Welcome to the weekend edition of your open thread. It looks like we’ll have some nice weather on this last weekend before school starts. Yes, I’m dreading the return of school traffic on Monday. Enjoy this last weekend of freedom!
Have you been following this story out of New Jersey? New Jersey just missed out on the Race to the Top education money ($400M for the state). There was one clerical error that was enough to put them out of the money. Chris Christie blamed his Education Commissioner Brent Schundler, but Schundler has emails proving Christie is a liar:
Former New Jersey Education Commissioner Bret Schundler, who was fired today by Gov. Chris Christie (R) amid accusations that he’d lied to the governor about an error in the state’s application for federal Race to the Top money, is now saying that he did not mislead the governor at all.
The state lost out on $400 million in funds as a result of an error in its application, which provided budget numbers for the wrong years, causing New Jersey to lose enough points to miss out on the money. On Wednesday, Christie held a press conference in which he strongly blamed the Obama administration for the loss of federal funding, saying that Schundler had tried to fix an error in the state’s application during his presentation to federal education officials, but they would not let him.
Then on Thursday, the federal Education Department released a video of the presentation itself, showing the officials pointing out the error to Schundler, who was unable to correct it. As a result, Schundler was fired for seemingly misleading the administration about what had happened.
But now he says he did not mislead them at all.
Schundler showed the AP several emails supporting his story -and that Christie knew this all along. Schundler’s is also claiming that Christie fired him so that Schundler could collect unemployment benefits. I’m really not sure what’s going on here but Schundler and Christie appear to have a real feud. Pass the popcorn!
I don’t know how many you are fans of P.Z. Myers. He had a recent cardiac scare and had several stents put in his heart. He should be fine a few weeks and he’s doing a real public service right now, discussing his symptoms and his decision to get a check-up:
This whole hospitalization mess started a few weeks ago, when I was on my daily walk, and I’d gone a little farther and longer than I usually do. I was on my way home, and I felt a dull ache in my chest — nothing severe, nothing acute, just a soreness that spread into my left arm. And I stopped on the sidewalk, and looked ahead, where I was only a couple of blocks from home, and I looked to my right, where the hospital was located only a couple of blocks away. And the ache immediately receded, and I had a little internal debate between the nice angel on my left shoulder, and the dickish devil on my right.
And the angel said, “Oh, look, it’s just a little soreness and it’s going away already. Go home, have a cup of tea, lie down for a bit, and then you can get back to work, no worries. You’ll feel fine.”
And the devil replied with the potent one-two punch of reason and abuse: “You teach human physiology, you moron — you know this is one of the warning signs of heart disease. You’d have to be incredibly stupid to ignore this and hope it goes away…until a heart attack comes along to blow your heart up. Jerk. This isn’t even a choice.”
I thought about it a bit and realized that the remote prospect of dying (it was a very mild ache, and I had no feeling of imminent doom) was nowhere near as persuasive as the thought that I’d feel like an idiot if the iron spike of an infarct did nail my left ventricle at some time in the future, and I’d neglected a portent and hadn’t done the best thing for my health. So I turned right, even though I also felt a bit of a whiner for showing up at a hospital with such a small complaint.
They don’t call heart disease the silent killer for nothing. You can go many years without suffering from symptoms. My dad had a similar incident to P.Z.’s about a decade ago – same symptoms. He decided to get checked out and ended up having quintuple-bypass surgery. As I tell my friends – don’t be a health care martyr!