This ranking system has been around for a while, and its original thought was to try to highlight schools that offered challenging courses to the most number of students. Traditionally, AP courses were only available to a small minority of top students, or students at magnet or college prep schools. So this had an egalitarian push to it that was part of a very large expansion of AP courses.

Both my kids used AP courses wisely, opting out of some requirements, skipping intro courses, and having enough credits to graduate in four years.

As to the value and quality of the AP courses themselves, my younger son ended up taking something like 14 AP courses at a California suburban high school; very few of them included anything that I would consider the equivalent of a college level course. Science classes without experiments, English classes without writing assignments, not a single multi-page research paper in the lot. Yet he never scored under a 3, and received mostly 4's.

He was poorly prepared to do college level writing assignments, and had to struggle for awhile.

He's not a poll-driven politician.

He just knows that voters agree with his takes on the issues, and that Specter is tremendously vulnerable as a venal politician.

The only point that I would add comes from a Chris Bowers piece at Open Left where he added the implication of who the millennials are replacing, as they come of age and the oldest voters pass on.

Looking beyond partisan self-identification, voters over the age of 65 have a partisan index of Republican + 8 (that is, McCain scored 8% higher among this group than among the nation as a whole), while voters under the age of 30 have a partisan index of Democratic + 13 (Obama scored 13% higher among this group than among the nation as a whole). As time progresses, the D+13 voters will be replacing the R+8 voters within the electorate, for an overall Democratic shift of D+21. In fact, looking beyond age to all first-time voters (a group which also includes new citizens and people who did not vote when they were young), Democrats actually have a partisan advantage of D+16.

I had a pending order at Amazon for pending releases, and they left a convenient box for me to tell them why I was canceling.

It will be interesting to see whether and how they respond.

I'm betting we'll find some rogue employee with a Christianist agenda setting policy without corporate knowledge.

When they apologize, it will be time to ask for reparations.

In this economic environment, retailers can ill afford gratuitous insults to massive segments of their markets, especially the ones who read.

This Saturday, it was exciting to see our local Assembly District election for delegates to the CA state Dem convention included a progressive slate that included young Obama supporters in their twenties and thirties, and a group that represented the ethnicity of the district, including Asians and Hispanics.

The state isn't recruiting these people. They came together in the Obama campaign with help from other local electeds with grass-roots organizations.

Hillary's my fourth choice. I'm an Obama fan, and my wife really likes John Edwards. But I've got to say that Hillary has the ability to bring women to the polls in an unprecedented way. With Senator Obama, there would be an amazing ability to energize voters and thrash Republicans up and down the ticket.

In this present crisis, Republicans are not the solution to our problems with government; Republicans are the problem.

Nice work by Hillary.

All of the candidates need to take it to these pundits and throw their stupid question back in their faces.

Try a little humility, Jerome, and get out and mix it up a little with some people outside the insular world of the cross-liked liberal blogosphere.

Senator Obama is answering a palpable hunger in the American electorate in the same way that Howard Dean attracted  the energy of the disaffected left.

Obama's campaign is far broader, and is responding to a much wider range of yearnings than just the partisan left, while still remaining fundamentally progressive.

He garners tremendous on-the-ground and financial support from progressives.

Senator Obama is running a Presidential campaign based with a goal of achieving a broad enough consensus that he can actually make progress on key issues.

And this isn't posturing of electability. It's a keen understanding that we will need a broad coalition to make changes in areas like healthcare.

Using the figure of 143,000,000 voters, this means that somewhere in the range of 7.000,000 of the 51 million registered voters who considered themselves Republicans have lost identification with the GOP since March of 2005, which was already below the election peak in 2004.

That's a loss of 14% of the registered voters who considered themselves Republicans.

In contrast, the number who identified themselves as Democrats dropped by about 1.4 million, which is consistent with long-term trends.

These numbers seem huge, confirming my belief that Bush and his criminal co-conspirators have wrecked the Republican party.

As an Obama partisan, but someone who would also be profoundly delighted with Edwards as a candidate. (We've contributed to both campaigns), I want to add a few quotes from an op-ed in this morning's NYTIMES about OBama's health plan.

"... the similarity of the emerging proposals is exactly what's interesting. I don't think you can call it a consensus, but there is nonetheless a road forward being paved and a growing number of people from across the political spectrum are on it -- not just presidential candidates, but governors from California to Pennsylvania, unions and businesses like Safeway, ATT and Pepsi.

...

It is a coherent approach. And it seems to be our one politically viable approach, too. No question, proponents have crucial differences -- like what the individual versus employer payments should be. And attacks are certain to label this as tax-and-spend liberalism and government-controlled health care. But these are not what will sabotage success.

Instead, the crucial matter is our reaction as a country when the attacks come. If we as consumers, health professionals and business leaders sit on our hands, unwilling to compromise and defend change, we will be doomed to our sliding global competitiveness and self-defeating system. Avoiding this will take extraordinary political leadership. So we should not even consider a candidate without a plan capable of producing agreement.

The ultimate measure of leadership, however, is not the plan. It is the capacity to take that plan and persuade people to find common ground in it. The politician who can is the one we want.

The lure of Senator Obama is that he might have the background, education, intelligence, and experience to lead us into post-partisan solutions  to our most important issues.

Sent $100.00

I've thoroughly enjoyed this series, and especially the open way in which you have shared your thoughts and your data.

This is going to be a watershed primary and election,  with intense early interest, a tremendous field of Democratic candidates, and a Washington establishment of insiders that are losing their stranglehold.

Correction. $500.00 Dean not Bush contributors. I've never been at that table.

Well, fester, I don't know what the fuck basis you have for your large assumption.

Assume if you will that there are hundreds of thousands of progressives who are smart enough to understand the relationship between money and politics, and who are willing to give disproportionately from their wealth, and you may begin to understand the progressive infrastructure and the netroots.

And assume that these people give a damn about their country and their children's future, and that they are willing to give as if their children's lives depended on defeating the Bushites. If you could stretch your imagination, you would find yourself at a table of $2300.00 Obama contributors or $500.00 Bush contributors. The $1,000 a plate Kerry table was different, but had some of the same members.