Which I believe is part of the cause of the Judges opinion that minority and underprivileged children are being treated unfairly by the tenure system. In the richer districts where parents are more focused on getting little johnny into an ivy league school than a community college (or simply just out of high school), parents are more likely to complain vocally about what they see as an under performing teacher than in a poorer district. School boards don't like conflict so since the can't fire the mediocre teacher they simply move them to a school where he/she will not cause a fuss.

Over time this leads to richer public schools outperforming poorer schools, not just because of the students performance, but because the poorer area schools act as catch-alls for the most poorly performing teachers in the system.

The average salary for a teacher in California is $67,000 with a starting point of around $41,000.

Add to that a Census Bureau’s report that had people self evaluate their working hours and you had teachers actually self reporting fewer work hours that other people of similar education levels (43.7 vs 44.8), although the time difference is minimal. This was also backed up with a Bureau of Labor Statistics study which went more into where hours of work were spent (at work vs at home).

Then you have the vacation schedule which puts teachers working days at anywhere from 60 - 80 fewer days per year than the average worker and I doubt you will find many people with regular jobs that will find a $67,000/year salary for only a 2/3rds of the year job, underpaid, especially when that job has some of the most outrageous employment protections in the country..

1) I'm not American so their internal spying did not violate my non-existent constitutional rights.
2) I don't have much of an issue with his disclosures about their internal spying programs since I happen to believe they are violations of the constitution.
3) It's his disclosure of external spying I disagree with. All countries spy on each other; that's nothing new or unexpected but his disclosure of specifics placed him clearly outside of the concerned citizen category into the traitor camp.
4) This part of this thread is about his supposed attempts to do the right thing before going public so discussing those actions is hardly irrelevant.
5) Discussion Snowden's specific (in)actions is important in that it can highlight the difficulties with whistle blowing in the various levels of government.

According to the US Dept. of Labor, 4.7% of hourly employees in the US are paid at or below minimum wage with approximately half of those being under the age of 25. The largest category of those being paid at that rate worked in restaurants where it is common to be paid less than minimum with the understanding that tips will make up the remainder of your wage.

So in the entire US less than 3.7 million people are actually paid the minimum wage and even then a large number work in a field where additional forms of payment (mainly tips) are considered the norm and when calculated into their hourly pay would also remove them from the group making minimum wage.

Not quite or even partially true. Snowden CLAIMS he approached his superiors multiple times but the only released document was about a technical question about the legal power of executive orders.

He essentially asked if executive orders outweighed actual signed laws and the answer given him that while they have the weight of a law, if they conflict with a law then EO's are effectively void.

Of course you can claim that this was the only document released by the NSA because it proves Snowden is lying about his attempts to properly handle what he saw as a violation of the constitution, but if there were other documents don't you think Snowden would have presented them to prove his case. Or is a man who managed to copy millions of classified document not able to copy HIS OWN EMAILS from his account prior to leaving?

Two problems both of which, ironically enough, caused by the anti-death penalty groups and both of which are described above in several other posts.

1) Due to medical licensing regulations, most medical professionals in the US are not permitted to take part directly in executions. That in conjunction with the relative rarity of executions means the people administering the lethal cocktail are generally poorly trained.

2) The manufactures of many of the drugs that would be considered more humane for the purposes of lethal injection directly prohibit their use for that purpose. This leads to the people from problem #1 messing with less effective drugs to try and create a new lethal cocktail.

I don't believe any country in the world has a blanket law making killing illegal. Murder is illegal, but not simply 'killing' (most people over the age of 10 can understand the distinction).

Furthermore, since the illegality of an action is a decision made by the state, if the state create rules under which they can kill someone it is by definition, not illegal. It's not even illegal for citizens to kill other citizens under state specified conditions.

With over 33,000 assaults annually on prison staff by inmates I would hardly consider an incarcerated violent criminal to be "no present danger to anybody", not to mention inmate on inmate assaults. Until such time that all prisons are run by robots, a violent offender, even behind bars, has the potential to cause bodily harm to someone else.

That is not a defense of capital punishment, just a statement of fact.

Here are the numbers from the Guttmacher Institute study from 2004 (subjects were permitted to give multiple responses - at least 89% did) :

        74% felt "having a baby would dramatically change my life" (which includes interrupting education, interfering with job and career, and/or concern over other children or dependents)
        73% felt they "can't afford a baby now" (due to various reasons such as being unmarried, being a student, inability to afford childcare or basic needs of life, etc.)
        48% "don't want to be a single mother or [were] having relationship problem[s]"
        38% "have completed [their] childbearing"
        32% were "not ready for a(nother) child"
        25% "don't want people to know I had sex or got pregnant"
        22% "don't feel mature enough to raise a(nother) child"
        14% felt their "husband or partner wants me to have an abortion"
        13% said there were "possible problems affecting the health of the fetus"
        12% said there were "physical problems with my health"
        6% felt their "parents want me to have an abortion"
        1% said they were "a victim of rape"
        0.5% "became pregnant as a result of incest"

So the vast majority of respondents definitely gave answers that indicated convenience as a primary factor in their abortion decision (change in lifestyle, money). Health concerns don't show up until the very bottom of the list.

The entire ER free loader myth is just that, a myth. I believe Forbes pegged the costs of uninsured visiting emergency rooms in the US to a little under 1% (yes that's less than a single percent) of health care costs. They described it as a 'rounding error' in their report.

On the other hand the failure of the Government to pay for actual expenses for Medicaid/Medicare patients costs providers significantly more. That's the primary reason fewer and fewer hospitals and doctors accept Medicaid patients nowadays; it actually costs them money to see someone on a Government plan once their actual expenses are calculated.

So complain about health care costs all you want but in reality it is costing people with insurance a hell of a lot more to cover the costs of people with Government care than it is for people with no care whatsoever.

From all accounts he both continued and even extended LGBT friendly practices at Mozilla.

The ONLY thing ever said about him was he donated to Prop 8 and because of that it was assumed (I would guess rightfully so) that he believed the legal definition of marriage should remain 1 man 1 woman (as did the majority of Californians at the time). No one has ever come forward, to my knowledge, to say he ever put forward any proposals to limit same sex benefits at any place he ever had any control over.

Studies show that while aggressive drivers can cause traffic jams with their late braking, and may be your main problem, in general it is the timid drivers that cause the majority of traffic jams.

Leaving too much distance between cars, randomly braking, going excessively slow while merging and not capitalizing on turning lights all contribute to create huge interruptions in traffic flow. My personal favorite is the driver who watches crosswalk lights to try and predict the transitions from green to yellow because they are terrified of yellow lights.

Just for clarification, both of Bush's wars were started with Congressional approval and not by executive order. You might be mistaking them with Obama's incursion into Libya which was in fact by executive order only with no congressional involvement.

I'm trying to figure out how forcing someone to provide a service to another person (for whatever reason) does not have an affect on the person PROVDING the service.

For the cake buyers: their initial state is cakeless.
When they are refused a cake: their final state is cakeless.

There has been no change to their state of well being or a violation of any liberty. They are in the exact same point as where they started and are not restricted from making their own cake or finding another baker. They may be slightly upset over having their cake order refused but there is no constitutional protection from having your feelings hurt.

For the baker: Initial state is he is living his lives according to their beliefs
After being forced to cater a gay wedding: not only has he violated his beliefs but he's had to sacrifice his resources (time and product) to do so.

Only 1 party in this transaction has had any major change in their status and that is the baker.

If you disagree with this baker the proper option is to open up a competing bakery which does provide services to gay weddings and let the market decide. In reality, in one bakery case the owner was told that he would have to provide services for all gay weddings in the future or face up to 12 months in prison and another closed his shop and started working out of his home because of the harassment from organized gay rights groups and death threats to his children.

In at least one of the original cases (I believe the cake one) and possibly both, the business owners DID in fact give the couple a list of other businesses that would be fine with providing the service they needed. There didn't appear to be any animosity on the businesses part, merely a deep held religious belief that they did not want to violate. The couples decided to sue anyway out of spite and not out of lack of options.

In a proper free market, a privately owned business would have the right to discriminate based on whatever criteria they wanted with the complete knowledge that in doing so they would be opening themselves up to potential competition. You bake cakes but don't do gay weddings, then another baker can open up and grab not only the gay wedding business but that of those who are offended by your choice.

They are not government entities so shouldn't have to cater to all members of the community but in most cases actively discriminating against a certain clientele is just simply bad for business.