In the GOP debate in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick Santorum beat the snot out of Mitt Romney on one of the biggest policy issues fueling the persistent if frustrated Not-Romney vote: health care. Pressed by Santorum, Romney made clear that if he is the nominee, conservatives can kiss ObamaCare goodbye as a debate issue. Check out the transcript from CNN:

SANTORUM: What Governor Romney just said is that government-run top-down medicine is working pretty well in Massachusetts and he supports it. Now, think about what that means –

ROMNEY: That’s not what I said.

SANTORUM: — going up against Barack Obama, who you are going to claim, well, top-down government-run medicine on the federal level doesn’t work and we should repeal it. And he’s going to say, wait a minute, Governor. You just said that top-down government-run medicine in Massachusetts works well.

Folks, we can’t give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom. Whether the United States government or even a state government — you have Amendment 1 (ph) here offered by Scott Pleitgen (ph), who, by the way, endorsed me today, and it’s going to be on your ballot as to whether there should be a government mandate here in Florida.

According to Governor Romney, that’s OK. If the state does it, that’s OK. If the state wants to enforce it, that’s OK. Those are not the clear contrasts we need if we’re going to defeat Barack Obama….

ROMNEY: Rick, I make enough mistakes in what I say, not for you to add more mistakes to what I say. I didn’t say I’m in favor of top- down government-run health care, 92 percent of the people in my state had insurance before our plan went in place. And nothing changes for them. They own the same private insurance they had before.

And for the 8 percent of people who didn’t have insurance, we said to them, if you can afford insurance, buy it yourself, any one of the plans out there, you can choose any plan. There’s no government plan.

And if you don’t want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn’t have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility.

Either get the insurance or help pay for your care. And that was the conclusion that we reached.

SANTORUM: Does everybody in Massachusetts have a requirement to buy health care?

ROMNEY: Everyone has a requirement to either buy it or pay the state for the cost of providing them free care. Because the idea of people getting something for free when they could afford to care for themselves is something that we decided in our state was not a good idea.

[...]

SANTORUM: Just so I understand this, in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated as a condition of breathing in Massachusetts, to buy health insurance, and if you don’t, and if you don’t, you have to pay a fine.

What has happened in Massachusetts is that people are now paying the fine because health insurance is so expensive. And you have a pre-existing condition clause in yours, just like Barack Obama… [GOP debate, CNN transcript, Jacksonville, Florida, 2012.01.26].

Romney is left so out of ammunition that he has to resort to sneaky debate tactics and condescendingly say to Santorum, “It’s not worth getting angry about.” I know that trick: when you’re losing, try to portray your opponent’s passion about an important issue as irrational emotion. Heck, Santorum could naked through Disney World screaming “RomneyCare = ObamaCare!” and his momentary lapse of judgment would not negate the fact that a majority of voters will not recognize any meaningful distinction between the individual mandates embraced by Governor Romney and President Obama.

I don’t mind if ObamaCare is an issue in this Presidential election. It’s good policy. President Obama can defend it and win on it. If you want to challenge the President on that issue, then Santorum makes clear that you’d better not send Romney to make your case.

Alas, Santorum is not going to Disney World. He’s going home, tired and broke, to do his taxes.

Two proposals in the South Dakota Legislature would do away with teacher tenure in South Dakota’s public schools. Governor Dennis Daugaard does it the wimpy way as part of HB 1234, letting currently tenured teachers keep their tenure while granting it to no future teachers (because young teachers don’t vote… except with their feet). Rep. Betty Olson (R-28B/Prairie City) does it straight up, eliminating tenure for everyone right away with HB 1145.

To justify her bill, Rep. Olson cited in committee testimony Wednesday three letters from Harding County School Board members who say that without Rep. Olson’s bill, they can’t carry out their duty to provide a safe educational environment for their children:

Olson read letters from three members of the Harding County School Board, which described their reluctance to fire a tenured teacher with a history of bullying students. Board member Casey Olson’s letter said the board suspended the teacher without pay, but the district’s lawyer advised the teacher probably would win an appeal if fired. Instead, they gave the teacher a different assignment with less responsibility.

“The board decided that due to the tight budget, it could not afford to lose a lawsuit,” Casey Olson’s letter said. “Now, our district is saddled with a teacher most of the parents don’t want in the same classroom as their kids and the board is nervously hoping another incident does not occur” [Josh Verges, "School Board: Eliminate Tenure," that Sioux Falls paper, 2012.01.26].

Read that again: a majority of the Harding County School Board believes that a teacher is bullying students. The Harding County School Board is allowing that alleged bully to remain in contact with students.

These Harding County School Board members clearly misunderstand Rep. Olson’s bill, state law, and their own duty.

1. HB 1145 does not change the rules for firing teachers. It only changes the rules for not hiring teachers back for another year.
2. State law allows school boards to fire teachers at any time for just cause. Boards can nuke teachers on the spot for “breach of contract, poor performance, incompetency, gross immorality, unprofessional conduct, insubordination, neglect of duty, or the violation of any policy or regulation of the school district.” I’m pretty sure bullying students falls under more than a couple of those criteria.
3. If students are in real danger, the board should be acting now. If parents and other staff know there is an adult predator in their school, the solution is not to repeal due process for every teacher in the state: the solution is to replace their lily-livered school board members with adults who take children’s safety seriously.

Harding County doesn’t have to wait for the end of the school year to remove this threat from their school district. If they have evidence of this bullying, that evidence will stand up in the board hearing and district court hearing and appeals provided under current South Dakota law.

And if the board doesn’t have evidence sufficient to withstand legal scrutiny, then too bad. We do not take due process away from the vast majority of decent teachers to grease the skids for a few school board members who can’t work up the courage to do their jobs.

Rep. Stace Nelson, R-19/Fulton

The Legislative leadership of the South Dakota Republican Party has booted Rep. Stace Nelson (R-25/Fulton) and Rep. Lance Russell (R-30/Hot Springs) from the GOP caucus. According to reporters Bob Mercer and Tom Lawrence, state Highway Patrol officers are patrolling the Capitol, and Speaker of the House Val Rausch (R-4/Big Stone City) was accompanied in the halls of democracy by an armed guard.

I want to believe, as does Steve Sibson, that these expulsions and the summoning of police are a power play by a corrupt GOP elite determined to quash any challenge to their reign. But whenever I find my mind rolling down the same path as Sibby’s, I do a reality check.

Reps. Nelson and Russell led the charge on alleging ethics violations by the GOP House leadership. The leadership effectively defused those charges before session began. If Reps. Nelson and Russell have any more powder on this issue, they have been keeping it dry since session opened.

Rep. Lance Russell, R-30/Hot Springs

If these two GOP excommunicants have the goods on the leadership, if they really can point to corruption and favoritism that is crowding out the voices of the people whom they are elected to represent, then they have one clear responsibility and public response: form their own caucus, invite others to join, and raise holy but civil hell for the rest of the session. Two guys with a proper grasp of House rules and Mason’s Manual can throw a lot of righteous monkey wrenches into the works. At the same time, you spend every off-duty moment calling around the state and recruiting candidates of any party affiliation to challenge the leaders corrupting your party. You form alliances with like-minded Republicans and sympathetic Democrats: they can’t all be cowed by a handful of tinpot dictators who think leadership of a part-time legislature in a state smaller than the Fresno metropolitan area makes them the cocks of the walk. If you really have the goods on leadership gone wrong, liberal bloggers, the regular press, and most importantly, voterswill eat it up and help you set things right.

But at the point where you blow your stack to the point that the House leaders can justify calling in armed police (and really, what else could have brought on that call?), you’re not winning.

Whatever is happening, the people need to know. If Districts 25 and 30 are going to suffer weakened voices in the House because the leadership has taken action against their elected representatives, the citizens of those districts need to hear a clear, full explanation so they can decide whom to send to do that job next year.

The South Dakota Board of Regents today announced the hiring of David B. Borofsky as Doug Knowlton’s interim replacement as Dakota State University president. Borofsky likely welcomes the chance for a breath of fresh South Dakota air, since the employer he leaves, for-profit Westwood College based in Denver, faces a lawsuit filed Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The charge: Westwood misrepresented its accreditation and its costs to students at four Chicago-area campuses.

Madigan’s lawsuit alleges that, through marketing its criminal justice program, Westwood falsely convinced students they could pursue a law enforcement career with agencies such as the Chicago Police Department, Illinois State Police and suburban police departments, even though those employers don’t recognize a Westwood degree due to its lack of regional accreditation.

…The lawsuit also alleges that Westwood downplayed the ultimate total cost of attending the college and failed to provide students with sufficient information about their loans. Westwood is typically more expensive than most community colleges or state universities, with 2012 tuition rates for a Bachelor’s of Applied Science totaling more than $71,000. Madigan said that when government and private loans did not cover a student’s cost, Westwood financed the student’s balance at exceedingly high interest rates – as much as 18 percent – and financial aid officers misrepresented the terms of the financing [Illinois Attorney General's Office, "Madigan Sues National For-Profit College," press release, 2012.01.18].

$71,610, financed at 18%, for a useless degree. Less than ten miles down the road, the College of DuPage offers regionally accredited and thus recognized criminal justice degrees for $12,672.

The Illinois AG’s lawsuit isn’t Westwood’s first bad press. In 2010, a General Accounting Office investigation of for-profit colleges found Westwood “made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to G.A.O.’s undercover applicants.” An admissions rep for Westwood’s parent company Alta testified that the school used high-pressure sales tactics, deceptive pricing, and fictitious endorsements. That recruiter told the Senate these abusive practices were not isolated actions by a few bad apples but “rather a pattern of behavior encouraged by corporate leaders.”

Dakota State University’s new temporary leader takes the reins within the next couple weeks. Here’s hoping interim DSU president Borofsky enjoys his return to a campus dedicated to people, not profits.

One bit of Borofsky’s Westwood experience that students may hope Borofsky brings to DSU is the “Employment Pledge”: last year Westwood promised to pay six months of its graduates’ bills if they were unable to land jobs six months after finishing their coursework.

Maybe President Newt Gingrich wouldn’t be so bad after all… if he’d really take us back to the moon:

During a campaign event on Florida’s Space Coast — hard-hit by the recession and the space program’s uncertain future — Gingrich talked about coming of age at the time of Sputnik, the first satellite, launched in 1957 by the Soviet Union. He recalled reading science-fiction author Isaac Asimov and Missiles and Rockets magazine.

“I come at space from a standpoint of a romantic belief that it really is part of our destiny, and it has been tragic to see what has happened to our space program over the last 30 years,” Gingrich said Wednesday in a crowded hotel ballroom in Cocoa, not far from the Kennedy Space Center.

…If elected, Gingrich promised, “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Gingrich said he would encourage commercial activities in space, including science, tourism and manufacturing. And he promises, in about eight years, a rocket capable of reaching Mars [Brian Naylor, "On Florida's Space Coast, Gingrich Aims for the Moon," NPR.org, 2012.01.26].

To the moon, Callista! (By the way, Callisto is a moon of Jupiter the size of Mercury. I’ll bet that name has something to do with Newt’s attraction to his current wife.)

Gingrich read Asimov. He’s channeling Isaac Asimov and the science-fiction icon’s historically inspired vision of Galactic Empire. Gingrich wants to be our Elijah Baley. I can dig that. (Asimov also gave his characters some crazy names: R. Daneel Olivaw, Gladia Delmarre, Golan Trevize… how could a boy named Newt Gingrich not have been inspired?)

A tsunami can wipe out an island. An asteroid can wipe out a planet. A nova can wipe out a solar system. But it will take the Second Law of Thermodynamics and more years than you and I can count to wipe out the entire cosmos. If we can make it to the stars, we can live forever.

“I’m prepared to invest the prestige of the presidency in communicating and building a nationwide movement in favor of space,” Gingrich said at a meeting of aerospace executives and community leaders after the rally.

“If we do it right, it’ll be wild and it will be just the most fun you’ve ever seen,” he said [Irene Klotz, "Newt Gingrich: Space Visionary and Future Geek-in-Chief?" Christian Science Monitor, 2012.01.26].

That’s my kind of grandiosity. And really, does Mitt Romney sound like he’d ever bring us fun?

Thar she blows! House Bill 1234 puts Governor Dennis Daugaard’s really bad education reform ideas on paper for the South Dakota Legislature to debate and (please, please, please) kill. The details:

1. $3980 bonus to every high school and middle school math and science teacher who applies. One need not be a full-time math teacher: the standard is 51% of an FTE teaching math or science. The money comes in a lump sum; school districts may disburse $480 of that check to cover retirement, taxes, and adminsitrative costs (really? the business manager gets to skim?), leaving the teacher with a guaranteed $3500 in pocket.
2. $5700 bonus to up to 20% of the best teachers in each district. We round down: If your district has 99 teachers, up to 19 get bonuses. The district can keep $700 to cover taxes, retirement, and admin.
3. To qualify for a bonus, teachers need to get a “distinguished” rating on the evaluation instrument to be concocted by a 20-person workgroup consisting of teachers (pick me!), administrators, board members, parents, and reps from SDEA, SASD, and ASBSD. This criterion means that we aren’t guaranteeing bonuses to 20% of the faculty: if a district has 100 teachers, 99 rate “proficient,” and only one rates “distinguished,” only that one latter teacher gets a bonus.
4. In addition to the “distinguished” rating, teachers may also demonstrate their bonus-worthiness by engaging in the following activities (that scratching sound you hear is teachers already taking notes and updating résumés):

1. mentoring of less experienced teachers;
2. curriculum development;
3. assessment development;
4. data analysis;
5. service to the local district, state, or national committees or task forces;
6. leadership in a professional learning community;
7. national board certification (by the way, did you know that credentials don’t predict teacher performance? oh, all that effort that could be spent instead actually working with kids…);
8. other leadership activities or recognitions;
9. additional criteria determined by the school board.

HB 1234 emphasizes that participation in the bonus programs is voluntary. If any math or science teacher does not want the $3980, that teacher may simply skip filling out the application. Likewise the merit bonuses: if we really believe that merit pay is an ineffective and counterproductive policy, we teachers can shout “we’re not racing!” and decline to apply.

Participation in the state-mandated evaluation scheme, alas, is not voluntary. School boards also have no authority to spend the governor’s bonuses in any other way. That lack of local control may gum up the works for Republicans who are paying attention. Senator Larry Rhoden (R-29/Union Center) says his conversations with local teachers have led him to believe the Governor’s plan should be amended to allow school boards to use the additional money for other locally determined priorities. Senator Ried Holien (R-5/Watertown), a former teacher, agrees that school boards need more flexibility in this bill.

If we can’t kill HB 1234 outright, let’s hope Senators Rhoden and Holien can at least work such amendments, so school boards can spend this additional money on policies that will actually work.

What’s that degree Congresswoman Kristi Noem is getting in May? Democratic candidate Jeff Barth thinks it’s a B.S. in math:

And here I thought Noem’s main math problem was her ability to exaggerate the potential job creation of the Keystone XL pipeline by a factor of 100.

Note that Barth’s pointed language on spending and handouts to the wealthy goes just a little soft on the tax side of the equation. “We need to restrain our spending and keep our income up. In fact, we’re all going to have to pull together to solve this problem.” He does support raising some taxes (and that’s one perfectly logical debt solution, paying for what we’re getting from government).

One other math note: someone write Barth a check now so he can get a better webcam! I’m all for homemade, but my Blackberry Playbook can shoot better video than that… and I’m not running for Congress. Heck, B. Thomas Marking had better quality video than this one (although he’s closed his YouTube account, so we can’t enjoy his homemade campaign clips any more, darn it!).

The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead publishes a list of surprising facts about the impacts of the Bakken oil boom on rural North Dakota: mile-long traffic jams, $2000-rent for one-bedroom apartments and other costs pricing long-time residents out of their towns, doubled inmate population and doubled staff at the Williams County (Williston) jail, overwhelming influx of undocumented workers (Romney probably won’t want to come talk self-deportation there)….

The Forum editorial board looks at what Big Oil is wreaking on North Dakota and sees a free market in need of regulation:

The market is amoral. Without targeted intervention and reasonable regulation, the market will maximize its priorities, which seldom include minimizing the deleterious effects a go-go boom can have on people, communities and cultures.

The troubling trends in oil country cannot be spun away simply because money is being made and government revenues are setting records. The numbers suggest that at the very least, industry should ratchet it down enough for North Dakota’s rural small-town ranching and farming culture to catch up. If the industry won’t do it, a slowdown imposed by regulators should not be off the table [editorial, "Startling Oil Patch Numbers," Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, 2012.01.24].

Jobs and dollars aren’t everything if they obliterate the community you started with. Remember that when Kristi Noem and John Thune and even that nice Jeff Barth fellow tell you that the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline (which would have boosted the Bakken boom) would have been nothing but good for South Dakota and America.