FUTURE-OF-ACADEMIC-HISTORY NUGGET

Ken Burns or Instructors? from Inside Higher Education
"He said that he favored "certification," in which people could demonstrate competency or skills in certain areas through testing rather than earning degrees. ... Johnson also said the education system could become much more affordable by changing the role of instruction. "We’ve got the internet -- you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need disruptive technology for our higher education system," he said. Johnson added, "One of the examples I always used -- if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas.""
Sadly, I think Johnson is spot-on here about the future of history (and several other subjects) in academe.  The constituency for maintaining the current faculty/resource heavy commitment to history, literature, philosophy, etc. is collapsing. One dynamic professor on video shown to thousands of students and given a quiz will do.  Then use an army of $10/hr adjuncts to grade the damn things.  Channel the savings to STEM.  Problems solved!

The New "Magical Thinking": Great Universities Are Possible ... Without Funding

The Pillaging of America's State Universities (Jonathan Cole) from the Atlantic
"A type of delusional thinking seems to convince American policymakers that excellent public colleges and universities can continue to be great without serious investment. ... these education investments have a very high payoff for states, the nation, and the larger world. All this amounts, arguably, to a pillaging of the country’s greatest state universities. And that pillaging is not a matter of necessity, as many elected officials would insist—it’s a matter of choice."

Ryan: Barely Two Minutes in Office and Already Under Fire

Fury of the Right Falls on Ryan (Scott Wong) from The Hill
"Outside the Beltway, the right is livid with new Speaker Paul Ryan’s trillion-dollar spending deal with Democrats. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter says Ryan, just seven weeks on the job, is ripe for a primary challenge. “Paul Ryan Betrays America,” blared a headline on the conservative site Breibart.com. And Twitter is littered with references to the Wisconsin Republican’s new “Muslim beard.”""
So much for any prospects of a brokered convention where the GOP turns to Ryan for their salvation.

The Budget Deal: A Major Win for Obama

Obama Wins on Budget Deal as John Boehner Cleans Out the Barn from the New York Times
"The budget agreement struck late Monday between the White House and Congress hands President Obama a major victory, vindicating his hard line this year against spending limits that he argued were a drag on the economy and also buying himself freedom for the final 14 months of his term from the fiscal dysfunction that has plagued his presidency."

The Real Barriers to Trump's Big "Wall"

An Engineer Explains Why Trump’s Wall Is So Implausible from National Memo
"The challenge of Trump’s border wall is not technical, but logistical. The leap in complexity between “building a wall” and “building a 2,000-mile-long continuous border wall in the desert” is about equal to the gap between “killing a guy” and “waging a protracted land war.” Trump’s border wall, if built as he has described it, would be one of the largest civil works projects in the history of the country and would face an array of challenges not found when constructing 95-story skyscrapers. ... In order to adequately answer Mr. Ramos’ question, let’s first make some assumptions on the project’s scope"

Budgetary Con Jobs

Trillion Dollar Fraudsters (Paul Krugman) from the New York Times
"Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does. Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry."

Health Care Spending Has Slowed SHARPLY!

The Medicare Miracle (Paul Krugman) from the New York Times
"Health spending has slowed sharply, and it’s already well below projections made just a few years ago. The falloff has been especially pronounced in Medicare, which is spending $1,000 less per beneficiary than the Congressional Budget Office projected just four years ago. This is a really big deal, in at least three ways."

Finding the GOP's "Full Measure"?

Another Government Shutdown? Not Gonna Happen (Byron York) from the Washington Examiner
"Ryan remembers thinking as the shutdown became a reality. "This can't be the full measure of our party and our movement. If it is, we're dead, and the country is lost.""
I love this quote -- because it so captures the on-the-ground reality for hard-right lawmakers who seem to be calling the shots on such matters.  This IS the "full measure" of the GOP and the Conservative movement right now -- and yes, the current version of the Republican Party IS dead!  It just doesn't know it yet.  The final piece about the "country is lost" says more about why right-wingers are in such a nihilistic state of mind in the first place.  The country is actually doing OK -- it's only conservatives who are lost -- as in they have no idea where they are or where the rest of the country is.  -- Nuggetsman.

Measuring Obama's Successes

Obama Cares. Look at the Numbers from the New York Times
"A true measure of a president’s priorities lies hidden in plain sight in his budget proposals. Under that standard, Mr. Obama has been more committed to communities like Ferguson than any Democratic president in the past half century."

The Remaining "Controversy" Around Obama's 2009 Stimulus?

What Debate? Economists Agree the Stimulus Lifted the Economy (Justin Wolfers) from the New York Times
"Here’s a simple case study making the point that our political debates about economics have become largely unhinged from those among actual economists. Take the Obama stimulus plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If you took your cues from the political rhetoric in Washington — or even from the occasional virulent debate in the economics blogosphere — you would think the whole question of fiscal stimulus is highly contested. But it’s not. There’s widespread agreement among economists that the stimulus act has helped boost the economy."
The table that accompanies this article showcases how absurd this "debate" really is!

An Imaginary Budget and Debt Crisis

The Fiscal Fizzle (Paul Krugman) from the New York Times
"... debt and deficits have faded from the news. And there’s a good reason for that disappearing act: The whole thing turns out to have been a false alarm."

Obamacare's Benefits Continue to Unfold

Budget Office Lowers Its Estimate on Federal Spending for Health Care from the New York Times
"The growth of federal spending on health care will continue to decline as a proportion of the overall economy in the coming decades, in part because of cost controls mandated by President Obama’s health care law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday."

GOP Budgets Provide Fodder for Dem Candidates

How Republican Candidates Have Made Life Easier for Democratic Senators (Eleanor Clift) from the Daily Beast
"Providing fodder for endless attack ads, challengers to Democratic incumbents in three tough Senate races voted for a budget even more draconian than Paul Ryan’s."

TODAY'S BIG NUGGET: BIG Savings Under Obamacare!

A $900 Billion Slowdown in Health Care Spending? Thanks, Obamacare (Joan McCarter) from Daily Kos
"The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has crunched those great Obamacare numbers from the Congressional Budget Office last month, and has figured out that there will be a $900 billion slowdown in federal health care spending, and it pinpoints where those savings come in."

OMG! China Has "More Clout Than Ever"

China Splurging on Military as U.S. Pulls Back (Christopher Bodeen) from the Associated Press
"China's navy commissioned 17 new warships last year, the most of any nation. In a little more than a decade, it's expected to have three aircraft carriers, giving it more clout than ever in a region of contested seas and festering territorial disputes. While Beijing still lags far behind the U.S. in both funding and technology, its spending boom is attracting new scrutiny at a time of severe cuts in U.S. defense budgets that have some questioning Washington's commitments to its Asian allies, including some who have lingering disputes with China."
NOTICE how this author never mentions how many carriers the US already has and masks the gloss-over with foggy generalizations.  As we noted last week, the US has NINETEEN carriers.  To this author (and so many others just like him) I ask, why the circumlocution?!  Answer: because it completely undercuts his vaguely hawkish argument that the US is "pulling back" and that the Chinese have "more clout than ever"!

TODAY'S BIG NUGGET: Naval Defense Policy in a Nutshell

Chart of the Day: Aircraft carriers. U.S. Has More than Everybody Else Combined, and Then Some (Meteor Blades) from Daily Kos
"Each of the icons in the graphic is an accurate depiction of the flight deck as seen from above, all drawn to the same scale. Each of the middle column of ships is roughly the size of the Empire State Building."
Regular readers know I've been going on about this disparity for quit some time.  It has been one of the central issues we've talked about here in assessing and getting informed on US defense policy.  This chart speaks volumes.