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There was a very strange pamphlet that showed up in Sussex County, sanctioned by the REPUBLICAN sheriff down there..   Here is the quote…

“PARTICIPATE  IN  THE  TRAINING  OF  THE  SHERIFF’S  POSSE……”

Fact: Sheriffs in Delaware are not law enforcement officers. They are paper pushers. Their only duty is to serve court papers such as divorce proceedings and the auction of houses… By law, they are not allowed to form “posse’s”

I can remember however, a long, long time ago, when rural people who didn’t agree with Federal guidelines that was being imposed upon them, would arm themselves, gather in the middle of the night under a certain tree, or a bend of the road, and ride out to perform their own particular brand of justice.

We called them the Klu Klux Klan…… Is Sheriff Christopher trying to revive them…..

It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics.

 

We knew this but it  is now being published… and so it is in the news.

The world is getting warmer… and we can now predict our climate by looking at map at 300 miles south and guessing what our weather will be from that…

Just as plate tectonics and  Darwin’s origin of the species were able to lay the groundwork of reason  for explaining puzzling observations, this simplifies what to expect from global warming rather startlingly.

Texas is now  what we alway thought of when we considered the weather of Mexico; Oklahoma is now West Texas; Kansas is now Oklahoma; Nebraska is now Kansas; South Dakota is now Nebraska, North Dakota is now South Dakota: Southern Manitoba is now North Dakota…..

If  West Texas had 3 days of rain, now Oklahoma is getting 3 days of rain;  If it snowed 12  times in South Dakota, it is now doing the same in North Dakota… and so on.

So, to predict our heat, rain, winters, etc, our guide would be North Carolina.  Longer growing seasons,  some winters with no snow, hot summers…

However due to Global warming, the East Coast has a caveat.  An anomaly so to speak  and actually some relief from the North Carolina summer heat we would normally expect….

With the unprecedented melting of the Arctic and Greenland icecaps dumping its excess into the Labrador Current, that cold water drops South hugging the East Coast shoreline all the way down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks where it finally becomes neutralized…   Therefore even though we have hotter air masses, the colder ocean temperatures creates a buffer against Global warming off the entire northeastern US.

Europe, Japan, and Alaska all experience  the same mitigating effect, although with both Greenland and the Arctic Icecaps melting into the Labrador, the US East Coast gets a stronger volume of cold water.  Call it our icy shower effect….

Once melting stops and the currents dry up, we return to the North Carolina scenario of the twentieth century….

Cold Water in Summer Hugs Delaware's Shore  xoxoxo
Chart Courtesy of NOAA

So, we in Delaware really get the best climate on the East Coast.    Warm winters, little or no snow, and cool breezy summers….. as well as a longer growing period, and… less dependence on fossil fuels for winter heating.

Gee, global warming isn’t so bad for Delaware after all….  Oh, the rising seas?  There you go again… Why did you have to spoil the rosy picture I was painting?

 

On Delaware Politics, Mike Protack put this up for humor.  Warning: it isn’t really funny.  However, it is a very useful tool which can be used to describe the difference between the two parties.  Or more specifically, one decrepit party versus the rest of humanity.  One can definitely see in its original tone, that Republicans feel they are the entitled ones. They feel they should not have to work for their wealth, but it should be handed to them.  They assume they are entitled to exist at the top fo the food chain, and all others, who are on this planet, are here only for their pleasure or benefit….  So, I sincerely thank him for posting this, so the historians of posterity can come here to browse, whenever they ask: …”btw, what ever happened to the Republican Party?”

If a Republican doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.

If a Democrat doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a Republican is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.

If a Democrat is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a Republican is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.

If a Democrat is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a Republican is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.

If a Democrat is down-and-out he wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a Republican doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.

A Democrat demands that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a Republican is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.

A Democrat non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Republican decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.

If a Democrat decides he needs health care, he demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a Republican reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.

A Democrat will delete it because he’s “offended”.

That is how they wish it was…. Now… here is how it really is…..  if you notice above, Mike Protack’s joke is phrased as if it is the Republican who is the one doing something of which all Republicans don’t approve .  Everyone knows, that is not how Republicans are!   For this to be a true, accurate depiction of how things truly are and perceived by Republicans, we need the Republicans to be the ones controlling everyone else…  That is the reality and that is why the Republican party has lost 50% of its base since last November.

If a someone doesn’t like guns, a Republican threatens them with bodily harm.

If a someone is a vegetarian, a Republican taunts him for being a tree hugging commie pinko fag..

If someone is homosexual,  Republicans and his friends, attack him and drag his body behind their pickup around town.

If  someone is down-and-out, a Republican jeers, taunts, and punches them in the face.

If a Republican doesn’t like a talk show host, he beats the crap out of his wife.

If someone is a non-believer,  a Republican gets on his knees, and leads the Sussex County Council in loud, obnoxious prayer.

If a Republican decides he needs health care, he quits his job, runs a meth operation, and uses the money to pay off his doctors….

If a Republican reads this, he will say it was written by a bigot.

Obviously this of course has been done as a public service so those insensitive Republicans who are still unaware of how they appear to society when they express their views in public, can finally get the idea.  I hope this helps us all to move forward and treat each other with mutual respect…..

But, I doubt….  that they have it within them to rise to the challenge….   :)

Recently, being “Right” is Wrong. It is wrong for the military. It is wrong for the economy. It is wrong for the planet. It is wrong for education. It is wrong for your pocket book. It is wrong for Hurricane Sandy victims. It is wrong for women. It is wrong for Catholics. It is wrong for the middle class. It is wrong for children. It is wrong for the environment. It is wrong for growth. It is wrong for gun safety. It is wrong for rape victims. It is wrong for ocean lovers. It is wrong for those with beachfront property. It is wrong for the sick. It is wrong for those with private insurance. It is wrong for the victims of Sandy Hook. It is wrong for middle America. It is wrong for anyone and everyone….. Being “Right” is simply wrong.

Unless you are a billionaire. And want everyone else poor and squalid so you can sequester yourself behind your billions… For you…. the Right is right….

Anyone who tries to say the Sequester was the folly of both sides…. is getting paid by a billionaire….

There is no.. other… way.

How “right” is it to make us the middle class suffer just so billionaires won’t have to pay one single penny more on every earned dollar over the $1 million dollar mark?

After a brief stint as head Rodel’s Vision for Delaware, Mark Murphy was promoted to the spot of Secretary of Education.

Who is his replacement?

Dr. Dana Diesel Wallace

 John Young  has all the details but on her public announcement there appears this:

….and then served as the superintendent of West Fargo Public Schools in North Dakota. As Superintendent, she and her team fundamentally redesigned their curriculum and established a dual enrollment program. In her time there, she moved her district from the 50th percentile in AYP across all grades to approximately the 90th.

Please go to the source, but apparently as John found out, “that ain’t necessarily so..”

  • The scores she inherited appear to be in the 70′s, not the 50′s.
  • The scores she left with appear to be in the 70′s, not the 90′s.

John has all the corroborating documents on his page… (Hint, it is much easier to find)…

The time frame involved ended only 3 years ago.  This is not something from ones deep, dark past.   What’s ironical is the Rodel blurb brags about how they searched long and hard, pouring over the details of a hundred applicants, and they chose …. this one…

So.  How could have that money been spent within Christina School District if a charter School hadn’t siphoned off that and wasted it in a fiasco of epic proportions?

Could we have saved one student?  Two?  Maybe a whole class?  Maybe all 16,807 could have had some educational benefit from this total, which I should point out, we only have of the fiscal state funding so far…..

Here exactly is why Charter Schools fail

They spend that total on just barely offering the barest minimum of educational opportunities….

Doubling the above total  and spending it within the Christiana school district would provided all current 16,807  students,  EVERY SINGLE ONE, with an additional $152.00 per child to spend upon their education…..

This is money spent on extra’s.  On those things that make students learn.  On salaries, On supplies.  The basics are already cared for… so this incremental amount goes straight to augmenting each student’s ability to learn…..

When you pursue  a charter school philosophy,  you are stealing  $152,00 from every single child from elementary up to twelfth grade, and squandering it upon items like…. A-1 Sanatation, ADT Security Systems,  and half a million dollars to 4048 Associates…..

How do those expenses help our children learn, especially when those expense are being paid for over the Christiana District already?   By pursuing the misguided policy of  funding Charter Schools, we are paying for two trash bills, two electric bills, one extra lease payment to private individuals,  two electronic security services…..

And with every new Charter School opened,  given only a 17% chance of survival, meaning  a failure rate on the investment of 83% of our wasted tax dollars, more and more is bled from that fund that actually does what it is supposed to do…. teach our kids and make them want to learn.

Charter Schools can go private. That is fine. But public money is not well spent to help out one’s buddies owning 4048 Associates……

Caesar Rodney Institute has promoted Charter Schools as being the future of education.  As posted earlier, Charter Schools always fail.

As one more example piled upon the skyscraper of evidence, here is Pencader Charter School today…..

To say this happens in public schools all the time, misses the point… We spent millions on this Charter School just to allow kids to learn in an environment where THIS WOULD NOT HAPPEN.

The inside story is that adults were responsible for this unfortunate situation, not students.

One more charter schools fails again.  Yet Caesar Rodney is still trying to get hard earned tax dollars spent on these wasteful projects just so it’s benefactors can get their hands on some of your money….

Wouldn’t that money have been better spent rebuilding one of the schools we already got?

Of course it would.  Charter schools always was, is , and will be a horrible idea….   In fact, for quick reference, anything   everything the Caesar Rodney Institute sells itself out to represent, is… a horrible idea.   I guess that is why they are there.  So people with horrible ideas can try to fool the rest of us who don’t have time to do the research to understand this fake organization is lying to us…. they’ll say anything for a fee, mind you, for a fee.

Kilroy lambasted the Caesar Rodney attempt to stir up sentiment towards Charter Schools in rural Smyrna Delaware.

The News Journal played along too, here.

The meeting was attended by the following.

  • Jim Hoseley, the Caesar Rodney Institute’s director of the Center for Excellence in Education.
  • Priest of St. Polycarp Roman Catholic Church.
  • A woman in the middle of the room wearing a purple knit hat.
  • “Honey Bun”.
  • The Rev. Thomas Flowers.
  • One woman in the crowd who wondered aloud “where are the black people” as she looked around at a crowd of white faces.
  • Mike Matthews, a Red Clay Consolidated special education teacher and union supporter,
  • And one man who blurted out,  “Does he also believe in Santa Claus?”

Which would leave 25 others also down there, with the backdrop of the room filled with American flags and images of Jesus….

One would assume, except for Mike Matthews, that all those in attendance were people unfamiliar with education, period. Most of us would probably call them gullible.

Delaware Today magazine was then taken to the woodshed by Mr. Hosely of the Caesar Rodney Institute because it did not include charters with its public school rankings report. Instead, Delaware Today magazine charter schools were ranked in another issue of the magazine that was dedicated to private schools.

(The obvious reason it did so, was because Charter Schools are run like private schools and not, like public schools. Obviously missing the logic that if they were run like Public schools,and funded by the public school system, they might as well be Public Schools. That they are run like a Private School, is the whole point of charter schools…)

Next, the Caesar Rodney spokesperson bashed Markell because his state of the state did not mention vouchers. There are those who “philosophical” believe that there should be more of a “free-market” approach to our schools because this will push students to higher rates of achievement.

Governor Markell’s Delaware’s public schools have been failing minority students at a higher rate than their white peers, Hosley said.

This is where the lady looked around and said,” Where are all the BLACK PEOPLE!

In the past, black people is a group that the Caesar Rodney Institute hasn’t often found strong support among this community — earlier there was insulting criticism of brown-skinned people’s reasoning on there strong support for President Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, there were quite a few things that Mr. Hoseley of the Caesar Rodney Institute, failed to mention….

He failed to mention:

States that are in a hurry to expand charter schools should proceed with caution. The evidence of success is not all that ample.

Advocates of Charter Schools who “philosophically” believe in the “Free market system” cheer when they see a charter school closes… “See, that’s what we are talking about!  Yeah, Baby!  It failed.  Shut ‘er down!  The market system works.  If it succeeded and had done well, it would have prospered. Now that it is closed, it can’t destroy any more children.  The free market system works.  Woo Hoo!!! “…..

When asked, they could provide no answer of what to do with those children who were now,  unable to go to school…..

I’m about to dump this bibliography onto Delaware Liberals comment section as a response to Cass’s admonition that there is no empirical evidence that raising taxes grows the economy.

I understand her frustration. Having dealt with Global Warming deniers, I am aware of all the twists and turns one uses to escape overwhelming evidence that one is wrong. As with Global warming there are many moving parts. I remember Tommywonk illustrating the difference between weather and climate. There is a difference.

Usually the argument of distraction is used. I know someone whose house flooded after Sandy, who once said to me “Ha, Ha, there is a glacier that is growing ice. Global warming is debunked.” They were unable to grasp the big picture, that if the average global temperature was rising, then the earth was getting warmer, even if you did get snow in October.

The overwhelming evidence in regards to the economy, is that when tax rates are too low, inevitably economies fail. When tax rates are high, economies do well across the entire board of measurements.

Obviously having a bibliography in someone else’s comment section will be hard to find. It is here for anyone wanting to reference data available that answers the question “why” higher taxes grow economies….

http://www.epi.org/publication/books_rethinking_growth/

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/06/24/Will-Higher-Taxes-Tank-the-Economy.aspx#page1

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-02/raising-taxes-isn-t-a-kiss-of-death-for-employment-growth-history-shows.html

http://www.decisionsonevidence.com/2012/04/more-jobs-through-lower-tax-rates-a-look-at-the-evidence/

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-dont-spur-151649273.html

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2010/04/a-tax-on-jobs-experimental-evidence.html

Rutgers economic historian James Livingston has reasserted it in an excellent book: “Against Thrift”.

http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/111016/rein-the-rich#

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3043/does-cutting-taxes-create-jobs

http://www.columbia.edu/~ma820/taxes.and.jobs.html

http://www.ncjustice.org/sites/default/files/BTC%20Brief%20-%20Better%20Alternatives%20to%20Cutting%20Corp%20Tax.pdf

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2011/05/12/higher-taxes-encourage-tax-avoidance/

http://lanekenworthy.net/2011/05/09/taxes-and-work/

http://blog.oregonlive.com/myoregon/2010/01/facts_not_propaganda_should_gu.html

http://open.salon.com/blog/myles_spicer/2011/04/12/job_creation_by_the_wealthy_is_mostly_a_myth

http://www.fairtaxation.org/facts/jobs.php

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-economic-impact-of-raising-taxes-on-high-income-households/

http://web.econ.uic.edu/espe2007/paper/F53new.pdf

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2011/07/on_high_income_taxes_and_job_c.html

http://washingtonindependent.com/108872/studies-debunk-myth-that-the-rich-flee-states-with-higher-tax-rates

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/corporate-income-taxes-profit-and-employment-performance-canadas-largest-compa

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too

http://www.politicususa.com/higher-taxes-jobs.html

I hope you don’t mind that I left them in browser form. It was late, and I thought that at least seeing the raw links was easier to pick and choose among, than clicking blindly. Enjoy.

(just added this… Although it is possible that Google has though my previous research tailored my search results to my liking, but when I Googled “evidence that high taxes creates new jobs” I got pages stating that “low taxes do not create jobs”. Those touting that low taxes did create jobs, were all copies of one study derived from the Cato Institute, and …. they always ended with “well, it just has to be this way”. Not very solid intellectual arguments to be sure.) It appears there that Mitch’s philosophy “Low taxes create jobs.” has been removed from internet consideration as being a serious topic.

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