diet soda a day are 43 percent more likely to experience a “vascular event”—i.e., strokes and heart attacks—than people who drink none.

Now, it’s important to understand that studies like this one establish correlation, not causation. It’s possible that the heart trouble experienced by diet soda drinkers comes from some other behavior they share that has nothing to do with diet soda.

But crucially, this study accounted for factors like weight, diabetes, high blood pressure, and intake of calories, cholesterol, and sodium, study author and University of Miami epidemiologist Hannah Gardener told me in a phone conversation. In other words, non-overweight diet soda drinkers showed significantly more risk of heart attack than non-overweight people who don’t drink diet soda.

The Manhattan results comes on the heels of other highly suggestive research showing an association between diet-soda consumption and type 2 (adult onset) diabetes and metabolic syndrome, a condition characterized by abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, and other factors.