Neil deMause: The Website

Why public schools need their own bailout. And pay no attention to that other guy who ripped off my topic today.

At my son’s elementary school, the news that Gov. Paterson is proposing $223 million in midyear cuts to city schools sparked about the same reaction you’d expect from telling a laid-off autoworker how the ice cap is melting: I’ve already got one crisis to worry about.

Last year’s cuts already cost our school its drama classes, a music teacher, and numerous aides. Library hours have evaporated. And the list of supplies that parents are asked to send in keeps getting longer… [read more]

Also pay no attention to the word “meltinger,” which was an editing error. If you want to read the original, slightly longer version, you can find it here.

Of all the inane chatter flying around about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win, the award for the inanest has got to go to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who first opines that this will make up for Obama’s devastating loss of the 2016 Olympics (sadly, no mention of Leno’s ratings), then proceeds to this conclusion:

Winning the Nobel Prize will allow Obama to go to his divided Democratic caucus and make the case far more forcefully that the time is now to stay united behind him on Afghanistan.

As my spouse noted on hearing this: “Oh, I see. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a justification for going to war.”

UPDATE: At least one former Nobel Peace Prize winner agrees.

Geared toward small-business owners, but a worthwhile overview of coming legislation for the general public as well. I tackle health care, taxes, and credit cards:

Health care: Still on the critical list

Last year: The cost of providing health insurance to employees continued to skyrocket, jumping by an average of 5.7% per employee after a 6.1% hike in 2007, according to a study by consulting firm Mercer. A survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that health care was the number-one concern of small business owners, prompting the NFIB to become a major backer of an advertising campaign calling on the presidential candidates to make health reform a priority.

This year: President-elect Obama has endorsed a sweeping reform plan that would create a new National Health Insurance Exchange to allow more businesses access to insurance pools…[read more]

Paul Krugman has an excellent column in today’s New York Times, making some of the same points I made last week about how education and other social services (food stamps, anyone?) are just as deserving as “stimulus” spending as, say, highway construction. Krugman says it better than me, of course, being a Nobel Prize winner in Op-Ed Column Writing and all:

As a nation, we don’t believe that our fellow citizens should go without essential health care. Why, then, does a large share of funding for Medicaid come from state governments, which are forced to cut the program precisely when it’s needed most?

An educated population is a national resource. Why, then, is basic education mainly paid for by local governments, which are forced to neglect the next generation every time the economy hits a rough patch?

Krugman also notes that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is calling for any federal stimulus plan to include increased funding for education, food stamps, and Medicaid along with infrastructure spending. Maybe Strickland can be the Fiorello LaGuardia of the Obama era.

New York is looking at massive cuts in school spending - should an education bailout be part of Obama’s economic rescue package?

Anyone reading headlines of late has to feel like we’re on the fast track to apocalypse: Unprecedented bus and subway fare hikes; a slash of more than $2 billion from state education funding; and that’s before even getting into the indignity of paying $1.06 a song on iTunes.

The trick, as always, is figuring out which of the harbingers of doom are real, and which are scare tactics meant to shock the populace into finding other ways to stave off disaster… [read more]

Fun with Google caching!

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion is “in hot water” after blurting out to Yale students that he’d already been picked for a top job in the Obama administration, as well as the target of “an anti-Adolfo e-mail campaign” to Obama’s change.gov by Bronx residents upset by his role in the Yankee Stadium controversy, according to a story by Daily News Bronx editor Bob Kappstatter. Wrote one angry Bronxite: “If he runs for a dog catcher, we will campaign against him and support the dogs.”

At least, that’s what you would have read on the Daily News website at 2:16 am, when it was posted. By this afternoon, the story, headlined “Adolfo Carrion under fire,” had disappeared from the Daily News site… [read more]