An extra helping of gravy for the opinion starved!
NO Sports, No Tweets, no polls, no dinosaurs...
Get ready for San Jose with this:
The movement of wealth from the middle class to wealthier Americans has complex origins, but federal tax policy has been a major contributor.
And following the 2009 stimulus, which helped but was not enough to fill the massive hole in the economy, Washington has exacerbated the inequality trend by embracing austerity rather than creating jobs through investments in roads, transit and other public infrastructure. So a shrinking middle class has been unable to lift us beyond a tepid recovery.
More below:
Some people in Iowa get it:
In today’s toxic political environment, some critics may never believe anything the Obama administration does has any value. But they should at least look at the facts before they accept at face value the idea that the stimulus was “wasted.”
Not everything is OK in
OK:
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Janet Barresi was quick to pooh-pooh the report: "Per-pupil funding is not necessarily a good yardstick for success," she said. "Some of the lowest-performing school systems in the nation also have the highest per-pupil funding."
Of course she would say that. Her actions since she took office suggest that she is less than committed to increasing state funding for public education. She seems more committed to moving money away from local school districts and into charter schools, virtual schools and the like.
It's no accident that bad ideas spring up all over the place at once. Add corporate education to union busting and vote fixing. Yuk! We need to stop electing mean people to positions of power. Not
easy:
Solution: Make politicians beholden to voters, not donors, by getting money out of elections.
Problem: The Supreme Court says money is speech, including corporate money as dictated by Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. People with the most money have the most speech. And have rigged the system so they have more of both. The rest of us get rube bait.
New Hampshire republicans bother me. I'm not
alone:
But the real travesty of these measures is that they erode the right of citizens of our country to have a say in who will lead them. Perhaps some in Concord — and in many statehouses across the country — have forgotten that the right to vote is the foundation on which our country was built. We haven’t. And voters should not, and cannot, tolerate attempts by anyone to trample on that right.
Ok that's it for now. I must now watch football.