Let's just buy the News Journal a big, fuzzy 1970s style pimp hat ...

... for today's "article" about the Markell education budget.

What I think must really have happened is that some unpaid intern moved a piece from the editorial page to news section by mistake. That's the nicest construction I can put on this rehash of things we already knew about the Governor's education budget dressed up as the "news" of a $31 million "increase."

Let's see, part of that $31 million "increase: is the $2 million Charter School Slush Fund.

Over half of it is a pair of increases that he is required by law to make:

The largest portion of that growth comes from $8.8 million to fully fund schools based on the increased enrollment and $8.5 million for “step increases” for school employees, gradual pay raises teachers get as they gain experience and education.

The state is required to fully fund both programs, so Markell and the Legislature would have to rewrite the law to make changes

Another section looks like it means $3.2 million in additional funding to the schools, but is really some unknown figure less than that, which DE DOE gets to hand out as pure patronage:

Finally, the proposal includes $3.2 million to provide some help to all state agencies, including education, that are taking hits because of sequestration, a set of mandatory across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress earlier this year.

The Department of Education is working to figure out how much it will receive and how it will distribute that money. District officials say the money won’t be enough to ease all their sequestration pain, but it will help.

So let's get this straight: Governor Markell is claiming credit for a $31 million increase in education spending when

1. $17.3 million was mandated by State law
2. $2 million only goes to charter schools while school districts are cutting positions
3. $3.2 million is not really going to education, but maybe a fraction of it, and we really don't know but they included it anyway, and this is investigative reporting News Journal style.

That means that for the most part we're back to giving Indian River full-day kindergarten, funding a couple of minor pieces of leftovers, and ... purchasing new computers to report scores on required standardized tests.

All of which has been known for weeks, even months, but is presented today by the state's captive newspaper (like we have captive insurance companies) doing its bit to counter the growing perception that Governor Jack Markell is simply the worst governor in modern Delaware history.

The only reason I keep my subscription is because I am constantly amazed to see, day by day, the level of pro-administration pimping the paper will sink toward next.

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A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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