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A Third Of Trump Supporters Say Clinton Has The Experience It Takes To Be President

A Third Of Trump Supporters Say Clinton Has The Experience It Takes To Be President

Published with permission from Alternet.

When it comes to Hillary Clinton, supporters of Donald Trump aren’t known to mince words. But there’s one area in particular where both sides have found common ground.

Compared to Clinton, Trump falls far behind in experience. According to aGallup poll released Friday:

More than six in 10 Americans say Clinton has the experience it takes to be president (62%)—twice as many as say this about Trump (31%). In fact, experience is Clinton’s greatest overall strength from among those tested in the poll, and it is Trump’s single weakest attribute.

Of course, ratings among a candidate’s supporters will be predictably higher. Yet, even among Trump supporters, 34% agree that Clinton has the experience it takes to be president. This rating was higher than for any other individual characteristic regarding the candidate the respondents opposed. (emphasis ours)

It seems Clinton is aware she would do well to focus on her political experience advantage over Trump while campaigning against him.

“You know, there’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow a big golf course deal,” Clinton announced at a San Diego press conference yesterday. “But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of ’60 Minutes’ as Putin was, is not the same thing as actually dealing with Putin,” she mocked Trump. “So the stakes in global state craft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels,” Clinton continued.

She went on to joke about Trump’s “nasty Tweets,” to laughter and applause.

“Rather than solving global crises, [Trump] would create new ones. He has no sense of what it takes to deal with multiple countries with competing interests and reaching a solution that everyone can get behind,” Clinton said.

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton takes part in the Memorial Day parade in Chappaqua, New York, U.S. May 30, 2016. REUTERS/Adrees Latif 

University Offers High-Tech Homework That’s Tailored To Students

By Gabrielle Russon, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Tiffani Harper’s online homework seemed to have a mind of its own. It knew that she learned best by watching videos and detected what topics she struggled to grasp.

“It’s teaching me the best way to study,” said Harper, 32, a UCF student from Sanford.

Harper’s nursing class is part of a growing pilot program that uses cutting-edge technology to personalize online homework for students. The University of Central Florida is one of a handful of schools in the country using the adaptive-style learning for several online courses, school officials said.

At a school as large as UCF — one of the biggest in the country with 63,000 students enrolled — the program is especially important, they said.

“It personalizes a learning experience for a student who could potentially be in a large class. It won’t feel large. … They get the help they need,” said Thomas Cavanagh, who oversees the university’s online learning. “It’s a really nice way to mitigate the size issue.”

As part of the class, assistant professor Julie Hinkle monitors the students’ online homework to see where they need help and detecting where they succeed or fail. The software even tells her how much time Harper spent studying — eight hours and 22 minutes for one recent section.

Armed with that knowledge, Hinkle might change her lectures for her students in class or send out emails and hold more office hours for her online-only students.

The material itself can change, giving students more review when they get problems wrong. The homework also adapts to fit learning styles.

One day, for instance, Harper watched a YouTube video of a doctor explaining a complex chemistry lesson on a kidney disorder. Others might learn better if they read a text or look at a diagram.

So far, some psychology and nursing classes are part of the adaptive learning pilot, but Cavanagh said it will expand in upcoming months to include certain math classes and the final two years of a bachelor’s degree in applied science.

So far, UCF has invested about $37,000 on the software, training and startup costs for the pilot, which began last school year.

“For some of the basic courses or technical degrees, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Cavanagh said. “If we’re serious about student success, I think we have to look at it. It’s sort of incumbent on us to try these kinds of experiments and see if they work.”

But he also acknowledges the pilot program isn’t a natural fit for every class, like English, where there is no easy computer logarithm to score essays.

On a recent day, Harper sought refuge in a cubicle in the quiet room at the UCF College of Nursing.

She is a college student who experienced life before she ever arrived on campus by joining the work force, getting married, becoming a mom.

But when her husband’s grandmother was dying, Harper saw the tenderness of how a hospice nurse put Chapstick on the sick woman’s lips, and how the nurse cared enough to explain the dying process to the family. That motivated her to enroll in nursing school.

In the quiet room, Harper started her online homework by answering a question about how much she knew about the kidneys in the human body.

“A reasonable amount,” Harper clicked, remembering her previous anatomy class.

That was the starting block. From there, the homework could generate easier — or more difficult — questions, depending on the student. If she got one wrong, there could be more readings, more diagrams, more videos that Harper could study on her laptop screen.

Like anything in education, students take away what they put in.

“I’d rather get it wrong than a lucky guess because I want it to teach me the material,” Harper said.

The online homework was a first taste of the material, but the stakes were not that high. If Harper got it wrong, she could go back and try different questions to improve her score or study more before her exam.

“Well done!” flashed on her screen as Harper answered a question right and moved to the next part.

©2015 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Tiffani Harper, a nursing student at the University of Central Florida, takes notes as she demonstrates her Personalized Learning web courses at UCF on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

 

Sen. Paul Says Lack Of Experience Should Not Be A Hindrance To Presidential Run

Sen. Paul Says Lack Of Experience Should Not Be A Hindrance To Presidential Run

By Rick Pearson, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO—First-term Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said Tuesday that lack of experience can sometimes be a good thing for people seeking top offices against “career politicians” who have become entrenched in the current political system.

“I was a physician, and then a U.S. senator, and people said, ‘You need to be a state legislator and a mayor and all of these other things before you’re in the U.S. senate’ and I absolutely disagree with that because I think in some ways, when you have people who are career politicians, they’ve been beaten down by the system and are so part of the system that they can’t see all the problems of the system,” Paul told reporters after speaking at a school choice forum in the Wicker Park neighborhood.

The comments came after last week’s remarks by Bob Dole, a former GOP presidential nominee and long-serving U.S. senator who belittled Paul and fellow Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as “first termers.”

“I don’t think they’ve got enough experience yet,” Dole told the Eagle newspaper of Wichita, Kan.

While Paul said he was not responding directly to Dole, the Kentucky Republican said, “Maybe you can have too much (experience as well) in the sense that I think that over long periods of time, people lose their zeal for change in Washington and they become part of the system.”

Paul said he never criticized President Barack Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, for having a lack of experience to seek the White House.

Paul’s appearance at Josephinum Academy, a Catholic all-girl high school, was part of a two-day Midwest swing to tout school choice as a way to try to gain Republican support from traditional Democratic voters in the black and Latino communities.

“We have to figure out as Republicans how to get our message to the people who favor charter schools and choice in schools and say, ‘Look, we do care about your kids and frankly the other side cares more about the status quo than your kids.’”

During his talk, co-hosted by the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, Paul labeled the fight for school choice and publicly funded vouchers as between “dead enders and those who believe in education.” Afterward, Paul told reporters the “dead enders” included Democrats in Illinois and nationally, as well as teachers’ unions.

The Chicago Teachers Union and other educators’ unions have opposed many aspects of school choice, including charter schools and vouchers, contending they divert public tax dollars from public schools.

Paul also said he planned to meet with unnamed black community leaders about his push for “economic freedom zones”—a plan to reduce federal taxes in high unemployment areas to spur job growth. He unveiled the proposal late last year.

“If we were to allow my bill to pass, it would bring over $1 billion to Chicago. This would be Chicago bailing out Chicago,” said Paul, who added that it was another issue that should appeal to traditional Democratic minority constituencies.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

‘We’re Americans. We Don’t Walk Around Terrified.’ — Wrong!

Now, let’s mark the anniversary of something that happened AFTER 9/11.

On 9/12, as a shaken nation reeled, an old soldier gave a pep talk. Do not let this change you, warned Secretary of State Colin Powell. Do not cower or walk around terrified. “We’re Americans,” he said. “We don’t walk around terrified.”

It was bracing medicine, designed to stiffen watery spines and lift downcast eyes. In that, it was like Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 first inaugural address to a nation mired in economic ruin. “Let me assert my firm belief,” he said, “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror…”

Nine years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt gave in to a nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror of some of his own citizens and authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans whose only crime was being Japanese-American. It is a blot on our national honor that neatly sums up the contradictions in what he said 78 years ago and Powell echoed a decade back.

Yes, the physical bravery of Americans is incontestable, as proven on battlefields from Concord, Mass., to Peleliu Island in the South Pacific to the Meuse-Argonne region of France to Paktya Province in Afghanistan.

Similarly, Americans have always found courage to conquer the trials of national life, from Dust Bowl privation to presidential assassination to the bombing of children in church to the explosion of a spaceship arcing toward heaven.

But when it comes to finding courage to simply be Americans, to venerate the values upon which we were founded, the things we say we believe, we have too often been conspicuous by our cowardice, our spineless eagerness to throw sacred principle aside as a sop to expedience and fear. Or, as Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy said days before Roosevelt issued his order, “If it is a question of the safety of the country (and) the Constitution … why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

In times of danger or fear, we seem to feel it OK to curtail the freedoms — of religion, association, speech — codified in that “scrap of paper.” We never seem to get that it is precisely in such times that those freedoms are most important and most in need of defense.

So everything that has happened since Powell spoke — the curtailment of civil liberties, the domestic surveillance, the demonizing of all things Muslim — is troubling, but predictable to any student of American history.

In his new book, “Manufacturing Hysteria,” author Jay Feldman traces the depressing line from a German-American being lynched during the First World War to the murders of Arabs after 9/11.

Along the way, union leaders, alleged communists, Mexicans, gays, peace activists and African-Americans all take their turns in the barrel, all get brutalized, detained, fired, illegally searched or killed outright because they, we are told, are the people we should fear. As a nation, we seem to need that, seem to need a people to fear. But fear interdicts intelligence.

It is almost impossible to reason and fear at the same time.

We ought to know this. Our history should have taught us. But we are, it seems, resistant to learning. And 10 years after 9/11 one thing now seems obvious.

Colin Powell was wrong.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)