DL Open Thread: Thursday, August 13, 2020
Highest Day Of US Covid Deaths Since May. So, let’s reopen schools and let’s encourage the football powers to play this fall. Florida sheriff bans mask use by deputies. The Florida governor…well, just read it for yourselves.
Rethugs Fall In Line Behind QAnon Candidate. With one exception, who gets blistered by Trump.
Postmaster General Removing Sorting Machines. He is sabotaging our post office. Where is the outrage? Have we just reached the point where we are immune to the sabotaging of our most important institutions?
The Essential Kamala Harris Reading Guide. These articles, in totality, paint a vivid picture of a complicated and accomplished woman.
The Infuriating Power Of Police Unions. A must-read (know your enemy):
Police unions, like all unions, were designed to protect their own. But unlike other labor unions, they represent workers with the state-sanctioned power to use deadly force. And they have successfully bargained for more job security than what’s afforded to most workers, security they can often rely on even after committing acts of violence that would likely get anyone else fired or locked up.
And yet, in the broader push to reform the criminal justice system, police unions have remained largely untouchable, both by the broader labor movement, which has avoided criticizing their bargaining process, and by politicians on both sides of the aisle, who have accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from them. Democrats don’t want to come down against unions, and Republicans, who are normally happy to attack unions, don’t want to mess with the police. When former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker destroyed collective bargaining rights for his state’s public sector unions in 2011, he left police unions mostly unscathed. The AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor coalition, has referred to police unions as rightful beneficiaries in the movement for workers’ rights.
Assad In Trouble In Syria? Detailed reporting on the intersection between money, power and family that now threatens Assad’s power.
The Biden-Harris Rollout. I just have one question: Why AI DuPont High School? Back in the days before charter schools, Harris McDowell used to refer to AI as ‘Delaware’s only private public high school’, and he was correct. I would have looked for a more symbolically-resonant location for the rollout, but that’s just me.
What do you want to talk about?
Harris McDowell has been a horse’s ass since I got to Delaware (I can’t speak to his childhood). It was a bullshit statement then and it’s even more so now. Minority enrollment at A.I. is 70%.
Why there? It’s about a mile from his house.
They could’ve used the new theater at Tatnall School – that’s walking distance from Joe’s house. However, that would have been seen as even more elitist than McDowell’s description of A.I.
AI was the white flight refuge before charter/magnet schools. Now, not so much.
AI attracted a heavy enrollment from the first wave of Asian professional families, and legend has it (I haven’t checked) that Asians were counted together with other minorities so that AI could claim a larger minority enrollment for certain funding advantages.
AI wasn’t really a white flight refuge. Rather, the way the district lines were drawn from 1968 (Educational Advancement Act) to 1978 (start of deseg), there wasn’t much housing in that district that blue-collar families of any race could afford.
White flight in the mid-70s/early ’80s meant heading to Garnet Valley, Unionville, Cecil County and Appoquinimink or, if you could afford it, to Catholic and private schools. That’s when Caravel Academy and Independence School were founded, and some church-related schools really grew — Faith City, New Castle Baptist and one up by Marsh and Naamans roads.
That said, there were some factors that gave Alexis I. du Pont (both the school and the district) a private-school feel. The district’s school board wasn’t elected — it was appointed by a Superior Court judge. Its boundaries were drawn to include only one piece of real estate on the east side of the Brandywine — the DuPont Experimental Station — in order to generate sufficient tax revenue to ensure lower taxes for members of The Family who lived in the manses of Chateau Country.
There are plenty of things for which Harris McDowell deserves criticism, but his characterization of A.I. isn’t one of them. In the ’70s it was a splendid option for the folks who lived in Hockessin and couldn’t afford tuition at Tower Hill.
And Alby is absolutely right about A.I. today — it’s nothing like what it used to be.
Trump thinks destroying the post office will help him, I suspect it will be a two edged sword as the Republican base is largely composed of old people who will want to avoid waiting in lines, especially in hard hit Florida. But what the hated DeJoy is doing ties in nicely with the Republican desire to kill off the workers union and hand the business to their assorted owners. Reportedly DeJoy is now removing the sorting machine the post office uses to sort mail, a blatant and obvious act of sabotaging the service. Hoping there is hell to pay for this sick game, as noted it’s yet another failure of the media to get the word out there.
Mr DeJoy seems to want to spend the rest of his life in federal prison for interference with the national election. Maybe he can get a cell near the Trump family. To each their own.