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...talked before about the deficiencies of the U.S. public-education system. If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan - who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools - what would you do? There's precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I'd think of myself as a venture capitalist, fund as many wacky and inventive ideas as I could, and closely monitor them...
...confidence that a blockbuster fourth quarter is about to unfold. "Earnings on a year-over-year basis are expected to more than double in the fourth quarter," says Van Dijk, thanks largely to big recovery in the financial sector. In the final quarter of 2008 AIG imploded, losing $38 billion. With that ball of lead no longer weighing down the financial group average, earnings will surge. (See pictures of the top 10 scared stock traders...
...Calculating the financial group's improvement can be a bit tricky since going from a loss to a profit isn't truly a percentage improvement. "When you cross over zero, comparisons get weird," says Van Dijk. Even so, the financial group's turnaround - it should log $15 billion or more in fourth-quarter profit - will give a strong boost to the S&P 500 composite earnings. The S&P will also be boosted by a famous departure: "GM was losing billions last year, but it's no longer in the S&P," observes Van Dijk...
Flyby hears you, Christine. Perhaps the clouds should just be left to do their thing. After all, who are we to mess with four billion years of the water cycle...
...Driving the call for more stimulus efforts is the unemployment rate, which now sits at 9.8%, and is expected to rise into next year, even though the recession may have already officially ended. Republicans, who have long been critical of the $787 billion stimulus that passed in February, are likely to support some, if not most of these new spending programs, in part because they are politically popular. Texas Republican John Cornyn, a vocal opponent of the February stimulus, said recently that he was in favor of some more federal spending efforts. "I think there are things we need...