This.
I admit that I’m somewhat curious to see exactly what happens next week — in much the same manner that I was somewhat curious to see exactly how the Titanic sank in that execrable James Cameron film . . . The details of how the wreck goes down can hold a certain clinical interest.
Some links for your perusal.
Go read Maven’s front page. Lots of good stuff over there, especially her stuff on this season’s campaign spending.
The GOP/TeaParty fueled campaigns have taken what Democrats merely hinted at as a strategy in 2008 and ramped it up to an artform – using front groups with only a passing connection to actual voters to take over our electoral system.
In this election, poor people will vote on rich candidates covered by even richer corporate media. Bloated on a diet of billions of dollars of anonymous campaign ads, money media are nothing but happy. What would Tom Paine say?
I love the graphic at this Mother Jones article. And yet to read the news, you’d think that the unions were running amok in D.C.
David Horsey: “Real” Americans” are not Tea Party priority
But real American jobs seem not to be of genuine concern to the Tea Party folks – or at least to those who are their favored candidates and spokesmen. The public statements and private musings of Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Jim DeMint, Glenn Beck and their cohort reveal their true priority. And that is to turn back the clock to a time before Medicare, Social Security, environmental safeguards, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, civil rights laws, consumer protection and any other government function or agency that seeks to protect the average American from the vicissitudes of the market economy and the depredations of powerful corporate interests.
In the imaginations of these libertarian purists, life was lovely in this republic before progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson began meddling with the system and set America on the long, dark trudge to Barack Obama’s totalitarian socialist rule.
Yes, what a glorious time it was back then, before government started setting some rules. The free market picked the winners – oil companies, railroads, mining companies, sweat shop owners, polluters, timber barons, plantation owners, the meat packing industry – and the losers – child laborers, mine workers, mill workers, sharecroppers, people sickened by degraded air, water and land, as well as by tainted food. Greed and exploitation ruled a Gilded Age where the income gap between the industrialists in their sprawling mansions and the workers in their tenements was wide. Considering the current compensation gap between Wall Street billionaires and middle class folks whose incomes have stagnated for two decades, a return to that happy 19th century utopia seems well under way. The Tea Party crowd should be delighted.
Sweetie, The Kids and I watched the Rory Reid / Brian Sandoval debate tonight. It was agreed by all that Rory owned the debate and pretty much kicked Sandoval’s butt. The best part was when Rory made the point that Sandoval’s “school choice” plan was merely sending taxpayer dollars to people who already have the means to send their children to private school and that a $6000 voucher used to subsidize a private education does not offer any kind of choice to a poor family who can’t cover the rest of the cost of the private tuition. Although the audience had, up to that point, abided by the no applause rule and had remained quiet during the debate, Rory’s answer was met with thunderous applause. Truth has a way of making one stand up and applaud.
THAT’s the Rory I want to see in his campaign ads.
And if you can figure out this word fog you’re better than me. The question was straightfoward: “What do you think about campaign finance regulations?”
Angle: Well I think that the Supreme Court has really made their decision on this, they found that we have a First Amendment right across the board that was violated by the McCain-Feingold Act. And that’s what they threw out, was those violations. The McCain-Feingold Act is still in place. The DISCLOSE Act is still in place. It’s just that certain provisions within that they found to be definitely violating the First Amendment. If we didn’t have the DISCLOSE Act there would be a lot of different things that people wouldn’t be able to find out. And certainly you can go to FEC.gov and see where Harry Reid is getting most of his money from special interests.
So is she for campaign finance regulations or not?
And no, the DISCLOSE Act isn’t law. Senate Republicans “filibustered” it.
I got this press release from the Rory Reid campaign yesterday. Snippet:
In a shocking new report, Education Week shows Nevada has fallen to the absolute rock bottom of national education rankings, sitting in 51st place out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
According to the report, Nevada graduates less than 42 percent of its students, compared to 69 percent nationwide.
Nevada’s 41.8 percent graduation rate was so bad that it was more than 12 percentage points worse than second-to-last-ranked New Mexico’s 54.9 percent graduation rate. In short, Nevada isn’t only last in education. It is dead last and by a huge margin.
“This is a educational crisis, an economic crisis, and a moral crisis,” Rory Reid said. “The system, the state, and the governors who got us here have utterly failed our children. The time has come to totally transform our system.”
Since 1997 – a 10 year period overseen by Republican governors – the graduation rate in Nevada has fallen 36 percent, from 65.7 percent to an all-time low of less than 42 percent.
I searched for and found the original report. Each link provides state by state data within each category.
In the print edition of Quality Counts 2010, readers will find separate state grades for each of the four policy and performance categories updated for this year’s report: the Chance-for-Success Index; the teaching profession; standards, assessments, and accountability; and school finance.
Check out the Chance-for-Success Index. It will make you weep.
Here’s a shocker, Nevada has no course or subject-specific standards for our high schools. None. Not English, Math, Science or Social Studies. Perhaps we could start addressing the drop out rate there? Worse, Nevada has no course-specific standards for Science at all, at any grade level.
Rory, does your plan address this? It doesn’t appear so, not when I read this part of his plan.
Research shows one key to a successful school is an effective principal. That’s why, in EDGE schools, principals will have:
- Control over grade-level staffing, and the ability to hire and release teachers in order to best meet their students’ needs.
- A per-student budget with discretion to spend it on the best programs and services for students.
- The freedom to structure curriculum to best meet students’ needs
- Ability to change the schedules for both students and faculty, and adjust work rules to help staff meet the school mission.
This part of the plan has always concerned me. Right now we have 17 school districts within the state (one in each county), and now Rory appears to want to remove even school district control over curriculum? Shouldn’t he be going in the other direction? Unfortunately, I’ve never gotten to directly question him, and today won’t be any better. He’s holding a Round Table today in Reno at 10:30 a.m. at Swope Middle School. Since I will actually be at work, if any of you decide to attend (and if they actually take questions this time – they didn’t at the last “Town Hall” I attended), please ask for me and let me know what he says.
I want to like the plan, but for me, it’s still too “tests results” oriented and not enough actually learning.
Anyone from the campaign, feel free to stop by and answer. But I’d really like to hear from Rory himself.
Well, such is the nature of Nevada politics that on the Rep side, the GOP nominated the most wild-eyed winger of them all to face Harry Reid in November, and on the Dem side, a great woman was nominated to run against the current Republican Lt. Governor (eat your heart out MZ).
Harry, I hope you are paying attention. 25% of your party did not support you in yesterday’s primary. Hell, more than 10% chose None of the Above. In the primary! And Harry, the answer is NOT to tack further to the right, got that? I’m sure you’d like to think that the Tea Party just clinched your re-election, but as radical as Sharron Angle is, I put nothing past the Nevada electorate. Nothing. Start talking some populist smack and really back your words up with action in the Senate, or you may be retiring to Searchlight come November.
In the NV-02 race (no Dem has ever won that district) an activist Democratic woman appears to have pulled it off against her RINO opponent. The third person in the race is a local crank, and surprisingly, he got 10% of the vote. Sam Dehne is certifiable. And he got 10%. The NV-02 Dem primary was a nail biter all night, and when I went to be the RINO had jumped ahead. This morning, it’s Nancy Price in the lead. I assume the closeness of the vote will trigger an automatic recount. Under 1% and it is supposed to happen. I don’t know if the absentees have been counted yet.
Joy of joys, Jim Gibbons went down to humiliating defeat. Doing the happy dance. Brian Sandoval (R) will face Rory Reid (D) in the general. While I support Rory, Brian Sandoval is not the wild-eyed radical the shadow group Don’t Bet on Sandoval makes him out to be. Jeebus on a triscuit, I keep getting their emails which allow me no way to “opt out” – nor is there any way to contact them via their web site. Rory needs to publicly distance himself from this group, but my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. If Brian wins, I won’t be as crushed as I was when the empty suit, the Man With No Plan, Jim Gibbons, whose re-election campaign motto was He kept his promise, beat out Dina Titus in 2006.
Locally, it appears that our Lyon County Sheriff, Allen Veil, will not have to face an opponent in the General Election. With 53.6% of the vote in a non-partisan race, he has been re-elected. Good.
Rory Reid - A man with a plan.
Ken McKenna - A man with a lot of words, but no plan. In fact, his website is a joke and his billboards embarass me. His billboards consist of a picture of McKenna and his wife with the nonsensical statement: “Say NO to taxes.” What the … ? He is supposedly running as a Democrat for NV-02, a formidable task, most assuredly. But dude, the idea is to differentiate yourself from the Republican, not sound just like him.
And yeah, I’ll be re-registering as a Democrat in time for the primary.
And why haven’t the Nevada Revised Statutes been updated to reflect all the changes associated with that date shift?
According to the Nevada Revised Statutes posted online:
NRS 293.175 Date of primary election; nomination of candidates; applicability of provisions governing nominations.
1. The primary election must be held on the 12th Tuesday before the general election in each even-numbered year.
2. Candidates for partisan office of a major political party and candidates for nonpartisan office must be nominated at the primary election.
3. Candidates for partisan office of a minor political party must be nominated in the manner prescribed pursuant to NRS 293.171 to 293.174, inclusive.
4. Independent candidates for partisan office must be nominated in the manner provided in NRS 293.200.
5. The provisions of NRS 293.175 to 293.203, inclusive, do not apply to:
(a) Special elections to fill vacancies.
(b) The nomination of the officers of incorporated cities.
(c) The nomination of district officers whose nomination is otherwise provided for by statute.
(Added to NRS by 1960, 243; A 1963, 1387; 1983, 1116; 1985, 268; 1987, 1366; 1989, 226; 1999, 1392, 3550; 2001, 672; 2005, 1434)
So you see, I’ve been happily going my way thinking that the primary will be mid-August, when in fact, the primary will be held on June 8th, with early voting beginning on May 22nd. Now, I know that a group of grassroots activists tried to make this happen in the 2005 legislative session, but all the meat of that legislation was stripped out at the last minute and the bill passed in no way reflected the wishes of the activists, so what happened? Is this the one thing that the state legislature was able to do in the last session? It appears so. Introduced on March 2, 2009, it passed inthe Senate on April 13th and the Assembly on May 19th, just 2 weeks before the session ended on June 2nd. How they found the time to sneak this in amidst all the budget battles is beyond me, but I digress.
Senate Bill 162. (pdf)
Senate Bill No. 162–Senators Woodhouse, Coffin, Wiener,
Horsford; Breeden, Copening, Parks and Schneider
CHAPTER……….AN ACT relating to elections; revising the date of the primary election to the second Tuesday in June of each evennumbered year; revising the provisions governing the registration of voters by mail; and providing other matters properly relating thereto.
Legislative Counsel’s Digest:
Section 6 of this bill changes the date of the primary election from the twelfth Tuesday before the general election of each even-numbered year to the second Tuesday in June of each even-numbered year. (NRS 293.175) To provide an example, if the provisions of this bill had been in effect in 2008, the primary election would have been held on June 10, 2008, instead of August 12, 2008.
As a result of changing the date of the primary election, sections 1-5, 7-12 and 14-17 of this bill amend various other dates relating to elections such as the date for filing declarations of candidacy.
Section 16 of this bill changes the date on which a voter’s registration or correction of registration information is deemed to be effective to the earlier of the date on which the application is postmarked or received by the county clerk.
(NRS 293.5235)
hmmm…don’t you think the Nevada legislature should make sure that their ONLINE version of the NRS actually matches the current version?
Oh, and another thing…if you are an independent candidate in Nevada, your filing dates to get on the ballot are the same as for candidates from major parties, even though your name will not appear on the primary ballot. And you have to jump through a lot more hoops to get your name on said ballot. The Rs and the Ds do have a lock on things in this state.
And, not for nothing, but we think it’s totally ass (as the young people say) for the guy in charge of electing Democrats to governors mansions nationwide to come out and favor one candidate over another more than a year before the primary election is even held. It smacks of intimidation, of good old boy, backroom politics. And we’re not sure how they do things up in Montana, but here in Nevada, voters tend not to like that kind of thing. Especially Democratic primary voters. Just ask U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, who enjoyed their generous support in 2006.
So, Gov. Schweitzer, with all due respect, drop your money on the tables and then fly back to Montana. We’ll call you next year, once we’ve decided who best to defeat the Republican nominee, OK? And then we expect you to make with the campaign cash — regardless of who we pick, even if it’s not the candidate you like — because, well, that’s your job.
Spot on. I like Brian Schweitzer. I think he’s doing a bang-up job in Montana, but like Sebelius, I’m shocked that the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association would publicly support one Democratic gubernatorial candidate over another, even though he is mandated to remain neutral. Go read Molly Ball’s article. It’s stunning what he admits to. If this is the road he wants to go down, then he needs to step down from the chairmanship. As in: right now.
On another note, further into Molly’s article linked above we find this little gem:
Jack Schofield, a member of the university system Board of Regents, has a Web site touting him as a 2010 congressional candidate.
The site, http://www.jack2010.com, touts a lifetime of experience for Schofield, 86, who was a fighter pilot in World War II. But it doesn’t say what seat in Congress he’s interested in.
Reached for comment, Schofield said the campaign is in the “making preparations” stage. A Democrat, he said he would run for the only Nevada congressional seat currently held by a Republican, the 2nd District, represented by Dean Heller.
Schofield doesn’t live in the 2nd District — he lives in Democrat Shelley Berkley’s 1st District — but that’s not a requirement. Another Democrat, Douglas County School Board President Cindy Trigg, has already announced a challenge to Heller.
It may not be a requirement, but we voters in CD-2 prefer to have our representative actually live in our district. We’re funny that way.
