More Florida
oddities: Flash Update!!
Reports of a South Florida
couple being assaulted by a vicious bobcat last Tuesday have been revised a bit
after DNA analysis of the hair left on them by the beast turned out to show
that the deadly attacker was a raccoon! You really can’t make this s**t up. Those
damned raccoons and their wily disguises!
normal appearance
Bobcat, (or Raccoon in drag,
cleverly disguised as one)
Just when we bemoan
the sad state of US relations with…well, practically everyone, these days,
comes a ray of prideful sunshine. A family in Hawaii (yes, Donnie, Hawaii is in
the USA, just like Puerto Rico) has entered the Guinness Book of World Records
with the heaviest avocado ever grown. With an average avocado weighing in at around
6 ounces, The Pokini family’s 5.6 pound behemoth is the new champion! For the
math challenged, this baby is 15 times as big as those you see in the produce
section. Am I the only one who smells a doping scandal here? Meanwhile, anyone
got chips? (‘cause we have guacamole for days!)
In other and
more depressing news, 18,000 families have applied for school vouchers under a
new Florida program which will allow recipients to use taxpayer-funded
scholarship awards to attend private schools. As is usual with this sort of
thing, Both the Governor and Education Commissioner claim that the program will
“Help low income and working-class students.”
You know what
helps low income and working-class students? Valuing education. Yeah, it’s
pretty much that simple. Students whose families send them off the school with
the belief that education is important already have the single most important component
of the success tool kit. Such “vouchers” which address only school issues and
have no effect in the home are the straw men of public spending.
A scholarship
to a private school where accountability is limited and the only difference is
in school and not at home is a scam. In many cases legislators who sponsor this
public cash grab do so for private profit since, in Florida at least, there is
a history of for-profit school operators having direct or familial ties to state
legislators. As the Miami herald reported
two years ago (and it has worsened since) several highly placed legislators,
including the house Speaker and Education committee chair benefit, or have
benefited, directly from their relationships with public or private Charter
schools. Several sit on boards (and draw significant salaries for it) of such
schools or their corporate entities. Having these elected double dippers vote
on such an issue is analogous to asking me if I’d like a larger Social Security
check. Well, Hell yeah!
It’s not,
however just the personal gain for legislators aspect which is troubling. It’s
flawed thinking. The schools for which such vouchers might be issued are, in
many cases, charter schools in the neighborhoods of D and F public schools, this constitutes handing over to the private sector not only public money but allowing and
encouraging charter schools to take the best students. In other words, instead
of pouring those public resources into struggling public schools, the
Legislature is turning publicly funded education into separate and decidedly unequal
school systems. In a struggling public system where choice already exists
through magnets, there’s oversight and regulations that ensure
standards. The charter system — which since its inception has demonstrated a wide
range of reliability, accountability and failure, including some horrendous and
well-documented flops — is an “Education as Industry” rodeo and free-for-all. Private corporations operating
the schools make the rules. Their basis is profit, not product.
And, as if
handing them hundreds of millions weren’t enough pillage, school districts are required
to share, with charter schools, federal Title 1 funds that go to schools with
the neediest students, and funds that come from property taxes for school
construction. Understand: your taxes could be allocated to send a child to
school in another district when they are needed locally. It’s not just a giveaway, an example of
corporate welfare, but a takeaway from public schools that desperately need
state funding. All in the name of benefiting the expansion of an industry from
which lawmakers and their families benefit.
Of course,
again in the Sunshine State, there are also the too frequent episodes of
blatant fraud and mid-term closures of charter and other private schools. Add
to this, the fact that these “scholarships” will also direct public money into
church run schools, and it becomes more troubling to anyone who believes in
Church/State separation. A concrete example would be the First Academy School
run by First Baptist Church of Orlando. It charges tuition, pays teachers, and.
I suspect, if the books were open, makes some profit in the process. Students
can come there from literally anywhere. Yet, under the newly approved voucher program,
more students, now with taxpayer money footing the bill, would be able to
attend this church run school. If you desire to send your child to a religious
school, especially one where such things as LGBTQ issues and other equally pressing
social concerns are frowned upon, so be it, it’s their loss in the long run,
but don’t ask me to pay for it.
As long as we’re
on the “feel good” items from today’s news, let’s visit another topic. Apparently,
not content to let racist and anti-Semitic religious huckster Billy Graham lie,
the Daily Sun runs a column from beyond the grave. As Nixon Oval office tapes
showed, Old’ Billy was hardly the humanitarian when persons other than White
Protestants were concerned, but that’s another story. Today’s snippet of shit-kicker
wisdom states: “Christ Made Peace by the Blood the Cross.” I’ll just let that
lay here while you browse the world news and ascertain for yourself how that’s worked
out over the ensuing 2000 years.
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