'Social'-izing the children
If you think it's important to keep your child at home until he or she attends kindergarten, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan begs to differ.
"Universal access to high quality early learning is coming, it is the right thing [and] it's a triumph of common sense," he said when discussing the idea at the Los Angeles Universal Preschool last month, Cybercast News Service reported. "At the end of the day for me, this is really a social movement."
Indeed, Duncan said, achieving government-funded universal preschool is a movement comparable to civil rights and gay marriage.
"If you look at social movements," he said, "we all celebrate what happened [with civil rights] in the 1960s."
And gay marriage?
"If you look at the movement now around gay marriage and marriage equality and gay rights that California is absolutely helping to lead," Duncan said, "that's fantastic it's happening now, but why didn't that happen two or three or four or five decades ago?"
So if you like everything about public education now, imagine how much more you'll like it when you can shove your toddlers into the system.
Harry could be harried
With the GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate last week, gaffe-prone, obstructionist Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be moving to minority leader come January. And in two years, he may be out all together.
The Nevada Democrat will have to stand for election in a state that, for the first time since 1929, has a Republican governor, control of both houses of the legislature and all six statewide offices. And the GOP also captured three of the state's four U.S. House seats, including the upset of Democratic incumbent Steven Horsford by Cresent Hardy.
While Reid, who hasn't indicated he won't run for a sixth term, would get to run in a presidential election year, where turnout will increase, he'll be pressed to keep his seat. He captured barely 50 percent of the vote in 2010 and would have lost had he not faced a flawed candidate in Sharron Angle. And he'll likely have a spate of eager opponents in 2016, perhaps including popular Gov. Brian Sandoval, who was re-elected last week with 70 percent of the vote.
Loss was no fluke
Sandra Fluke, who earned her 15 minutes of fame when radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh referred to her by a derogatory term after she lobbied Congress to pay for her birth control pills, can now return to anonymity.
After the then-30-year-old law student became the subject of a rant by the talk show host, she wound up with a personal conversation with President Obama and a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
Believing her star was on the rise, she sought to run for Congress as a Democrat from California, but Golden State officials dissuaded that. And although she did run for state Senate, and despite a Vogue magazine profile and a wealth of exposure on MSNBC, she lost last week to fellow Democrat veteran public servant Ben Allen.
First loser again
Clay Aiken, who finished second to Ruben Studdard in the second year of the television show "American Idol" in 2003, finished second again last week in his try for a U.S. House seat in North Carolina's 2nd District.
The Democrat was defeated by incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Renee Ellmers by more than 17 percentage points.
"We've walked down this path once or twice before," Aiken told his supporters after the news of his defeat was announced.
The singer, who once worked with autistic children for almost two years, based much of his campaign on helping people with disabilities. Ellmers, gracious in the win, allowed as to how she hoped the two could work together on "all-encompassing mental health reform."
Aiken wasn't the only celebrity or celebrity-related candidate in last week's election, but all went down to defeat. Joining Aiken were Republican Zach Dasher, nephew of "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson, who was not one of the top two finishers in Louisiana's all-comers primary for a 5th District U.S. House seat, and actor Chris Mitchum, son of the late film star Robert Mitchum, narrowly lost as a Republican to incumbent Democrat Rep. Lois Capps in a bid to represent the 24th District of California in the U.S. House.