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New Hampshire is one of the nation's leaders in reducing high school dropout rates and increasing graduation rates, concludes a national study from Johns Hopkins University's Everyone Graduates Center.
"Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic," cites the increase in the Granite State's graduation rate from 77.8% in 2002 to 83.4% in 2008. New Hampshire ranked 7th in the nation in reducing dropout rates.
(This from the same Very Serious Fiscal Hawk who will throw a tantrum in front of Harry Reid for as long as it takes until all of his rich friends get to keep their deficit skyrocketing Bush tax giveaways.)
I guess the one good thing about today is that the Catfooders are finally caput. What a harmful diversion from the four alarm fire of prolonged high unemployment.
Today's Concord Monitor has a story about a woman named Karen Morgan who has just lost her unemployment benefits, because of the expiration of the federally funded extension program. She's 55 years old and has had several operations for breast cancer.
Tara Reardon, commissioner of the state's Department of Employment Security, said 4,700 people in New Hampshire have already exhausted all eligibility for unemployment compensation. Now that the program has expired, by the end of the year an additional 3,000 will be left without unemployment benefits and 9,000 more will lose benefits by April if the program is not reinstated by then, Reardon said.
The fastest growing segment of the homeless population is women over 50. A long term (over 6 months) unemployed person over the age of 50 may never find another job.
Here's what a NH Republican has to say:
Grant Bosse, a lead investigator with the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a New Hampshire free-market think tank, said the government should find places to cut spending if it's going to extend unemployment benefits.
I'd sure like to hear him explain that to Karen Morgan. These are real lives being hurt by the Party of No. Every newspaper in the country should be telling these stories, every single day.
Republicans have proven repeatedly that they don't care about deficits.
The American people do, though. Only one out of four of them want the Bush tax giveaways to the uber-wealthy to continue.
Nancy Pelosi cares about deficits. She used her considerable skill yesterday once again on behalf of the Rest of Us. (Thank you Carol, Paul.)
On the heels of this success, President Obama abdicated his bully pulpit and admitted that Republicans will still get what they want on behalf of the Richest Two Percent, deficits be damned.
Cue the media, who have inserted the word "symbolic" into their headlines on the vote.
What remains is the Senate. The American people have enough up-or-down votes on their side. But Harry Reid has shown no ability or interest heretofore in getting around the parlor tricks of that institution.
The following groups today urged incoming House Speaker John Boehner to keep the Office of Congressional Ethics up and running, and in fact to strengthen it:
The League of Women Voters, Common Cause, Taxpayers for Common Sense, The National Taxpayers Union, Judicial Watch, Public Citizen, The Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy 21 and U.S. PIRG. The Tea Party is also in on the act, expressing support for preserving OCE as well.
Thanks to the work of the OCE, which was created by Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Charlie Rangel, whom Tea Party Caucus member Frank Guinta called a "corrupt politician," was formally censured by the House.
Representative-Elect Guinta will go to Washington saddled with his own unresolved controversy over significant campaign finance discrepancies. He refused comment to the Washington Post when asked about it.
Sarah Palin dumped last minute money into some GOP campaigns:
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, contributed more than $200,000 to her fellow Republicans during the final three weeks of the just-concluded midterm election campaign.
One of the lucky beneficiaries?
Several Palin-backed Republican nominees for the House, such as Ann Marie Buerkle in central New York, Frank Guinta in New Hampshire and Paul Gosar in Arizona, ousted Democratic incumbents.
Could Franky's financial Panky come back to haunt Governor Quitter?
"The scandals surrounding Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters have shown us why we need to change the incentives for serving in Congress," Guinta continued. "If we can just change the way business is done in Washington, we can make it less attractive to serve for decades in Congress, and keep corrupt politicians like Rangel and Waters out."
Will he, as a member of the Tea Party Caucus, echo the Ohio Tea Party's call for incoming House Speaker Boehner to continue Speaker Pelosi's creation of an independent Office of Congressional Ethics?
(Important information for citizens and activists. Thank you, Lucy!
(part put below the fold by me) - promoted by Jennifer Daler)
The purpose of this diary is to give an introduction to tracking bills on the General Court web site.
The General Court home page can be found here. It's worth playing around with-there is a lot of information on this site. Because I am in the House, I will explain the House side of things, but the Senate is similar, although some of their rules and procedures are different from ours.
From the home page, click House of Representatives to get to the House page. Then click Calendars and Journals. This will bring up a list of calendars and journals with the most recent on top. The latest calendar is not typical, as it is for Organization Day, and the bills are all still being drafted, so I'm going to use a calendar from last spring as an overview of how the calendar is laid out.
So Frank Guinta thought he could stonewall and run out the clock on questions surrounding the mystery bank account he used to finance his campaign? That after the election, no one would remember or care? No such luck.
From the Washington Post:
Four freshman lawmakers are entering Congress amid questions and controversy over their campaign and personal finances.
The piece goes on to describe the $355,000 Guinta personally lent to his campaign and the amended financial disclosure reports belatedly identifying the source of those funds. Then the bombshell.
On Thursday, a coalition of watchdog groups plans to press House leaders to preserve the independent ethics watchdog that Democrats created after the 2006 elections.
In an interview with the National Review Online, incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) recognized the importance of ethics issues and the need for the new majority to keep a clean record. "I think that as Republicans emerge as a new governing majority, it is incumbent upon us to institute a zero-tolerance policy -- that we understand there are reasons for our being fired in '06 and '08," Cantor said.
House Republicans have temporarily blocked legislation to feed school meals to thousands more hungry children. Republicans used a procedural maneuver Wednesday to try to amend the $4.5 billion bill, which would give more needy children the opportunity to eat free lunches at school and make those lunches healthier. First lady Michelle Obama has lobbied for the bill as part of her "Let's Move" campaign to combat childhood obesity.
Republicans say the nutrition bill is too costly and an example of government overreach.
That is because there would be higher nutritional standards for the food served to school children, many of whom are low income.
The bill would provide money to serve more than 20 million additional after-school meals annually to children in all 50 states. Many of those children now only receive after-school snacks. It would also increase the number of children eligible for school meals programs by at least 115,000, using Medicaid and census data to identify them.
The legislation would have also increased reimbursement to schools for feeding needy kids.
When Judd Gregg opposed extending jobless benefits back in May, his reasons were rooted in intellectually lazy class stereotypes:
Because you're out of the recession, you're starting to see growth and you're clearly going to dampen the capacity of that growth if you basically keep an economy that encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment.
This article, detailing the real suffering that will occur with the imminent expiration of jobless benefits this month, shows otherwise:
Some economists worry that renewing jobless aid would discourage some unemployed people from seeking work. But a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco downplayed the impact as "quite small." For most recipients, the average $300 weekly unemployment check doesn't go very far.
Relatedly, Judd Gregg is so Very Serious about money matters that he is a member of the Catfood Commission.
