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I pride myself in setting out every day to learn something new. Lately however, my taste for things scientific has given way to my overwhelming sense of inadequacy when it comes ito the language of scientific inquiry…mathematics. I rue the fact that I am a language-y, feeling-y type. I’d rather be a cold, hard, logical person any day. Then I could be working with CERN or something.
Oh well, my jealous phase shouldn’t last long. I have other interests to keep me occupied in the meantime, and was very impressed with a BBC program from a few years ago that explains so much more than even the documentary’s producers could have known at the time. The focus is on the American Neo-Conservative movement and the Radical Islamic movements that came about roughly around the same time. The series explains A LOT about where we are today and the tension that exists between and within the U.S., Middle Eastern countries and Radical Islamic Factions. Very interesting stuff, so I’ll post all of the segments here.
**Ironically, my s/o has just recently found and begun playing the Bible quest video games they talk about in one of the segments…he has no idea why he remembered about them, but has been playing every night lately!**
Jeez. What wasn’t announced today? The presidential choice for a new/Hispanic/female Supreme Court Justice, and the upholding of Prop 8 w/compromise on what marriages were deemed legal before the vote. In other news–North Korea tried out two more ballistic missile tests, A Russian company bought about 2% of facebook, the price of oil went up (apparently over the weekend), the median price of homes went down according to new data, Verizon Wireless reps refused to help police find a missing man–until his past due balance was paid, heartburn drugs now make pneumonia more likely, Rush Limbaugh bashed Gen. Colin Powell for basically saying the Republican party needed to be more inclusive. What a day.
I am personally excited about Sotomayor as a justice. If I were a learned woman, and was skilled at obtaining and reading opinions, I would like to read hers. Her colleagues on the federal benches think pretty well of her. Ultra-Conservative and Über-Liberal (felt the need to differentiate there) factions are outraged…it is as it should be. And I bet she is just as sensible and just as any other Supreme Court Justice, only lacking in the experience that comes with time. As a side note: I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg ROCKS because she was the only one out of the entire bench to realize that in the strip-search case (a middle school girl was searched because administrators thought she may have stashed perscription strength ibuprofen somewhere on her person) a 13-year old girl, with no prior misbehavior might be humiliated when strip-searched on hearsay, even if by female administrators and a nurse, when searches of her purse and backpack revealed nothing. Way to go. I guess my non-experience as a teenage boy would not shed any light on whether this would have been embarrassing to the opposite gender or not. Moving on…
The Prop 8 issue saddens me, but I knew it was coming. There are too many conservative voters in California that are already plenty mad over the state’s economy that I figured great pains would be taken to avoid uproar. I also believe that the vote and what the voters decided is constitutional and binding, but not fair at all. We need a big ‘ol Loving v. Virginia to get it all over with…people are still not ok with interracial dating/marriage/mixed kids (even though I can proudly say that one of those ‘mixed kids’ is our President!), but it’s still legal for people to meet someone of another race and fall in love, decide to spend the rest of their lives together…or not. This is not currently the case for many homosexual couples, who I think have unions just as loving and faithful–if not more so–than many heterosexual couples. Of course, if some form of same-sex unions were legalized nationwide, just like interracial relationships, they wouldn’t have immediate support, but people would have the choice.
As far as North Korea is concerned, I don’t even know how to feel about their lunatic ranting and raving as of late. There is such a thing in the classroom as “the child who is starving for attention.” This is North Korea, right now but the question of why may be very interesting to find out. In the classroom, the best answer is to discipline this student without giving him/her the attention that they are provoking. That approach is not so easy when dealing with a country that does underground nuclear tests. It could simply be that their nation is falling apart, or better still, ripping itself apart since Kim Jong Il is reportedly still in bad health. They also may be on the verge of setting the stage for disaster at the cost of innocent lives in neighboring nations. Nobody seems to report on why they would take these actions other than that Pyongyang is mad that we had the nerve to voice our disapproval. Not the most comforting thought in the world.
As for the other news, take the blurbs for what they are, and for God’s sake, please pay your phone bill before you go missing…
I will be maintaining radio silence today. Not because I’m mute on the status of the election. I’ll just be busy.
I have planned to go get in line at my voting precinct at 7am. Then I will check in at the local headquarters (if I have time left over) before I go and work as a Democratic Poll Watcher. I will pick up my roommate from work and take her to our polling precinct, then, go back to the headquarters and see if anyone else needs a ride to the polls.
After that, I’ll probably take some medicine (I’m sick as a dog) and a nap before I head to the election party. I’m so excited that we have a chance for CHANGE!!!! It really is a beautiful thing to speak to a woman that is taking care of an 84 year old African-American woman–one who marched in Selma, Alabama and who has waited her whole life for this chance; now, she has validation that her fight during the civil rights era was worth it. Yes, maybe this is not based on the facts about the candidate, but the symbolism is so important to a dying generation, and I cannot deny their reason for getting behind Barack Obama.
On a serious note, I’d like to see two things happen:
- No matter which candidate wins, I want us to CONTINUE to hold them accountable. But I want to also lend the President-elect support as the future leader of our country. As much as I am a supporter of Barack Obama, ifhe renigs on promises or brings about detrimental changes (doubtful, but for the sake of argument), I WILL BE THE FIRST TO SCREAM LIKE HELL. My hope is that neither of them could possibly be as bad for America as Bush and his administration, so lets all hope for the same thing–and make our voices heard. This is supposed to be a participative democracy, right?
- Let’s go back to being neighbors, spouses, lovers, friends, acquaintances–and do it civilly. If this election is all it took to fracture our nation irreparably, then we need to really re-evaluate what it means to be an American citizen in a geographically vast, intellectually diverse, country. The distance separates us, but our opinions shouldn’t. The First Amendment not only protects what we say; it also gives us cause to tolerate/encourage others to exercise their right as well.
I AM VOTING FOR BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN TODAY. ARE YOU?
On the phone with one of my friends who is teaching in the state, I heard something disturbing. He told me that, this month, in Alabama, the state department of education DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY 100% OF OCTOBER PAYCHECKS. What??!!?? If nothing else in the business is, I thought, “Surely, the meager paycheck a teacher earns for empowering a generation of students every day for 180 days out of a year is SECURE.”
Apparently, not so much. On Tuesday, state Superintendent, Joseph Morton, sent a memo to all school boards in Alabama stating:
To date, the Education Trust Fund has enough tax receipts to pay 75% of the October allocation for the FY 2009 education budget. Since it appears certain that 100% cannot be paid by Thursday evening in order to get you the state allocation in time to meet October payroll obligations on Friday, October 31, please prepare a 75% payment for October.
Morton said that the remaining 25% should be expected by November 7. But in the same breath, he said if local school boards needed to take money out of their local “Rainy Day Funds”, to do so immediately. If they needed to borrow money from their designated banking institutions, they should begin that process immediately, as well.
So, the culprit here is the Alabama Education Trust Fund, which earns money off of oil and gas revenue in Alabama? The assumption can only be that disruptions in oil production this summer (hurricanes, etc.) has hurt us. But that assumption comes WAAAY too close to advocating “drill, baby, drill,” since the trust fund is only a “rainy day” account. Or…as was stated on the Mobile NBC station’s website, perhaps it is the fact that in this weak economy and tough times for homeowners, people have elected not to pay their property taxes early–which has created an education budget shortfall. But more likely is the fact that, back in early summer, when the Alabama education budget didn’t originally pass, the state department of education scrambled to pass something. the version that did eventually pass came through with projected shortfalls.
Maybe I’m overreacting, and this is not a big deal. So far, it seems that all Alabama school systems have been able to come up with the remaining 25% for teacher, administration, and support staff paychecks without much issue–but how have we allowed this to happen in the first place? The original sin, of course, is due to the inability of past and present governors and legislators to find real, substantial, and stable ways to fund education in the state. But, since they have not yet been able to–or won’t–we’ve come to depend upon the Education Trust Fund, to borrow our shortfall for the year.
Ironically (or not, depending on your ability to concoct conspiracy theories), the major amendment on the Alabama ballot this year is “Amendment One”, concerning the above mentioned Education Trust Fund. Not exactly the hot-button Proposition 8 of California, but no less important to Alabama’s youth. According to the UAH Government Relations Department:
Alabama currently has a constitutionally established ‘rainy day fund’ for education that was designed in 2002 to address budget shortfalls. The language in the 2002 constitutional amendment was “flawed” in that it placed a fixed cap on the rainy day fund based on 2002 appropriation levels. Amendment 1 basically changes the wording in the constitution to allow the rainy day fund cap to increase as the education budget grows over the years.
Think about it this way. Suppose in 2002 you had set aside enough money to purchase a full tank of gasoline for your automobile in case of an emergency. But an emergency did not occur until 2009. And when you pulled up to the pump in 2009 you discovered the amount of money you set aside in 2002 was not enough to purchase a full tank of gasoline now. That situation is analogous to what has happened to the education budget. We are faced with addressing a 2009 funding shortfall with a rainy day fund capped at a 2002 level.
This rainy day fund is built upon a larger Alabama Trust Fund (from the same oil/gas taxes) that, last summer, was quite healthy, with about $3.3 billion. Currently the cap on the education trust fund is set at 6% of the 2002 education budget, which in no way relfects the rising costs in Alabama and across the United States. From what I understand, this is due to the poor wording of the original measure. If the amendment passes, it will not cost us, the taxpayers, one red cent–it will just allow education to tap into more of the larger trust fund.
And now, my official statement.
TODAY, IN ALABAMA, TEACHERS CAME CLOSE TO LOSING 25% OF THEIR PAY. WE SHOULD NEVER BE THAT CLOSE, FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE WHO DEDICATE THEIR LIVES TO EDUCATING OUR FUTURE. NEVER.
Please vote wisely. Vote yes on Amendment One, Tuesday, November 4.
