Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20131006235526/http://www.myleftnutmeg.com:80/
Can someone ask a member of the teabagger brigade whether or not they have a count on how many undocumented immigrants signed up for Obamacare? While you're at it, ask them how those death panels are going.
The female driver whom police fatally shot after a high-speed chase on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon has been identified as Miriam Carey, 34, of Stamford.
The shooting happened on Capitol Hill a little after 2 p.m. after Carey's car, a black sedan with Connecticut license plates, breached a security barrier near the White House.
Police said Carey died at a hospital shortly after being shot. They said there was a 1-year-old child in Carey's car who was also taken to the hospital but doesn't appear to be badly hurt.
Law enforcement officials said they did not think terrorism was involved in the incident, which touched off chaos on Capitol Hill and a lockdown of the Capitol and House and Senate office buildings.
"This appears to be a singular incident," said District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier at an evening press conference. She also stressed that "security perimeters were not breached."
[...]
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was on the Senate floor talking to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and others when someone told them there had been a shooting.
"It was pretty dramatic and shocking to be on the Senate floor," Blumenthal said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., meanwhile, was in the cloakroom next to the Senate floor when he heard the news. The Senate chamber was then locked down, its heavy doors firmly closed. Murphy remained in the cloakroom.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, was on the House floor, when that chamber was abruptly shut down.
New London Day's David Collins doesn't have anything good to say about the state's GOP gubernatorial candidates.
Foley, according to one newspaper interview he gave earlier this week, has sided with the tea party, saying that he endorses the strategy of House Republicans to shut down the government to extract changes in the Affordable Care Act.
"So I support what they are doing," Foley was quoted as saying.
That was enough to cross him off my list of people who might make a good Connecticut governor.
[...]
I had hoped, too, that maybe some of the other possible Republican candidates for Connecticut governor might be counted in the reasonable GOP camp, like the Republican House members who would reopen the government without demanding changes to a health care program that is already the law of the land.
Alas, no.
I couldn't reach state Sen. Toni Boucher of Wilton, who also has an exploratory committee. But she told another newspaper this week, while complaining about the health care act, that we've had shutdowns before and they haven't been that bad.
So she's off my list.
Exploratory candidate Mark Boughton, mayor of Danbury, politely returned my call and explained that he thinks there's blame to go around both parties in Washington. But he said linking negotiations about the health care act to a government shutdown is OK with him.
"It's how sausage is made," he said.
He's off my list, too.
I came away from a long and spirited chat with declared gubernatorial candidate John McKinney of Fairfield, state Senate minority leader, impressed that he is a thoughtful candidate who was also willing to lay blame for the shutdown on both parties.
In the end, though, he seems to side with Boughton on the sausage-making theory. I could not get him to condemn the strategy of linking a government shutdown with demands to change the health care law.
This is classic pre-primary politics: reach to the extremes of your party, then hustle back to the center before the general election.
In anticipation of a prolonged government shutdown, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's Budget Director Ben Barnes asked state agencies last week to identify federally funded programs and positions that could be impacted.
By Wednesday, the plans were posted on the Office of Policy and Management's website.
The responses Barnes received from state agencies that deliver social service programs were lengthy, while there were a handful of agencies like the Insurance Department that don't receive any federal funds and won't be impacted.
Achievement First - Bridgeport Academy is among Connecticut's worst offenders when it comes to charter schools that fail to provide students with properly certified teachers.
According to the records filed with the State Department of Education, of the 59 teachers working at Achievement First - Bridgeport last year, 21 (36 percent) did not have Connecticut certification or were teaching outside of their certification parameters.
Among the list of non-certified personnel at Achievement First - Bridgeport Academy was Morgan Barth. Barth was recently named by Commissioner Stefan Pryor to be the Director of the State Department of Education's Turnaround Office, the entity that is assigned to overseeing state support for Connecticut 30 Alliance Districts.
It is incredibly telling that Stefan Pryor, the co-founder of Achievement First, couldn't find anyone more capable of managing the Malloy administrations ongoing effort to "help" the state's thirty poorest school districts than someone whose only experience was at Achievement First, Inc.
It's even more telling that the Malloy administration, who can't stop belittling and undermining teachers chose to hire someone who has never held state certification despite a state law requiring them to do so.
According to his resume, Morgan Barth was a "founding teacher" at Achievement First - Elm City Preparatory Academy in New Haven from August 2004 to June 2008 and then went on to serve as a principal there and then as principal at the Achievement First - Bridgeport Academy Middle School.
But in direct violation of state law, Morgan Barth apparently never held Connecticut state certification to be a teacher or an administrator.
On July 1, 2010 a new state law took effect that allowed charter schools to use up to 30% non-certified teachers and administrators, although Connecticut's regular district public schools were still required to have 100 percent of their staff certified.
Despite that law, Achievement Fist Inc. has consistently had more than 30 percent of their staff non-certified.
And that 2010 law doesn't erase the fact that it appears Morgan Barth was illegally teaching and serving as a principal for at least 6 years.
There are over 45,000 public school teachers who meet Connecticut's certification law and nearly as many retired teachers who met the law when they were teachers.
Add in at least 8,000 plus school administrators (except Paul Vallas and Steven Adamowski) who also have proper state certification.
But despite more than 50,000 certified teachers and administrators, Governor Malloy and Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor chose to put Connecticut's "alliance districts" in the hands of an individual who has consistently failed to do what is legally required of Connecticut's real public school teachers and administrators.
The arrogance and sense of entitlement that surrounds the corporate education reform movement is not unlike the arrogance and sense of entitlement that surrounds the clowns in Washington who are purposely tanking our federal government and our economy.
Achievement First, Inc. is the charter school management company co-founded by Governor Malloy's Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor.
Achievement First, Inc. won't take its fair share of bilingual students or students who aren't proficient in English.
Achievement First, Inc. won't take its fair share of students who need special education services.
Achievement First Inc. is unwilling or unable to provide certified teachers in many of its classrooms.
And thanks to the Mayor of Hartford and a 5-2 vote of the Hartford Board of Education, Achievement First, Inc. will be opening a second elementary school in Hartford next year.
Only Board members Robert Cotto Jr. and Brad Noel voted against the Achievement First plan despite the fact that Achievement First effectively limits which Hartford students it will educate and also faces serious problems with its draconian disciplinary policies.
But now Achievement First Inc. only needs the approval of the State Board of Education (a la Stefan Pryor) and a Hartford location before it can move forward with its plans for a taxpayer-funded school.
One option being discussed is to close an existing Hartford school and turn the facility over to Achievement First, Inc.
Another option is to "co-locate" the Achievement First, Inc. school within an existing Hartford school.
New York City has utilized the co-location mechanism many times. The charter school company moves into the existing public school. It gets its pick of the best features of the facility and the remaining "public" school and its students then get to use whatever is left.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the co-location practice in New York City has been the Harlem Success Academy chain of charter schools.
Like Achievement First, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools won't take its fair share of bilingual or English Language Learners.
Like Achievement First, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools won't take its fair share of students who need special education services.
And like Achievement First, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools have been widely criticized for discipline policies that appear to some to be nothing short of child abuse.
For example, in one report about CEO Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools it was revealed that, "New students are initiated at 'kindergarten boot camp,' where they get drilled for two weeks on how to behave in the "zero noise" corridors (straight lines, mouths shut, arms at one's sides)."
As of two years ago, Eva Moskowitz was earning over $490,000 a year from her five taxpayer-funded charter schools, more than twice what the New York City Chancellor of Schools made for running 1,400 schools.
And what does Eva Moskowitz say about co-location of charter schools within district schools.
In a commentary piece Eva Moskowitz wrote last summer she said;
"Sure, putting charter schools in separate buildings would spare district parents the pain of pressing their noses up against the glass of high-functioning charters. However, to improve our public-school system, parents must know things could be better, no matter how painful that knowledge is.
Consider it one more service charter schools do - communicating one simple message to the families whom the district schools so profoundly fail: It need not be so."
Is that the type of education reform policy that is coming to Connecticut?
It wouldn't be the first time Eva Moskowitz's operation crossed into Connecticut.
Just last year, when Governor Malloy held a fundraiser for his Prosperity for Connecticut Political Action Committee at the home of Jonathan Sackler, who serves on the Achievement First, Inc. Board of Directors, the vice chair of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy Charter Schools dropped by with a $1,500 check for Malloy's PAC.
As of 4 p.m., Tuesday 83 people had enrolled in one of the plans offered on Connecticut's insurance exchange. The number was far more than Access Health CT CEO Kevin Counihan had anticipated.
The call center fielded more than 1,930 calls during the day, with the average call time trending at approximately nine minutes. It also received more than 123,000 visits to its web site from about 28,000 unique visitors. The high traffic volume caused the website to crash or operate slowly at certain points in the day.
[...]
"With the subsidies I think more people can afford it and these are the working people," she said.
Individuals and families will receive subsidies from the federal government to off-set the cost of buying insurance. An individual with income anywhere between $15,857 to $45,960 can qualify for a federal insurance subsidy, and a family of four with income from $32,500 to $94,200 also will qualify for subsidies based on income and household size. There were 84 people who signed up Tuesday who made below 138 percent of the federal poverty level and qualified for Medicaid.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who attended Tuesday's ribbon cutting at the Hartford call center, sought to offer some perspective on today's accomplishment.
At the beginning of this process, when Connecticut was setting up its exchange, Malloy said not everyone was "necessarily pulling in the same direction."
"Ultimately I believe the federal solution that is now being marketed today, is the right solution," Malloy said Tuesday. ". . . We are in far better shape than those states and governors who have turned their backs on this historic program and these historic offerings. So let me be very clear, you get a lot proud moments when you are governor - this is one of the proudest."
No death panels?
No undocumented immigrants receiving free health care?
The Republicans would never lie to us...
The new State of Connecticut teacher certification reports are due October 1.
We know Paul Vallas won't be on the new certification list - he is "too big" to certify.
"Special Master," "Special Deal" Steven Adamowski won't be on the state's certification list either (for the same reason).
But one question that will be answered is whether Achievement First Inc. charter schools will continue to be the schools with the greatest number of non-certified teachers.
Teachers in REAL public schools have to be certified, but thanks to a law passed by the Connecticut General Assembly, charter schools can use non-certified teachers and administrators, as long as the number of non-certified doesn't exceed 30 percent of the total number of personnel.
This past year, Achievement First, Inc. reported that they had 266 teachers.
50 held no certification in the State of Connecticut and another 35 were teaching outside of their certification.
That makes a total of 85 non-certified teachers in Achievement First schools.
Let's see, that means 32% of Achievement First teachers were non-certified...
But that would be illegal!
Oh, never mind....
Must be nice to have the co-founder of Achievement First working as Governor Malloy's Commissioner of Education...
In his latest press release, State Comptroller Kevin Lembo announces that the state is on track to a 4.4 million dollar surplus...but several factors could severely impact his prediciton.
MLN is powered by 
