AP runs a story highlighting the harsh realities of state budgets: everyone out there is slashing stuff, and pre-K is such an easy target. As several of the quoted experts point out, pre-K levels the playing field for poor kids and saves us all money in the long run by bringing kids up to speed who'd otherwise need special attention at great expense later.

But you can't spend what you don't have, and as states are being bled dry and the federal government has yet to see a weapons system it doesn't feel it must have, there's a real problem. And nothing puts it into harsher perspective than hearing a no doubt well-intentioned bureaucrat from the Dept. of Ed make the claim:

The key, said Jacqueline Jones with the U.S. Department of Education's early learning office, is making states believe that pre-k is part of the education package rather than something they do only during flush times.

Yes, Jacqueline, that's very nice. But while your bosses on The Hill are busy blowing billions of dollars on toys the Pentagon doesn't even want, the states don't have the luxury of spending money they don't have. I don't think the problem is states "believing" in pre-K, I think it's a question of hard budgetary realities. I believe the word we're looking for here is "unfunded mandate": if you insist that pre-K is a key part of education, then put your money where your mouth is. And if you can't get the money to fund eductation because it was all spent on depleted uranium land mines in Afghanistan or some equally worthy cause, then the time has perhaps come to question the priorities of our hippie-in-chief and his fellow peacenicks. With his approval rating dropping like a bunker buster on the job, maybe he should revisit his approach to hope & change.

Of course, that's assuming that anyone in the Administration or on The Hill actually genuinely sincerely really gives a shit about the educational prospects of the increasing number of increasingly marginalized poor kids in this country. While they shriek in horror in mock concern for the unborn, The Republicans have yet to see an actual kid that they cared about -- kids don't vote, they cost money, they have to be dragged to church, they listen to inappropriate music -- what's there to like about them? And since most of the current crop of Democrats are really just Republicans who don't have the courage to come out of the closet and switch parties, I think it's safe to say that the kids are shit out of luck on this one.

From the department of "fuck you, we're the law around here" come two nuggets that make you go, "say, what?!?"

First, the ACLU has been forced to sue the Hartford police department in an attempt to find out what exactly happened when the local law enforment wizards decided to go full metal jacket on a sick man in his own home. Oh, the fact that he was black in a screamingly white neighborhood might possible have something to do with it, but if the Hartford cops have their way, the public will be kept nicely in the dark. They're hiding behind vague pencil pusher rules about state investigations -- however, the state police claim the investigation is completed, but the state attorney general says she hasn't seen the final report. How very convenient for them all that they can play musical chairs and make the unpleasant facts go away... except, not. Thanks to the ACLU and the interest from a couple of our local papers, it's pretty clear that the Hartford cops can squirm all they want, but they're eventually going to have to come clean and face up to their racial profiling and/or ineptitude -- whichever applies.

And so help us, Jim Douglas' equally inept Commissioner of Ed, Armando Vilaseca, is trying some of the same deceptive tactics with regards to a much-anticipated list of district budget cuts for the coming year. Yes, he says, the list is public, but no, he says, the public can't have it. That's nice, real nice. Again, the ACLU is having to throw some weight around to make it clear to these inept clowns that as civil servants they are obliged to obey the law, and Vermont has a pretty solid public records law. Oh, and as a completely unrelated aside, who the hell can have any confidence in a Commissioner of Education that uses the word "inputted":

This has been such a huge, huge undertaking, and we’re sending it to schools and having them look at the information to make sure we inputted all the information from the districts correctly

Really, Armando? You satted in front of your little screen an inputted all the data, and now you're afraid you wronged something? For fuck's sake; no wonder our children's isn't learning...

Kudos to the Times/Argus, the Rutland Herald, the Valley News and not least the ACLU in Vermont who are fighting an uphill battle against teh stupid and arrogant civil servants whose salaries we pay, but whose services we probably really could do quite well without...

(h/t Jim @ GMD)

Very poignant. Very cool. But will it convince anyone who genuinely enjoys the notion of killing others in the name of "justice"?

Amnesty International - Death Penalty from Blink on Vimeo.

Poking around teh intertubes when I should be in bed, and I came across one of my favorite bloggers from waaay back in the early days of eschaton, in a comment thread over at GMD. I think I had totally forgotten that Ntodd Pritsky was running for public office in Franklin County. Good for him, he's got a sound outlook on life and is a devoted dad -- isn't that more than you can say about 99 percent of the current crop of politicans? I hope his amazing grassroots run as an independent is hugely successful.

So, poking a little further, I checked out the competition Ntodd is up against, and I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I found the current Representative, Lynn Dickinson (nope, sorry Lynn, no linkie for you) - she's apparently trying hard to be the Sarah Palin of Vermont, and her platform seems to consist largely of supply-side platitudes, contradictory nonsense and a loud, almost primal cry of desperation: Give Me Wal-Mart Or Give Me Death. Seriously, how the hell can one of your four key issues be "Bringing Wal-Mart to St. Albans"? That's like running on a platform of "More Blue M&Ms in the 2 Pound Bags" or "Why Should The Gulf Have All The Fun: Let's get BP up here to spill some oil in Lake Champlain."

Actually, Lynn's pretty little head is evidently completely free of any cognitive dissonance when she lists the four pillars of her political platform:

• Bringing jobs and prosperity to our area
• Bringing Wal-Mart to St. Albans
• Supporting small businesses, farms and families
• Keeping our communities healthy and strong

I mean, bringing Wal-Mart to St. Albans will a) remove jobs from the area and lower the level of prosperity (unless you count Wal-Mart's profits as "prosperity" -- but that money ends up in Arkansas, not Vermont), b) kill off small business, farms and further marginalize families in the area, and c) will sicken and weaken an otherwise vibrant community by killing off small businesses, reducing the town center to a shell of itself, and leaving the town at the mercy of the ruthless marketing managers in Bentonville.

Somehow Lynn's platitudes and simplistic non-approach to effectively dealing with the issues affecting the voters in Franklin County must have worked, since she's currently one of the two incumbents. I hope that changes in November -- she really, really needs to get out more and come to realize that there's more to life than a Wal-Mart up the street..

Wikileaks, of course, rules. Forcing self-righteous hypocrites like Diane Feinstein (D - Sellout) to squirm uncomfortably on her throne is a great public service that should be richly rewarded. At the very least, you'd think it would force Congress to take a moment away from the cocktails and the bloviating to sincerely reflect upon and respond to the unassailable facts in the recent document dump indicating just how sucky Obama's pet war is going.

But, no. The collective rage-gasm on the Hill is apparently reserved for Wikileaks. How Dare They?!? We had the whole thing so nicely wrapped up in veils of secrecy and well-crafted propaganda plied to the gullible people via a willing mainstream media, and the whole thing was propped up by Preznit Smiley "this-is-not-my-Vietnam" Obama's assurances to the world that he knew what the fuck he was doing by over-extending the US forces in a land war in Asia. Oh, we had an endless flow of taxpayer dollars going to the well-healed contractors with their friendly lobbyists, because nary a single elected official had the testicular fortitude to stand up and call the administration to account for the lavish spending on destroying things thousands of miles away at a time when we can barely afford to fix our roads at home.

And then that little pipsquak Assange comes along and ruins it all with his info-anarchism. Openness. Hah! Transparency. Feh. That was a sound bite for the election campaign, not something we actually wanted. Idiot. Off with his head!

It's really sad. Just look at this little nugget:

The Senate last week rejected $22.8 billion in domestic spending that the House added to the Senate’s $58.8 billion war-funding bill for fiscal year 2010. The House measure, including $10 billion to avoid teacher layoffs in the fall, failed even to win a majority in the Senate [...]

So, while we're firing teachers wholesale in the US (it's not like we could use some more resources on deck in the realm of education, right?) we're happily looking to spend almost $60bn on assorted wars. Mind you, that's above and beyond the regular DOD budget -- even though they're primarily in the business of conducting war, this whole thing has gotten so out of hand that they actually get a separate budget line to go kill other people's kids in addition to their regular budget line for cool toys and starched uniforms. It's as if I send my clients a bill for hours worked and then send them another bill for the resulting product. Nice racket...

And how does this army of ours account for its cash? Not. At. All. It basically has no fucking clue what it's doing with money in its care. This report is almost farcical if it wasn't money that could have been better spent on, well, almost anything else:

The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation

But when the little boy points his finger at the emperor and discloses how the smoke and mirrors of "homeland security" and "the war on terror" is really a monumental clusterfuck moving us inexorably closer to the edge of bankruptcy and disaster, the knee-jerk reaction from the powerful is to slap his hand and ask him to mind his manners. It's rude -- heck, it's criminal -- to point out our failings, our lies, our deceipt of the taxpayers who are paying for this, it's wrong to question our motives, our strategies, our objectives and our tactics. It's all wrong, don't you see. We're always right, the government is never wrong, we know what's best for you and you just need to STFU and play along and pay.

It's really a large-scale version of what is happening with the police: as more and more people document the atrocities committed by officers with their tasers and delusions of grandure, the reaction is not to reassess the balance of power between law enforcement and the population they're meant to serve, the reaction is to clamp down on photography of cops in action. So, instead of dealing with the problem (cops with anger issues), or even the symptoms of the problem (cops tasering little old ladies in wheel chairs), the powers that be come down like a ton of bricks on those who dare point it all out (the random stranger with the video camera who catches Chief Wiggums tasering a 9-year old boy who is having an epileptic seizure).