Author Archives: cassandra_m

About cassandra_m

"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

Senator Chris Coons Calls Out Republicans for Not Getting to a Budget Deal

Recall that the Senate passed its budget in March, and the House passed its budget before that — meaning that if we’re finally following the “regular order” of budgeting, there should be a Senate and House Reconciliation Committee so that these two bodies can come to some agreement on a budget. That budget — a policy document only, it appropriates no money — is supposed to guide the appropriation process. Except that the GOP doesn’t want to work on a budget until we are much closer to the debt ceiling problem. We were supposed to have faced the debt ceiling in march or April, but the Treasury figured out a way to postpone that until Fall. So the GOP is stuck with a pretty bad timeline — blowing up the economy over the debt ceiling just before they start campaigning is very bad juju. And they have NO negotiating position unless the debt ceiling is imminent they think. So Senator Coons took to the Senate floor today to call to get back to the regular order of the budget process and to stop the effects of the sequester:

(If you’d prefer the text of Senator Coons’ comments, you can see them here.) Frankly, I think that tougher language is needed, but this is good. And more Democrats need to be doing this. In front of cameras for all of the pundit shows. The GOP had a field day with the bullshit claim of no budget for years, and now that there is one, they can’t bring themselves to touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Josh Marshall at TPM notes:

What’s left after you strip away all that obfuscation is that Republicans don’t want to go to conference unconditionally because they’re concerned their position won’t hold politically and they’ll ultimately be forced to swallow a compromise that includes tax increases — unless the whole process gets swallowed by another debt limit fight.

That’s mainly because the Republicans’ position in budget negotiations is as brittle as it is uncompromising and they don’t want to expose it to the wages of politics. They don’t want to repeat a losing election year debate about taxes and social spending in an open legislative context.

The rules open the House floor to a flood of privileged measures when budget negotiators gridlock, and, as Paul Ryan rightly noted at the Pete Peterson fiscal summit yesterday, that means Democrats will try to shorten their leashes, by, for instance, proposing to make entitlement cuts off limits. (Bernie Sanders showed how it’s done in the Senate already.) That means if Republicans truly want those entitlement cuts, they’ll have to whip votes and own them. It also means their commitment to sequestration over higher taxes on rich people will be tested.

It is well worth it to remind people that we don’t have a budget, we’re heading into the worst of the sequester cuts and the GOP won’t get to a budget because they need to play games with the debt ceiling.

School Board Elections, Redux

Yesterday’s NJ had a remarkable article from Matthew Albright that purports to take a look at the usually out-of-sight school board elections and the possibility of influence by outside interests on the eventual winners. It is remarkable, because it singles out teacher’s unions as the outside interests being served by the inattention of voters to these elections. There isn’t even a fig leaf of a “both sides do it” argument — in large part because this article lets Jea Street pontificate about how teacher’s unions are running the board for school board elections:

“The teachers have a lock on it. They control almost all the school districts,” Street said. “You’ve got to give the unions credit for being aggressive, assertive and effective. But on the other hand, you can take the position that it’s counterproductive.

“If they control the board, is the board acting in the interest of the students or the interest of the union?” he asked.

Really? It isn’t apparent to me that teacher’s unions run school boards. Just before Street’s rant, the reporter notes how two major funding referenda for Appoquinimink and Colonial went to defeat and brought out more people to vote than the usual school board elections do. You’d think — in unions were running the school board show — that they would have gotten more folks out to say YES to more money for their agenda. Whatever that is.

What no one rants about (just a little from John Young and he doesn’t name names) is the effort by other outside interests who often don’t care much about what goes on in classrooms. Anyone remember Skip Schoenhals and the Vision4Delaware crew? The Chamber of Commerce endorsed candidates (no idea of they spent money). And what about the parents groups who try to protect their little enclaves and new facilities who work for candidates? But the paragraphs are spent on unions and not the other special interests trying to influence the system too.

I don’t doubt that the teacher’s union is an active participant in school board elections. They are an active participant in all of the other elections too. But you have to do more than outsource an opinion to Jea Street that teacher’s unions run school boards. Because from where I sit, some of these boards could use a few more subject matter experts.

But we do get back to the idea that perhaps you can change the formula of increasing voter turnout by changing the school board elections to the regular Election Day and stop letting school boards basically hide their electoral activity from the broader pool voters. I’m a fan of this. I’m a big fan of this. (And while I’m here — why in heaven’s name is the school board election on 14 May, but the referenda for Appoquinimink and Colonial are a few days earlier? Why not all the same day?) I don’t buy that these elections will be politicized if held on the usual Election Day. They are politicized now — otherwise why accuse teacher’s unions of controlling the process — and I see the effort to pretend otherwise a particularly poisonous version of the Delaware Way. Let’s stop demonizing teachers and get to fixing this thing.

ps. I don’ recall the NJ actually spilling this much ink on the *actual* school board elections or their candidates for that matter? Am I wrong about that? Because I wonder how much more attention people would pay to school boards if the newspaper of record would pay attention to them in any meaningful way.

QOTD — What to Do About Syria?

This morning, I listened as NPR gave John McCain more air time to call for some type of intervention in the Syrian mess. Lindsay Graham has been screeching for more capability for someone over there to have better capacity to kill one another. Even Mitt Romney has gotten into the act to call President Obama weak over his handling of Syria. In the meantime, we have a press running all over the place certain that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, when that is far from certain:

A careful review of the physical evidence suggests there is still little to support the notion that the Assad government has used chemical weapons. The physical evidence appears to amount to a pair of blood samples — described in a letter to Congress as “physiological samples.” According to subsequent reporting by the Financial Times, there are only two samples — provided by the Syrian opposition — from different victims in different locations. The United Kingdom analyzed one sample at Porton Down; the United States analyzed the other sample, probably at Edgewood. The samples appear to confirm exposure to sarin. There are a lot of techniques that establish exposure to sarin. If you are interested, here are two papers from 2002 and 2008. Note the author with the Porton Down affiliation.

The president has rightly noted that the chain of custody — essentially all the evidence that would link the sample to a victim of a Syrian attack — is simply not intact. “We don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them,” Obama said.

(To put this in perpective — pretend you live next door to a gas station. And you are getting the smell and sheen of gas in the water coming out of your tap. You would need WAY more than two samples to claim that the gas station is contaminating your well. You would need to document how the samples were taken, who handled those samples, how those samples were analyzed with some confidence samples to ensure that the analytical equipment is working correctly. And here we have the GOP wanting to intervene based on way less evidence.)

And so far, the American people aren’t buying this sabre-rattling:

Sixty-two percent of the public say the United States has no responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria between government forces and antigovernment groups, while just one-quarter disagree. Likewise, 56 percent say North Korea is a threat that can be contained for now without military action, just 15 percent say the situation requires immediate American action and 21 percent say the North is not a threat at all.

What do you think? Should the US do any intervention in Syria?

Sunday Open Thread [5.5.13]

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Are you doing anything to celebrate? Patricia Talorico in the NJ has a roundup of the best places in DE for tacos today. Did she miss any of your favorite spots?

There is also a good article in the NJ re: the Fisker meltdown. And I’ll take the obligatory note of the hypocrisy by the GOP on this thing — handing over taxpayer monies to businesses (especially dirty energy businesses) is just fine, even though they hardly need the help. And they don’t seem to mind handing over money to the local banks and casinos and other local ventures — but I imagine that these ventures are also writing them campaign checks. Fisker was always something of a risk — and frankly, I think that the conversation ought to be whether or not taxpayers ought to be in the venture capital or business support business. The free market certainly isn’t served by the government handing over funds to start up OR to support the balance sheets of established businesses. I was a supporter of taking this risk, but I’m more than a little disturbed that we’re willing to rush in to support businesses with little to no of the accountability that we keep puffing our chests out over schools and teachers. As it happens, the state as a functioning asset with great jobs already that they were trying to throw under the bus — the Wilmington Port. How is it that we can be so gung ho over a Fisker deal and working to actually dump an asset that is already performing?

Still, the Fisker story isn’t quite over yet. They raised a bit more than $1B in venture capital and it looks like they added $100M in new funding last September. Who knows where Fiskar goes from here, but I wouldn’t quite give up the ghost on something that attracted more private venture capital than either the US or Delaware contributed. Making cars at Boxwood may be done, but Fiskar is still worth watching.

And WTF is up with Tom Gordon’s CAO?

Grimaldi, who is County Executive Tom Gordon’s chief administrative officer, got in a shoving match during a Delaware Police Athletic League meeting in late 2011 or early 2012, witnesses said. And he was charged with offensive touching after a 2010 altercation that Grimaldi said was his reaction to an attack, court records show.

Having a government gig apparently means never having to be accountable, I guess.

What interests you today?

Saturday Open Thread [5.4.2013]

This isn’t an accident, either:

A 3-year-old boy, identified by YPD as Darrien Nez, was transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center by emergency personnel and later pronounced dead.

Court records indicated that Spry had been staying at the residence to help her daughter pack for a move.

Spry owns a 9mm handgun, which was inside a backpack. She said she was packing the bathroom that morning and placed the backpack on top of a clothes dryer. Court records indicated that Spry said she saw her grandson come into the room but continued with her packing.

According to court records, Spry said she heard the gun go off about five minutes later and that when she looked over, she saw her grandson lying on the floor, bleeding from the nose. Court records did not indicate how the child got the gun.

Court records also indicated that Spry admitted to using methamphetamine the day before at about 11 p.m. and placed the pipe she used to smoke it in the same backpack as the gun.

She’s currently being held on $500,000 bail. Unlike the Kentucky parents who don’t look like they’ll face any charges. But let’s let Charlie Pierce have the last word on this madness:

[…]If your “way of life” involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, “learning to use and respect a gun” means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it’s sitting in the corner of the parlor like it’s a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way “normal” to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too.[…]

Seriously, let’s take a good, hard look at exactly who keeps pushing this Culture of Death and violence in communities.

And then there’s this (via The Bitchy Pundit):

What interests you today?

A Hopeful School Solution

What if you fired all of the security guards at a struggling elementary school and spent that money on Art programs? That is the Big Idea from this NBC news report telling the story of this Roxbury, MA school that appears to have found a path to improvement by reclaiming one of the features the school was built for.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In a school notorious for its lack of discipline, where backpacks were prohibited for fear the students would use them to carry weapons, Bott’s bold decision to replace the security guards with art teachers was met with skepticism by those who also questioned why he would choose to lead the troubled school.

“A lot of my colleagues really questioned the decision,” he said. “A lot of people actually would say to me, ‘You realize that Orchard Gardens is a career killer? You know, you don’t want to go to Orchard Gardens.’”

But now, three years later, the school is almost unrecognizable. Brightly colored paintings, essays of achievement, and motivational posters line the halls. The dance studio has been resurrected, along with the band room, and an artists’ studio.

It is certainly a very hopeful story and I’m really intrigued by the idea of getting kids back into arts classes. It makes sense to me that kids would respond better to (and learn more from) an engagement with the right sides of their developing brains than a battery of security guards. To be sure, this is probably not a miracle cure, but having these kids attend a school rather than lockdown practice seems to have some effect.

Monday Open Thread [4.29.13]

This was a deadly weekend for the City of Wilmington, with 4 shooting incidents in about 24 hours. Mayor Dennis Williams did not return Adam Taylor’s calls for his article this weekend, but one of the WPD’s PIOs spoke to WDEL this AM on the subject:

Public Information Officer Mark Ivey says police are limited as to what they can do to curb crime. He points to a vicious circle that keeps many of the same criminals working their way through the system.

Did you see what he did there? Mayor Williams promised marked improvement in the City’s rates of violence in 6 months, focusing largely on the WPD, its deployment and resources. Now that we are close to that 6 month milestone, it looks like we begin the effort to back away from that promise. Still, if you have spent any time at community meetings during the violent periods in Wilmington, you will recognize that line of reasoning. Chief Szczerba had his management roll out to community meetings armed with statistics showing the number of arrests made by the WPD for a period, noting that *they* were arresting people as fast as they could. It was the AG’s office and the Judges that kept turning them loose as fast as they went in. The thing is, that this really is part of the problem, and Cris Barrish’s excellent special report on how easy it is to get back on the street after being arrested for fairly serious crimes shows a part of it. But it is intriguing to watch how fast they’ve backed off of the tough guy belligerence that was going to fix it all. They aren’t helping themselves by reorganizing to be utterly reactive rather than proactive to issues, and cutting themselves off from the kind of community partnerships that are supposed to help them do their work. Too bad.

This amazes me — retired Justice Sandra Day-O’Connor tells the Chicago Tribune editorial board that Bush v. Gore may have been a mistake:

Looking back, O’Connor said, she isn’t sure the high court should have taken the case.

“It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” O’Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.'”

The case, she said, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.”

“Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,” she said. “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”

Well, hello.

What interests you today?

Late Night Video — You Are More Beautiful Than You Think

John Young posted this in the Friday Open Thread. I had seen this some days back on Facebook and was not prepared for the emotional impact of this video. On the one hand, this is part of a Dove campaign. On the other hand, this is a remarkable demonstration of one of the ways women underestimate and sabotage themselves. This is close to 10 minutes long, but I think well worth every minute.

Friday Open Thread [4.19.13]

Woke up at 5AM this morning where even the BBC World Service was completely dedicated to coverage of the Boston Bomber manhunt. Strange. But TGIF.

Keith Ellison has reintroduced his Inclusive Prosperity Act, that would institute a financial transactions tax on Wall Street activities:

Ellison is reintroducing his Inclusive Prosperity Act, a proposal to add a small “financial transactions tax” on high-volume, high-speed trading by Wall Street speculators. The tax—similar to one that the US imposed until 1966, and to taxes maintained by 40 countries worldwide—would generate roughly $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

The Man of the Appalachian Trail, Mark Sanford, is having a very bad week — first, the NRCC abandons him after revelations that he was charged with trespassing at his ex-wife’s house. Abandons him as in they are no longer spending money on his campaign. What is intriguing about this is that the GOP doesn’t mind spending its money on other womanizers and malcontents and even when they said they’d abandon someone like the MO Senate candidate with rape issues, they ended up supporting him close to the end. Second, (according to Jennifer Rubin) there is a conservative women’s group that is exploring a write-in campaign for Jenny Sanford.

And what the hell is going on with NCCo staff? David Grimaldi has a fight in Pastabilities and NCCo Chief responds out of his jurisdiction:

“I did respond into the city,” Setting said. “That was just to make sure that everything was being done in the proper manner.” Setting referred other questions to Grimaldi.

Are all NCCo residents treated to NCCPD oversight when they are misbehaving in Wilmington enough for the WPD to be called in? This sure looks like special rules are in place for NCCo staff to misbehave with impunity.

What interests you today?