“Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt.”

–Fran Tarkenton, What if the NFL Played by Teacher’s Rules?

Average Salary of a U.S. High School teacher: $43,450.00.

Average Salary of an NFL player: $1,9000,000.00

So yeah, let’s imagine, for a while, what the teaching profession would look like if we ran our schools like we run the NFL.

Let’s do that.

“I’d ask the fathers and husbands of America to consider our privacy when one summer day I found this guy on the deck of the rental property, just 18 feet away next door to us, staring like a creep at my wife while she mowed the lawn in her shorts…”

-Todd Palin, in a statement released to the press regarding author Joe McGinniss’ new book on Sarah Palin.

Which leads us to wonder… what, exactly, was “First Dude” Todd Palin doing while his wife was out mowing the lawn in hotpants? Please vote on what you consider the most likely scenario:

A) Staring at her through a peephole gouged in the wall with a mechanical pencil over a period of three days?
B) Keeping an eye on goddamn Trig, who just crapped his diapers again and Sarah just doesn’t have fucking time for his shit right now.
C) Watching “Red Shoe Diaries” on Skinemax while nursing a beer and smoking a joint.
D) Why, the dishes, of course…

“People close to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mrs. Bachmann is often influenced by the last person she speaks with on an issue rather than maintaining discipline in communicating a message.”

-An anonymous source “close to the Michele Bachmann campaign” as cited by the New York Times.

I suppose that as long as we can ensure that the last person she speaks to before making a policy decison is sane, reasonable and well informed on the issue at hand, a Michele Bachmann presidency would work out just fine.

When those on the left end of the political spectrum seek to argue that the modern Republican party has taken a decidedly anti-scientific turn of late, picking targets and providing examples to support their case is far from difficult. With the Republican presidential primaries in full swing, it is of note that only one of the major GOP hopefuls has come out in support the scientifically accepted theory that recent warming trends in the Earth’s climate are anthropogenic in nature, that is, they are caused by increased atmospheric density of man made heat trapping gases like CO2 and methane. This is far from a controversial statement among those scientists who study the Earth’s climate as part of their vocation. However, among Republican public officials and the vast majority of the GOP electorate, acceptance of climate scientist’s findings on the matter are greeted with more than mere skepticism. Current GOP frontrunner Rick Perry, for instance, has publicly accused the scientific cummunity of a wholesale falsifying of climate data to secure research grants.

Much the same can be said of acceptance of Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Despite the fact that Evolution by Natural Selection is the fundamental, unifying principle of modern Biology, has been for well over 100 years, and is universally accepted by all serious academic biologists outside fundamentalist Bible colleges, GOP candidates routinely proclaim themselves skeptical of the theory of Evolution (libertarian Ron Paul included).

Read more »

The above monument, commemorating the birth of the United Federation of Planets’ most famous starship Captain, can be found in Riverside Iowa. Clever.

(Via: Gizmodo)

Andrew Sullivan today links to a critique of Paul Krugman’s analysis of the so-called “Texas Miracle” in job creation that is alleged to have ocurred during the past few years. The critique is by Kevin Williamson and appears in the National Review. I won’t quote from the article extensively (you can follow the link and read it yourself) but I will offer my own rebuttal of its claims: Read more »

Congratulations go out to Track and Britta Palin, who have just welcomed their first child a scant three months into their marriage. Kyla Grace is described by proud grandmother Elizabeth Hanson as “beautiful.” We await word from the child’s more famous grandmother, Sarah Palin, who has yet to comment on the miraculous delivery of a healthy six-months-premature granddaughter. To our knowledge, aunt Bristol has also not yet chimed in with her thoughts. No doubt she’s too busy reminding America that premarital sex is a sin to comment on the good news.

(Via Andrew Sullivan, of course.)