Unreal

The new guard wants to shake things up

So the first two decisions they announce by press release are:

(1) 'We're going to stop construction on a school already on the path to construction, and thereby ensure that millions of dollars will have been wasted."

and

(2) "We're going to reverse the Wednesday early release policy a few weeks after new school zone signs just went up all over Raleigh." Why? So they can be different from the previous board. You see, that's what's important. Being "not the previous board."


In the meantime, the News & Observer had an article this weekend which portends doom for the new Board. They are about to walk right into a hornets' nest of resistance, which is what happens when you misconstrue a victory on one issue in a low turnout election as an overwhelming mandate to scrap everything.


So, they're going after the magnet program. They're coming after Enloe High School.

If they do that, this is likely to be the shortest-tenured school board in Wake County history.

Insanity

"The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." Albert Einstein (attr.)

Case in point, John Fox, "coach" of the freaking Carolina Panthers.

DelHomme has thrown 13 interceptions in 7 games. Matt Moore must really suck.

Bystanders?

No. I don't think so. Accessories. Conspirators. Let's hope "codefendants."

Attention, Senators Conrad, Carper, Nelson, Pryor, and Lincoln

GET WITH THE FREAKIN' PROGRAM.

Washington Post: Clear Majority Now Backs Plan.

Public option support at 57 percent of all Americans (70% of Democrats and 52% of Independents).

When the question states asks the respondents if they would support the plan if the "public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options" support jumps to 76 Percent of all voters. FIFTY-SIX PERCENT OF REPUBLICANS.

So tell me why five erstwhile Democratic Senators are holding the whole thing up.

Mr. President, it's time to start identifying primary challengers.

Gee, you think?

I don't usually find these people to be worth the time to comment, but I do worry about the kids, which is why this headline struck me as a "DUH" moment.

Kate: My Kids are Struggling.

Gee, you think that might be because their narcissistic parents paraded them in front a TV camera for a year and are now acting like spoiled brats?

First Place in the category of "Things you Should Have Written About LAST Month."

To the incomparable T. Keung Hui of the News & Observer, who felt it necessary last week to call my post below "angry" and overly emotional, but today wrote this gem:

The newcomers will also have to decide quickly whether to start on the promised neighborhood schools plan for North Carolina's largest school district. Such far-reaching change would sharply overhaul the way Wake's 140,000 students are assigned to schools, causing one more disruption for families that candidates promised to end.
* * *

If Wake County restores neighborhood schools, the change would have a dramatic effect on the magnet school program. Most of the county's magnet schools, with special areas of emphasis such as performing arts and foreign languages, were sited in lower-income areas near downtown Raleigh specifically to integrate and diversify them.

Many children who live in these urban neighborhoods are now bused to the suburbs to free spots for suburban students drawn to the highly touted magnets.

A return to neighborhood schools would mean that magnet schools would have to absorb the returning local children and potentially jettison the suburban students. When the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system ended busing for diversity in 2002, some schools lost their magnet programs to accommodate children from the neighborhood.

Gee, ya think?

Thanks for doing your homework after the test.

Nobel

The person least happy to get that phone call at this point in the political world was probably sitting in the Oval Office. I think maybe the Nobel Committee did the President no favors.

Is he supposed to announce a deployment of 40,000 more troops to a war zone the week after winning the Nobel Peace Prize?

Congratulations to the President. According to the Committee, you won this award based upon the promise of change in America's approach to the rest of the World. Let's fulfill it.

Forward to 1948!

Reports of the death of this blog are exaggerated.

In fact, greatly so. Sure, we've been gone a while. Sharpedo has been travelling and generally fulfilling whatever duties an officer in a mega corporation aimed at the world's impressionable youngsters has, and I have been busting my rear. When you do bankruptcy and commercial creditor's rights law, a recession is plate-spinning time.

Plus, facebook has given me another outlet for pictures of my beautiful kids, my useless trivia and urge to try to be witty on a daily basis. It also provides a forum for Winston to routinely call me wrong. So that has not been here.

But really, what has been lacking since November has been a foil. I couldn't go after the media. Jon Stewart does that to perfection every evening. I don't have time to chronicle the endless displays of spineless jellytude put on by the Democratic "leadership" in Congress. DailyKos is already all over that with the depth and breadth (if uneven quality) that only a cloud-computing megasite can bring to the subject.

So what did I have to write about? Not much, and certainly not much that warranted taking 10 minutes out of an already jam-packed day to sit down and compose something other than a quick facebook status hit.

Now, however, we've got something. Tuesday the voters of Wake County decided to urinate all over Harold Webb's legacy and soundly rejected socioeconomic diversity as a goal in education. In so doing, they handed the reins of the best school system in North Carolina over to the anti-busing, anti-magnet school, anti-diversity, anti-year round, anti-sex ed, anti-science, anti-arts, anti-tax right wing. Let's hear it for Topeka!

So the parents who whined about reassignment are about to start reassigning students all over the place - enforcing a policy that requires you to go to the school nearest your house - regardless of how crappy or overcrowded that school might be. And when they come to take my kids out of Lynn Road and put them in Jeffery's Grove, well... let's just say they ain't seen nothing yet.

So this blog, or at least the Wake County side of our editorial board, is now going to focus a little more intently on the new members of the Wake County Board of Education. This should serve as their notice.

I'm ready for Deborah Prickett, et al, to call for tax increases to build the innumerable new schools that their "neighborhood schools" policy is going to require. And if they think they will be able to cannibalize the budgets of schools in established areas of town just to build their realtor friends some shiny new educational palaces in Apex and Wake Forest without a fight, they're REALLY kidding themselves.

Few things are more fun than being an angry voter with an outlet for publication. Let's see what they propose.

Stay tuned...

Heads across America are exploding as Whole Foods becomes progressive bête noire, conservative cause célèbre

In response to an op-ed written in the WSJ by the CEO of Whole Foods in which he suggests that single-payer health care is a bad idea, Daily Kos readers are now talking of boycotting Whole Foods, which is leading conservatives to talk about supporting Whole Foods by shopping there.

I think my head is exploding.

To promote their health care views, progressives are going to start buying antibiotic-treated meat and non-organic produce at other grocery chains? To support a person who feels that health care is an individual choice, conservatives will buy arugula and $7.99 ground sirloin for their burgers?

Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed.