I got a robocall yesterday about a school board election. That has never happened before, and it’s an indication of how the Citizen’s United ruling is going to screw us over in this country. When the wingnuts have enough money to buy robocalls for school board races, the rest of us don’t have much of a chance. And it’s our kids who will suffer. So, don’t be pathetic and forget to vote today. If you don’t know where your polling station is, go here. Figure out what time of day you’re going to vote. Combine it with some chore or trip you are already making, or set aside the time right now. And take ten minutes to research the candidates on the ballot so you know what you’re doing. No commenting on blogs for non-voters.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Recent Comments
Got a robocall last night at 9:00PM from a politician. I’m on the “do not call” list but it doesn’t apply to these assholes. They call when I’m eating dinner and when I’m sleeping. I have to get up at 4:00AM to go to work and this asshole calls at 9:00PM. I have to double check the answering machine and add him/her to the growing list of inconsiderate assholes to never vote for.
GET A CLUE! MAIL SOME THIRD-CLASS CAMPAIGN LITERATURE! INSTEAD OF INVADING MY PRIVACY!
I actually do read it before I throw it away, if only to laugh at right wing stupidity. Filling my inbox with spam is also annoying, but it doesn’t interrupt me and I almost enjoy the cat and mouse of fine tuning the spam filter.
Do I vote for the Republican or the libertarian/Austrian? Those are my choices for my House of Delegates election lol.
Just for the hell of it, vote for the libertarian/Austrian. “Vote against the party, not the man.” 🙂
And then there’s the bottom of the ticket. And any referenda.
I was going to write in a candidate for that race. It’s going to be a wash anyway. The Austria has $63 on hand and has spent $2,000. I have all the other candidates I’m voting for. Usually it’s between a conservative independent and a rabid far-right winger. The Senate is the only difference with Edd Houck…but he’s more or less your standard Virginia Democrat. If elected to the national senate, he’d likely be right around Warner. I like his wife, though lol. She was my gym teacher in elementary school.
Wait, no, Henry “Hap” Connors, Jr. who’s running for Board of Supervisors could be the most liberal — he watches Jon Stewart.
With a libertarian you’ll at least get someone backing social freedom and a legitimate anti war stance that would pale in comparison to most authoritarian Democrats who gladly support the violation of rights and back the warfare / police state as good as any NeoConservative Republican.
The Koch Brothers and Art Pope tested massive financing of a school board election in 2010 in Wake County NC. This resulted in the de facto resegregation of Wake County Schools under the cover of “neighborhood schools”. And a corresponding redirection of resources that further benefit more affluent areas as compared to less affluent areas. The school board election this year has been hot and the job of the Art Pope-selected Superintendent of Education is in the balance. We will see if the backlash can partially undo the damage.
I saw this coming when the Wake County School Board election happened.
You might see developers finance similar attacks on offices as lowly as the Soil and Water Conservation commission.
It’s not just Congress that was irretrievably broken by the Citizen United decision.
Busing has turned more liberals into raging conservatives than almost any other issue. I strongly favor neighborhood schools. A school is strengthened when parents are invested in the school. If the school is a 45 minute drive away, that is less likely. Most big cities today are entirely black/minority because of the lack of neighborhood control. Busing has not worked, and in today’s revenue environment, it is a totally dumb idea. Would you prefer to spend 100,000 on gasoline or on 2-3 teachers?
I lived in Chapel Hill and Carrboro from 1975 – 1983. My wife lived there until 1981, when she moved to W-S to take a job. So we know the NC area, of course not recently (almost 30 years??!!). I know many people who still live there and work at RTP and SAS.
The real issue is housing segregation by ethnicity and class. Real estate agents consistently make assumptions about where folks want or should want to live. And the whole notion of “exclusive” neighborhoods compounds the problem.
The other issue is that neighborhood schools mean that resources are directed to the more affluent neighborhoods where they are not needed and away from the less affluent neighborhoods where they are needed because of the squeaky wheel principle and the iinfluence of money in politics.
The courts ordered busing in small cities when it was still workable. Wake County’s plan evolved into tighter and tighter geography because they could draw neighborhood boundaries that included diverse populations and minimize busing costs. This boundary setting changed from year to year and created uncertainty for parents about where their kids would go the next year. The school board could have reduced how rapidly it changed district boundaries. Instead, it essentially resegregated the schools by race. There is backlash.
Most big cities are entirely black/minority because the growth of independently incorporated suburban communities that ring the city promised less corruption, lower taxes, and not having to live near nonwhite people. Busing was never tried. The largest city to face busing orders was either Boston or St. Louis. In Boston, Louise Day Hicks shut it down. In St. Louis, a judge refused to order a busing plan that extended into the suburbs. But that occurred a decade or more after the white flight from the cities began.
Equality of opportunity in education is a difficult issue to deal with because of the legacy of racism in the South and outside the South. And there’s probably no issue that sorts out white progressives’ sense of privilege than this issue. When most of the traveling on buses was from poorer black neighborhoods to richer white ones.
And in the areas in which the public schools have sorted out the neighborhood school dilemma, the appearance of privileged private schools and the growth of charter schools have put pressure on public school resources.
In Raleigh or Charlotte of 1970-1990, busing was not a dumb idea and both cities had well-respected programs. In cities smaller than those, it was a very good idea. In part, because folks were being bused to school anyway and the mileage was not increased by changing where they went.
But in Wake County, neighborhood schools was just a rallying cry to get conservative school board members in who would take the schools in a direction similar to what the state school board of Texas tried to do.
Thanks for this Tarheel Dem. Well done.
Just for the record, Boston’s public schools were viciously segregated in the 1950s and 60s. The white majority engaged in its own form of “massive resistance” to any proposals aimed at desegregating the schools, until they lost a federal court case and the schools were desegregated, by busing, by federal court order. That court order remained in place well into the 1990s.
dataguy, I’m not going to try to change your support for neighborhood schools. But there are a couple of flaws in your argument:
1 – In most of the country, $100,000 will not pay for 2 teachers (salaries, benefits and related expenses), let alone 3.
2 – Saying that “most big cities today are entirely black/minority” is, first of all, factually wrong. (Check with the Census Bureau if you want the evidence.)
Secondly, most big cities in the US 100 years ago were heavily Catholic/Jewish. It had nothing to do with neighborhood schools. It had everything to do with where the jobs were, where people could afford to live, and where they were allowed to live. (Those were “the good old days”, when KKK stood for united opposition to “Koons, Kikes and Katholics”.
3 – “Today’s revenue environment”: The US is a wealthier country today than it was 30, 60 or 90 years ago. The problem is not lack of revenue; it’s lack of political power to extract that revenue from the wealthy.
[blockquote]”The problem is not lack of revenue; it’s lack of political power to extract that revenue from the wealthy.”[/blockquote]
Gotta understand that consolidated power is always co-opted for the few at the expense of many. As such, the power structure / oligarchy is plenty happy with all the hopes and dreams of progressives to seize control of the power and make everything “fair”. Will never happen. That’s not how centralized power ever works. Only solution: return the power to the people through freedom and liberty. Not perfect, but sure beats the current system raping wealth from the middle class, hard workers, etc. for the benefit of those able to gin up credit out of thin air on Wall Street, or curry favor for some pie in the sky government contract / program.
That, and I don’t buy the U.S. is all that wealthy anymore. Don’t believe all the GDP hype. GDP measures activity, not quality of said activity. In the most basic sense, it gives an A+ to wasteful / purely consumptive spending no differently than it does to highly productive / wealth creating economic activity.
I would argue that the U.S. is far less capable of producing wealth. Combine that with my first point, and you’ve got a serious problem of the politically connected parasites consuming more and more of a shrinking pie, both problems created by / at the present center of government / political / economic power.
Okay, then how do you understand the “Great Moderation”—that period in the mid-20th century (approximately 1946-73) when the US economy grew rapidly (compared with recent decades), and when the income and wealth gaps shrunk? What was going on then? And why?
A solution that did not work when gas was .50/gal will not work better now that gas is 7x as much. Busing has never worked very well, and now that gas is so expensive, it is less acceptable. In Indiana, they are charging parents for busing. That is coming to other places too.
Busing has not worked, and it’s time to end the experiment. If kids are riding a bus for more than 10-15 minutes and this is not rural, it’s not good.
There are in fact few places where busing for demographic balance is going on, but there are one heck of a lot of school buses on the road because of school consolidation.
go Ohio, Mississippi and Maine.do right by the people
AYUH!!!
I voted a few weeks ago. In NJ you can get it set up so they always send you a mail in ballot.
I recommend it because I never want to have to choose between doing something important, like working, and voting.
how do you set this up?
Apply for a mail in ballot at your local clerk. On the application there is an option to have them send you mail in ballots for the rest of the year or for ever.
thanks
I voted with a mail-in ballot. During the last Presidential primary, the voting machine I was using didn’t work properly; the printout you’re supposed to be able to read to confirm your votes was jammed. I complained to the pollworker and he shrugged it off, saying he was pretty sure it was fine. I switched to paper ballots after that, and a mail-in this time.
I’m in Ohio, so you can bet that I am dead serious about voting.
This is just one example of the crap we are dealing with here in Maine. Thank goodness for Bill Nemitz. If you don’t read his weekly column, I can’t recommend it highly enough. He is one of the very best and we are lucky to have him.
http://www.pressherald.com/news/stand-up-for-maine-ethics-election-law_-_2011-11-06.html
I voted this morning. My polling location is about 8 blocks away, so I just walked there. It was kind of cloudy and misty on the way there. On the way back the sun broke through the clouds and it got really pretty out. It was nice.