It's not about a "blood for oil" trade. It's that the architects of the war grossly underestimated the costs of the invasion, and part of the pitch for the occupation was that the cost of war would be minimal considering that the money recouped from Iraq's domestic production would help to repay for the invasion. This link has a few good quotes:

"The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment -- as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." -Donald Rumsfeld, 2003

I'm divided on this controversy, because I also know a couple of teachers. They post on Facebook, or they show up in IRC chat, and the number one thing that seem to like to talk about is how there's this one kid that they just absolutely want to strangle some days. Or lesser injustices like kids not doing their homework and such. Considering the stress of the environment and the lack of discipline in some kids, I think it's fair that teachers should want to vent now and then.

What bothers me more about the OP is that the teacher didn't blog behind a pseudonym or behind a locked Facebook post. I'm not sure that putting your actual name on a blog and making it moderately clear which kids you're dissing is a mature thing to do in any case.

A short reminder for those who forget - half of all teachers in America quit within 5 years.

Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school.

That's part of the problem - schools are often funded by local property taxes and the like. Which is to say, the richer areas have richer schools as more taxes get paid into them. You might want to ask why we have such a disparity in teacher salaries from school to school that have little to do with quality of performance.

Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.

The story goes, as I've heard, that one day a work consultant came to my company and offered to analyze their work practices to see if they could discover any positive or negative patterns. One thing they noted in their survey of the staff was that the more productive employees, the ones who had stayed on with the company for a decade, were the ones that had been referred to the company by a current employee. Since then, the company has offered a generous referral bonus for signing up friends.

Of course if you only listen to Rachel Maddow, then you were probably unaware.

If you think that Rachel Maddow doesn't hit Obama for this stuff all the time, then you're just as blindly partisan as you claim other people to be. Characters like Keith Olbermann, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Maher have been giving Obama shit since be got elected - from hiring much of Clinton's economic team with their heavy ties to the financial industry, to his backdoor meetings with healthcare providers promising not to bargain for lower bulk rates if they would support the reform bill.

See, the funny part about all of this is that people like Glenn Beck think that Obama is a socialist, an evil plant of the far-left set out to destroy all American values, but then they turn right around and accusing him of being in the pocket of big business without the least bit of irony. The guy is a centrist, and he's clearly positioning himself to work with the Republican Congress to try and get some compromises and get some things accomplished over the next two-year period - much to the chagrin of his Rachel-Maddow-watching supporters.

Maxwell Smart was more of a bumbler. Much of the time he did do something right or mildly clever to win the day by the episode's end.

This is what I was going to say. Get Smart was goofy, it was a farce, but the lead character was genuinely competent.

And Gilligan's Island? The Professor built radios from coconuts! Dude had The Spark!

+1 Foglio reference.

Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Case in point, and apropos to the original post, it was the government that required cell phone carriers to allow customers to take their phone numbers with them when they switched to a different carrier. This removed a barrier to competition, as the hassle of telling everyone your new number was often enough to dissuade people from switching companies, and may have even caused cell carriers to offer better deals in order to pick up more customers that were ready to switch.

Out of curiosity, did that make the game "profitable?" I mean, three times zero is still zero. Does the game now bring in enough revenue to justify its continued existence?

[F]ight your way through a mystifyingly complex government bureaucracy for a full day of discipline problems and budget cuts, all for the same pay as the meathead who barely graduated college? Gee, where do I sign up? A couple changes that I think would go a long way towards addressing some of this:

I think you contradict yourself a bit there. Instead of new incentives and a screwy pay structure and testing that kinda sorta shows who the better teachers are, why not just, y'know, raise the average teaching salary to match that of other professions with similar training requirements? That would bring more talented people to the profession, since many of those talented people leave to seek careers where they can be rewarded for their talents, and growing the talent pool would then give schools more range in firing underperforming teachers since they would have more ready replacements.

I mean, "incentives" is basically a way that we say we want it to look like we're giving people higher salaries than what they're currently getting without actually having to pay higher salaries. When a person signs up for a job, they ask what it pays every two weeks - they don't ask what bonus they earn for being voted employee of the month. And a lot of students do the same thing when they select their college majors. Right now, you might earn a good salary as a teacher if you're well recognized and you can teach in the right school district and you can cut a certain amount of politics and you're willing to eventually move up to an admin position (and not to mention in the current climate of cutting education budgets to make up for shortfalls in state budgets, if you can even get a job to begin with), whereas there are plenty of careers to train for where you can just earn a good salary. Your incentives might push current teachers to do a little better, but they won't attract more talented people to the profession.