Last Call For The Education Of Kansas Voters

The Sam Brownback GOP Disaster in Kansas continues as massive austerity cuts to public schools has now left districts without enough licensed teachers to fill jobs, as experienced teachers are leaving in droves.

While the tax cut experiment didn’t create jobs, it did destroy the Kansas budget, and one major consequence of that has been massive funding cuts for Kansas schools. Several districts ended the school year early for lack of funds. Education funding levels are so low, and unequal across school districts, that judges have ruled them unconstitutional and the case is currently pending at the state Supreme Court. 

Kansas’ teacher pay is among the lowest in the nation. The Kansas legislature has removed teachers’ tenure protections, tried to make it possible to criminally prosecute them for teaching offensive material, and attempted to weaken collective bargaining. Teachers are retiring in fear that the state will soon target their retirement benefits, one superintendent from a nearbyMissouri school district said. 

There are double the normal openings for school staff in Kansas, teachers are quitting and retiring at high rates, and new teachers aren’t looking to start careers in Kansas. The Independence, Missouri School District has billboards to lure teachers from over the border, and they’ve seen an doubling in applicants with Kansas addresses, even as applicants from Iowa and Arkansas have held steady. 

A piece of legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) now allows several Kansas school systems to hire unlicensed teachers to fill the gap.

Republicans got exactly what they've been calling for nationally in Kansas: major teacher pay cuts, retirement benefit cuts, tenure system loss, weakened teachers' unions, all of which were supposed to magically improve the system, get rid of "lazy bad teachers making too much money" and make super smart kids.

Surprise!

Kansas education is a wasteland, teachers are fleeing and giant corporate lobbyist ALEC wants to turn schools into factories churning out ignorant, compliant workers.

All part of the plan.

We're Gonna Drive On Through Electric Avenue

Meet Mary Nichols, the woman who helped LA clean up its smog problem over her long career as an environmental force in California state politics.  California could be the first state to require all new vehicles sold be electric if Nichols, the state's top clean air regulator, has anything to say about it.

And she does.

Sergio Marchionne had a funny thing to say about the $32,500 battery-powered Fiat 500e that his company markets in California as “eco-chic.” “I hope you don’t buy it,” he told his audience at a think tank in Washington in May 2014. He said he loses $14,000 on every 500e he sells and only produces the cars because state rules re­quire it. Marchionne, who took over the bailed-out Chrysler in 2009 to form Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, warned that if all he could sell were electric vehicles, he would be right back looking for another govern­ment rescue. 

So who’s forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it’s Mary Nichols. She’s run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state’s zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing Pres­ident Barack Obama’s national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplishment in a four-decade career. 

Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regula­tions today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.”

In that speech in Washington, Mar­chionne was talking up the little-bit-better option. He touted the improved efficiency to be wrung from traditional engines and gasoline-electric hybrids. But Nichols isn’t scared of auto executives and has never ac­cepted their vision of what’s possible. (Gen­eral Motors said catalytic converters, an early advance in tailpipe pollution control that Nichols promoted in the 1970s, could kill the company. They’re commonplace today, and GM’s not dead yet.) 

Even if most people outside California have never heard of Mary Nichols, she’s the world’s most influential automotive regu­lator, says Levi Tillemann, author of The Great Race, a book on the future of automo­bile technology. “Under her leadership, the Air Resources Board has been the driving force for electrification,” Tillemann says.

As goes California, home to one-seventh of America's population and the cars to go with it, so goes the nation. And Mary Nichols is calling the shots.  I'm betting Republicans are going to go berserk over this, particularly California Republican (and professional car thief) Darrel Issa.  We'll see what happens, but when it comes to putting pressure on the rest of the auto industry, California has a big axe to swing.

Trials And Tribulations In Cincy

Didn’t take long for this to happen, did it?

Some of the contents of Sam DuBose’s car at the time of his death have been identified. 

WLWT has confirmed through CPD’s search warrant inventory document that four bags and a jar of marijuana were in Dubose’s car at the time of the July 19 traffic stop that ended in former UC Officer Ray Tensing fatally shooting DuBose. 

However, multiple sources have told WLWT officers found a little less than 2 pounds of marijuana. 

No officials were immediately able to confirm the amount of marijuana found. 

According to reports, the marijuana was found in the car’s center console, under the front passenger seat and on the floor behind the driver’s seat. 

Police sources said the street value for the amount of marijuana found in DuBose’s car is anywhere between $2,000 and $5,000 depending on the quality and the demand. 

Police said any marijuana weighing more than two pounds is considered a felony. 

Officers said the search warrant was obtained two days after the deadly shooting.

Because a police state that murders people certainly isn’t above planting evidence after the fact, even if having pot was worth justification for Sam DuBose’s summary execution by Ray Tensing, or that it had anything at all to do with Tensing pulling the trigger. Because of course a black person killed by a white cop had pot on them, right? Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Sam DuBose, yadda yadda forever and ever amen. Always do, ya know.

So now thanks to the Cincinnati media that bungled this story from day one, accepting the police report that Tensing was being dragged and didn’t think to question it until after the bodycam footage surfaced, we have the same media accepting this police report, a warrant executed two days after the shooting, by cops that we already know lied to the media in the first place. It’s not like they’d have any motive to make DuBose look like a felon or anything.

The stenography goes unquestioned again around here. Good job, guys!

StupidiNews!

• US Air Force officials in Florida say two airmen were killed during a parachute training accident, the airmen were part of the 24th Special Operations Wing based at Eglin AFB.
• A California man has plead guilty to felony hate crime charges after telephone threats to the offices of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after last year's Charlie Hebdo massacre.
• GOP Govs. John Kasich and Chris Christie made the cut for FOX's prime-time GOP debate Thursday, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and 2012 runner-up Rick Santorum did not.
• Netflix is allowing its employees as much parental leave as necessary for the first 12 months after a birth or adoption, a new standard among already generous Silicon Valley companies. 
• Major League Baseball's streaming media division has cut a $600 million deal with a new partner: the National Hockey League, for streaming out of market games over six years.