HorsesAss.Org

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Not exactly sure why, but I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. Guess I’ve always had a thing for escalation of the absurd.

Those of you who have been missing Will Kelly-Kamp’s posts here on HA (and there certainly must be at least a few of you) will be pleased to know that he just landed a paying gig as a freelancer at The Stranger, where his posts on city issues, transportation and politics in general will appear on Slog on a daily basis.  Starting… well… now.

I first gave Will posting privileges, not because we agree on everything (we don’t), but because I saw him as a natural (if at times raw) writing talent whose snark, wit and irreverence meshed well with the attitude I had cultivated here on HA. It’s great to see him rewarded for his efforts, and I’m confident he’ll only become a better writer under The Stranger’s editorial guidance.

Congrats Will.

One more quick comment about the Seattle School District’s new assignment plan, to note that with the majority of students already attending neighborhood schools, much of the impact of the plan will depend on how thoughtfully the district redraws the new reference maps. For example, take my daughter’s old school, Graham Hill Elementary. Living on the same block as the school, we couldn’t get much closer, so no amount of gerrymandering would have impacted us. But the same wouldn’t be true for some of her friends who lived only a few blocks away.

The problem with the current map for the Graham Hill community is that the school lies near the northern end of a stretched out reference area that extends southward along Lake Washington before jutting west past Rainier AVE, just south of Othello ST. Indeed, back during the 2006 closure process, one of the arguments the district used to justify closing the school was that so few of its students lived within its boundaries; not surprising considering that the bulk of its potential families actually live closer to one of three other other schools — Brighton, Wing Luke and Dunlop — and in many cases, closer to all three schools than to Graham Hill.

On the other hand, when looking at the percentage of students who actually lived within a one-mile radius, Graham Hill had one of the highest walkability scores in the district, drawing many of its students from the Whitworth reference area just to the north. Down in our area of the city, most families already are choosing their neighborhood elementary school… they’re just not doing so along the artificial boundary lines the district has drawn.

So if the district were to adopt a neighborhood assignment plan while leaving the current boundaries unchanged, it could fracture the communities at four neighborhood schools, while ironically increasing transportation costs. Surely an unintended consequence, but a very possible one nonetheless.

My concern, coming off my unhappy experience with the school closure process, is whether the district is pursuing this strategy for the sake of efficiency, with too little empathy for how disruptive this policy change could be for the current generation of students, and without nearly enough input from the neighborhood schools themselves.

I guess we’ll soon find out.

A lot of families are awfully anxious as they await tomorrow’s release of the Seattle School District’s new assignment plan, one which intends to assign the majority of students to their neighborhood schools, with fewer options and less flexibility than we currently enjoy.

Will many of my friends here in SE Seattle, whose children are comfortably on an academic track they thought would guarantee them a slot at Garfield, happily accept an assignment to Rainier Beach? I don’t think so. Likewise, on the even more contentious issue of middle schools, an assignment to Aki Kurose in its present form would be the equivalent of a one-way ticket out of the district.

Criticize me all you want for stating the obvious, but that’s just the way it is.

I’m on the record as a passionate proponent of neighborhood schools, but I’ve been equally vocal in criticizing the lack of equity within the district. And with schools increasingly relying on PTSA money to fund things that used to be considered part of basic education (tutors, teaching assistants, art, music, physical education, books, equipment, field trips, etc.), the disparity between the educational haves and have nots can only grow wider.

At some schools in more affluent neighborhoods, PTSA’s raise more than $1,000 per student a year to pay for services the district and state can no longer afford to provide, while some schools in poorer and working class neighborhoods have no PTSA at all. This unofficial and unspoken “PTSA Levy” amounts to a not-so-secret tuition system that only exacerbates the inherent demographic disparity.

A few years back when we toured the TOPS K-8 program in the hopes of securing our daughter a desirable academic home for middle school (she got in for 4th grade, but we ultimately declined), the PTSA representative wasn’t shy about making his expectations clear. TOPS would give our children the equivalent of a private school education we were told (and in my opinion, oversold), and those of us who could afford that type of tuition were expected to pony up accordingly. Of course, there’s no enforcement mechanism, but there are parents at some schools who routinely write four and even five figure checks, while during our seven years at Graham Hill we where happy if we raised better than $50 a student.

No doubt Seattle would be better off with a neighborhood school system that would be more convenient to parents, provide much greater continuity to students, and save the district millions of dollars in transportation and other costs. But attempting to address the assignment issue before meaningfully addressing the equity issue, virtually assures that the current level of disparity between schools will only grow worse, while the district’s seemingly inexorable march toward resegregation will continue apace.

So here’s hoping the new assignment plan is about much more than just saving money.

Why would we want a government sponsored public healthcare option, when we have corporations like Wellpoint competing with each other to look after our interests?

No Bird’s Eye View Contest today. They’ll resume next weekend.

When you pay for a trip on the Central Link light rail, the machine makes change in dollar coins. Will wrote about the coins a while ago. They’re going through all the presidents. Recently I got me a John Tyler, and I couldn’t help but think that maybe America shouldn’t be celebrating someone who supported the treason side in the Civil War.

There have been some shitty presidents, and maybe we shouldn’t be honoring Tyler, Nixon, Reagan, Truman, Hoover, either Bush or the whole host of corrupt Republican presidents between Grant and Harding or asleep at the wheel presidents before the civil war. Not to mention the assortment of slave owners and the trail of tears guy on the money now. At the very least though, why are we celebrating the one who committed treason?

The proud citizens of Brazil weren’t the only ones celebrating Rio’s selection as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics; American conservatives apparently held an impromptu Carnival of their own:

When the International Olympic Committee voted against Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics this morning — after the President and First Lady flew to Copenhagen to push for it in person — the Weekly Standard newsroom burst into applause.

“Cheers erupt at Weekly Standard world headquarters,” wrote editor John McCormack in a post titled “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!” … McCormack’s fellow conservatives joined in the celebration…

“Chicago and Tokyo eliminated. No Obamalypics,” Michelle Malkin tweeted, following up with, “Game over on Obamalympics. Next up, Obamacare.”

“Please, please let me break this news to you. It’s so sweet,” said Glenn Beck on his radio show.

“Hahahahaha,” wrote Red State’s Erick Erickson. … The Drudge Report announced the news like so: “WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND. THE EGO HAS LANDED.”

“For those of you … who are upset that I sound gleeful, I am. I don’t deny it. I’m happy,” Limbaugh said. “Anything that gets in the way of Barack Obama accomplishing his domestic agenda is fine with me.”

“ChicagP\/\/n3D!” tweeted Newsmax, of recent fame for running, then pulling, a column about an impending military coup against Obama.

Yup, conservative Republicans really do hate America. Or perhaps, as TPM’s Josh Marshall astutely quipped, right-wingers just don’t consider Chicago to be part of America?

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(And there are forty+ other media clips from the past week in politics featured at Hominid Views.)

You might want to go see “Capitalism: A Love Story” because it’s timely and Michael Moore is funny, but as an added benefit you will be supporting a non-svelte hypocrite who has used the existing film distribution channels to place his subversive movie in front of millions of eyeballs.

In other words, think of just how mad this film is going to make the corporate greed heads and conservative loons. It’s only just come out and they’re already doing the character assassination thing, so it must be pretty good.

I sincerely hope there are no rabbits, however. Popcorn will do, Mr. Moore.

For the life of me I can’t find an obvious way on Comcast’s website to report a downed wire, so if anybody from Comcast reads my blog:  hey… you’ve got a wire down in the street on S. Morgan, just East of the intersection with 51st AVE S!

Just thought you’d want to know.

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If there’s anything worse than being a crybaby, it’s being a fake crybaby.

Back in June, when I wrote that mayoral candidate Mike McGinn was having trouble securing endorsements from fellow environmentalists due to his reputation for not working and playing well with others, my post drew passionate rebuttals from McGinn and his supporters. And a few weeks back, when I reported that his fellow environmental leaders were, um, less than enthusiastic about McGinn’s surprising primary victory, I once again heard from McGinn faithful, accusing me of pulling this meme out of my ass.

“[T]he sentiment I heard from many of his fellow environmental leaders was more along the line of ‘oh well, I guess we kinda have to endorse him,’ rather than the outright enthusiasm one might have expected,” I wrote at the time. But, well, I’m man enough to admit my mistakes, for it looks like they didn’t really hafta endorse McGinn after all:

In an affront to environmental poster boy, Sierra Club leader and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, the King County Conservation Voters have decided not to endorse either candidate in the mayor’s race.

Now, McGinn and his supporters can get all huffy if they want about the works and plays well with others meme, but when the region’s broadest coalition of environmental leaders just can’t bring itself to endorse one of their own — a man with unchallenged environmental credentials — it’s gotta say something about the many toes he’s stepped on (biked over?), if not his political style, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying I want a Mr. Nice Guy in the mayor’s office. It’s just always struck me as ironic that one of the big knocks against Mayor Nickels was his alleged unilateralism, and now we may be on the verge of electing a new mayor with the same bull in a china shop reputation.

Robert Reich on jobs:

Unemployment will almost certainly (be) in double-digits next year — and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, you can bet there’s another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who’d rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I’m in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there’s yet another person who’s more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.

Reich goes on to point out the basics of underemployment and the accompanying lack of consumer spending, and lays out in plain English the case for greater stimulative spending. While the debt is worrying, Reich argues that now is no time to worry about the debt and uses the example of Depression-era spending under FDR followed by post-war growth to argue that spending is the correct course to take.

Reich is also pointing out that in bad economic times, we tend to get ugly politics, which is an understatement. If you agree with his points, our country is essentially risking a long period of internal strife because of the overly simplistic views about government spending and debt that dominate our broken discourse.

Even Uncle Alan admitted that the “entire intellectual edifice” that underpinned neo-liberalism was a disaster. One can’t help but conclude that a lot of the recent insanity in politics results from the collapse of an economic belief system that was dominant in the empire for decades, and has yet to be fully discredited in the society at large. (Can you say “Russia?”)

So obviously Reich is arguing for a Keynesian approach.

One of the most entertaining quips by John Maynard Keynes is this bit from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

To put this in regional terms, we should start building and repairing things like bridges, transit and schools, although I have to admit there would be a certain satisfaction obtained by burying money in crazy places. We could then sit back to watch as the GOP-multi-level marketing machine goes to work. In a short time there would be an entirely new class of bidness guys and gals selling various plans designed to profit from digging for the loot, and many of them would need new cars and furniture.

All of this is to say that I don’t understand why Reich isn’t in the government again. With continued woes in the housing sector, ordinary consumers being hammered by usurious banks and a bleak employment outlook, it’s baffling that the Obama administration hasn’t put Reich into a key post.

I guess it’s because Obama is from Chicago?