Rick Perry, governor of Texas, rejected federal stimulus money, saying Texas could stand on its own. He said his state could secede from the union.
That was just before he complained the feds weren’t doing enough to help him fight swine flu.
Then he fell off a mountain bike and broke his collarbone.
The limousine belonging to Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania was caught careening down the Interstate at 99 mph.
The Las Vegas Sun investigated the work habits of Nevada Governor Les Gibbons, and found that he doesn’t have any. He takes large amounts of vacation time, working a total of five days during a recent nine-week stretch.
Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana were both caught breaking ethics rules by giving gifts to legislators, not long after they had campaigned against giving gifts to legislators.
Mike Easley of North Carolina, who apparently fell off the political turnip truck about five minutes ago, said it’s the press’s job to “be nice to [him],” and whined that they weren’t doing their job when they exposed failures in the state’s parole system.
And I haven’t even gotten to Blagojevich (sold senate seat), Spitzer (prostitutes), Palin (more wardrobe scandals than brain cells), or Sanford (Venezuelan mistress).
Our governor? He has been AWOL in his Year of Gubernatorial Scandal.
Compared with these people, Baldacci is about as interesting as C-SPAN at 3 AM. I can’t imagine him traveling to Vermont for maple syrup, let alone to Venezuela for an extra-marital tryst.
Can you picture what it must be like at those national governor’s conferences they have every year? You’ve got all these Schwarzeneggers and Palins and other larger-than-life characters, and then over in the corner is Baldacci, looking like a Certified Public Accountant hired for the occasion to make everyone else feel cool and hip.
Never mind Baldacci’s wasteful, pointless education initiatives, his budget bungling, or his inefficient use of federal stimulus money, or his apparent decision to banish the sun.
No, the biggest problem with John Baldacci, and the one thing we can truly fix if we play our cards right, is that he is hideously, remorselessly, painfully boring.
We can do better than this, Maine! In the 2010 election, we can reverse the doldrums that have left us irrelevant, and get ourselves on The Daily Show for once.
We need to change our image.
Some of the early candidates have potential. Start with Les Otten, former part-owner of the Red Sox, whose campaign logo (copied from Obama) and hairstyle (coiffed salt-and-pepper) smack of the slick and sleazy Hollywood politics we can only dream of.
Plus, can you imagine the fun headlines if he ever delivers a first-class scandal? “Guess We Otten-Not Have Voted for The Rich Guy.”
Independent Alex Hammer also has a cool name, one that evokes the power and seductive, quiet confidence of an ‘80s TV detective.
But he looks like a geriatric basset hound, only droopier, and he speaks knowledgeably and in detail about economic issues.
Not good.
Still, he has headline potential (“Hammer to the Slammer”) so let’s all donate $100 to his campaign.
Meanwhile, let’s see if we can get a statewide referendum going on this weather situation.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Children: Priority or Nuisance?
Back in college -- probably the same semester a very attractive 22-year-old pre-law major asked if I wanted to visit her apartment to “study” together, and I said, “No, thanks, I’m pretty much ready for the test,” because I thought she actually wanted to study – I took a course in political theory, featuring Plato’s Republic, a text even more gargantuan than the sentence you’re reading right now.
In The Republic, Plato outlines his idea of the perfect city-state, where one “philosopher king” rules over everything, but nobody minds because he’s too enlightened to do anything wrong. Justice is always served, peace and prosperity are the norm, and the public bathhouses are open 24 hours a day for your man-boy loving convenience.
Plato’s vision abandons all possessions. No one would have spouses or children in his ideal world. Instead folks would apply their skills for the common good. Those who were adept with children would look after them in daycare-type environments, and the rest of us would do important things, like figure out where truth comes from.
Even as a college freshman who could never get a date because I didn’t know what one looked like, and was therefore eons away from enjoying a family life, I could see that Plato was on to something.
I could recognize, even in my late-teen stupor, that any society that treated children as a nuisance -- a biological necessity to keep the species going -- rather than a cherished responsibility would certainly advance and thrive.
Not convinced? Too bad, because we’re already moving toward Plato’s ideal. These days it’s fairly common for babies to enter daycare at six weeks old while both parents (if there are two parents) work. To wait until your child is six months old before returning to work is considered a long wait to return to the workforce.
This is not meant as a guilt trip. Putting a child in daycare can be an excruciating ordeal. We live in a fast society with a massive economy, and, in many cases, two or more incomes are required to keep pace.
In many ways, we live in Plato’s Republic right now, except that our leaders are far from enlightened. Observe President Obama’s education policy (yes, he does have one, though he doesn’t say much about it). It emphasizes expanding childhood education.
Yay.
True, studies suggest kids who start school earlier tend to do better academically. But so do those whose parents haven’t abdicated responsibility for educating their offspring.
If the choices are school or neglect, obviously, school is a better choice at any age.
I know senior citizens who remember when Kindergarten was an add-on. Now we have full-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, Head Start, Early Head Start, etc. Even responsible, attentive parents feel they have to enroll their kids so they can “keep up,” or not miss out.
No one questions the merits of early childhood education. But at what point is a child better off with a parent rather than an “expert?”
At this rate, you’ll live to see the day when children are whisked away from their parents at birth to enter some sort of infant enrichment program, not to be seen or heard from again until they graduate high school.
Ever wonder why children don’t respect their parents as they used to?
Maybe it’s because, after being shuffled from one adult to the next since toddlerhood or before, their parents are simply less important to them.
And vice-versa.
In The Republic, Plato outlines his idea of the perfect city-state, where one “philosopher king” rules over everything, but nobody minds because he’s too enlightened to do anything wrong. Justice is always served, peace and prosperity are the norm, and the public bathhouses are open 24 hours a day for your man-boy loving convenience.
Plato’s vision abandons all possessions. No one would have spouses or children in his ideal world. Instead folks would apply their skills for the common good. Those who were adept with children would look after them in daycare-type environments, and the rest of us would do important things, like figure out where truth comes from.
Even as a college freshman who could never get a date because I didn’t know what one looked like, and was therefore eons away from enjoying a family life, I could see that Plato was on to something.
I could recognize, even in my late-teen stupor, that any society that treated children as a nuisance -- a biological necessity to keep the species going -- rather than a cherished responsibility would certainly advance and thrive.
Not convinced? Too bad, because we’re already moving toward Plato’s ideal. These days it’s fairly common for babies to enter daycare at six weeks old while both parents (if there are two parents) work. To wait until your child is six months old before returning to work is considered a long wait to return to the workforce.
This is not meant as a guilt trip. Putting a child in daycare can be an excruciating ordeal. We live in a fast society with a massive economy, and, in many cases, two or more incomes are required to keep pace.
In many ways, we live in Plato’s Republic right now, except that our leaders are far from enlightened. Observe President Obama’s education policy (yes, he does have one, though he doesn’t say much about it). It emphasizes expanding childhood education.
Yay.
True, studies suggest kids who start school earlier tend to do better academically. But so do those whose parents haven’t abdicated responsibility for educating their offspring.
If the choices are school or neglect, obviously, school is a better choice at any age.
I know senior citizens who remember when Kindergarten was an add-on. Now we have full-day kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, Head Start, Early Head Start, etc. Even responsible, attentive parents feel they have to enroll their kids so they can “keep up,” or not miss out.
No one questions the merits of early childhood education. But at what point is a child better off with a parent rather than an “expert?”
At this rate, you’ll live to see the day when children are whisked away from their parents at birth to enter some sort of infant enrichment program, not to be seen or heard from again until they graduate high school.
Ever wonder why children don’t respect their parents as they used to?
Maybe it’s because, after being shuffled from one adult to the next since toddlerhood or before, their parents are simply less important to them.
And vice-versa.
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