OPINION: A Prudent College Path
New York Times – Aug. 8
EVERY year the frenzy to get into highly selective colleges seems to intensify, and every year the news media finds and fawns over the rare students offered admission to all eight Ivy League schools. This year Ronald Nelson, from the Memphis area, was one of those who sopped up that adulation. But his story had a fresh wrinkle. Nelson turned down Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the rest of them and chose instead to stay in the South, at the University of Alabama, where he’ll begin his studies later this month. The lower price tag of Alabama, which is giving him a bounty of aid, was one reason. He also cited another: He’ll be taking classes at its honors college, which promises him an environment of especially dedicated, high-achieving students within a larger, more diverse community of more than 30,000 undergraduates.
Senator Blumenthal– do the right thing and support the president
Mondoweiss.net – Aug. 8
University of Alabama Law Prof. Dan Joyner, the author of a forthcoming book on Iran’s nuclear program expected to be published next year by Oxford University Books, recently wrote in Opinio Juris, calls the JCPOA “ a major success of international diplomacy, possibly to be credited with avoidance of war” and says further, “it is a carefully drafted, well organized document, and compliments are due its drafters.”
GOP stalemate could force costly, second special session
Florence Times Daily – Aug. 8
The Alabama Legislature’s special session appears to be ending the same way the regular session closed in June, with Republican leadership failing to agree on the 2016 General Fund budget. This time, a rare second special looms. Gov. Robert Bentley wants about $300 million in new taxes. Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh on Friday, like he did in June, said there isn’t an appetite in his chamber for new taxes. And somewhere in between is Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard. … The unity Republicans showed in 2010 is a distant memory now, said William Stewart, retired chairman of the political science department at the University of Alabama. “They’re not any closer to an agreement than they were when they first started,” Stewart said. “They have any number of options, and they can’t agree on any of them.”
THE PORT RAIL: We have too much information and not enough knowledge
Tuscaloosa News – Aug. 8
Do you really need to know how presidential candidate X insulted presidential candidate Z in Nowhere, Iowa, 10 minutes ago? How does this better inform you on what you may do in the voting booth in November 2016? The world once got along perfectly well — and maybe better in some instances — without round-the-clock news on television, and now available on your wrist if you want, beeping to alert you to messages and waking you in the middle of the night to let you know the Queen of England had a mild heart attack, but she’s going to be OK. Lots of people in this country don’t even know we fought against the queen’s ancestors in the American Revolution, but they are listening all the time to the “breaking news” about some poor dog rescued after he walked from Arizona to Kansas, or the other way around. (Larry Clayton is a retired University of Alabama history professor. Readers can email him at larryclayton7@gmail.com.)
3 locals study internationally
Andalusia Star News – Aug. 8
Three Andalusia High School graduates received full international study scholarships to attend the nine-week University of Cambridge International Summer School in Cambridge, England. The scholarships were provided by the Andalusia High School Scholarship Foundation … John David Thompson received the W. Robert and Judith Brown International Study Scholarship. John David is the son of John and Dawn Thompson. He is a sophomore at the University of Alabama majoring in political science and French.
Day cares to meet stricter guidelines
Montgomery Advertiser – Aug. 8
Seven weeks ago 86 children went to hospital emergency rooms after getting food poisoning at Sunny Side Day Care Center. Lawsuits quickly followed; so did questions about how the “church-exempt” centers operated, how they were funded, and how many regulations protect children there. So far the Sunny Side answers are: with little supervision, primarily through the Subsidized Child Care Program, and … not many. Sunny Side Day Care Center is one of 895 “licensed-exempt” centers in the state, compared to 1,001 licensed centers — numbers that state officials say are changing in the wrong direction … To further improve quality in child care centers, the state is implementing a Quality Rating Improvement System, which sets standards above and beyond licensing, and will measure beyond minimum standards, with training playing a large role. “We are hoping that that will encourage more centers to be licensed and upgrade the educational level with the staff that is working at the center,” said DHR commissioner Nancy Buckner. “We’ve been working on this with a lot of the child care advocates. We’re about to start it … the University of Alabama has the contract to do it with us. We’re hoping that that will improve the overall child care in the state by getting more licensed centers out there.