Racisim: It’s baKkKed in…
This post has been brewing since the end of May, but I didn’t have the words until last night. Not until I sat through BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s new Joint. Continue reading “Racisim: It’s baKkKed in…”
This post has been brewing since the end of May, but I didn’t have the words until last night. Not until I sat through BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s new Joint. Continue reading “Racisim: It’s baKkKed in…”
Here we are, almost all the way through the primaries. Continue reading “Aftermath (Part 8): Ticking down the countdown clock…”
I’ve got the tentative names and numbers updated for Illinois’ Primaries, but the big thing: I’m thinking we’re going to see the Governor’s office flip from Red to Blue this year. Continue reading “Election 2018: Illinois Primary”
According to the NY Times, votes should start to roll in at around 8:20. When they’re done, the dust is going to settle and yet another “bellwether” election will be over, but as I’ve said repeatedly, special elections don’t count. They especially don’t count when the weather is horrendous thanks to a nor’easter that’s sweeping up the east coast of the US.
That said, I’ll repeat for the peanut gallery: I don’t trust polls. I trust votes. Continue reading “Election 2018: Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District”
Well, now that’s over with, I can say…shoot. Yeah, there were way more Democrats running this year, and yes, definitely, voter turnout was greater across the board, for those races where there was competition, anyway. Continue reading “Election 2018: Texas Primary”
As I’ve said previously, I’m gearing up for this year’s Primaries. Just to get my feet wet, I went to the stats for Arizona’s 8th District, a pre-Primary special election to replace Congressman Trent Franks. Continue reading “Deceptive advertising…”
On June 2, 2016, I wrote Part One of this post.
Yeah, so I’m still here. I did all the checking before the election and the path out no longer exists for someone my age, without marriage and/or migration to another country as an ex-pat with the clothes on my back, and that’s so far from impractical it’s not even worth discussing. So I’m here. And I’m pissed. Continue reading “Fact-Free Ideology (Part Two): Election 2018 Edition”
There’s a benefit to following folks I’ve never met anywhere else but FB. Occasionally, someone shows me a bit of the Internet that I’ve missed before, and because it flew under the radar, I didn’t have it available to draw connections.
Today, someone revealed a tiny tip of a much larger iceberg, and now I’ve got the first Dots post in almost seven months. Continue reading “Connecting the Dots, Part 7…”
I rarely talk about local politics (because all politics is local), but where I live, in Maryland, parents are waking up this morning to discover that their Spring Break is about to be shortened by a day.
Why?
Because Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan is a Republican, which means he hates public education and the teachers’ union. In a fit of capriciousness and misplaced magnanimity toward parents who
It started here, with proposed budget cuts which disproportionately affect Prince George’s, Montgomery, and Baltimore Counties more than the rest of the state, but the damaging effects across the board will really hit when parents realize they’ll be required to shorten their plans for Spring Break due to weather.
According to Hogan, in a WTOP article posted on August 31, 2016:
The order “will help protect the traditional end of summer, not only for families on vacation this week, but also for the teachers and the students working here in Ocean City and all across the state for the summer.”
Maybe, but how many parents are going to lose the money that they’d otherwise have when they have to adjust their Spring Break plans because of winter weather?
And then there’s this claim, from the same article:
For their part, defenders of the shorter school year point out that Maryland’s Bureau of Revenue Estimates say the move could generate up to $74.3 million in direct economic activity for the state.
How do we test this? We wait until the end of the summer and see how things are doing in Maryland, of course. That means remembering the annoyance of calling to shorten or cancel travel plans, working around camp schedules (when parents can afford them), or dealing with an uptick in kids who stay at home while their parents work, because THOSE schedules haven’t changed.
Hogan has already declared his disinterest, if not open hostility, in working with Maryland teachers. I want to see how well our residents remember this when we go to the ballot box on November 6th.
Hogan should never have gotten a space in Government House and we need to show him the door come November. Our kids depend on it.
In Election 2018: The End of Everything (Part 1), I introduced the second “Cassie’s List” compilation, which includes all the historic data that matters to ME from the last six election cycles for US Senate and House seats. Unlike the work I did for the Presidential election in 2016, this delves deeper into state politics and shows why some state numbers are better predictors than others.
The list, you may recall, is here:
The data’s complete now, based entirely on the stats published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). I’ve downloaded the PDFs in the event that the current government decides to erase the data, which I can imagine they could do, since they’ve already done it with climate research and other inconvenient truths. Continue reading “Election 2018: Analysis Complete. Now what? (Part 2)”