...and the dowry will be bazillions [they hope] of dollars of Federal money. The University of Delaware thinks Vision 2015 is tremendous. Not surprising: universities generally think whatever will bring them in millions of dollars of Federal grant money is a good thing. Nor is it surprising to find the News Journal continually pimping for Vision 2015 : For nearly four years a coalition representing a wide range of public sector and private sector interests, including unions and business leaders, teachers and administrators, has worked to develop a plan to transform our schools. It's a plan informed by data collected from around the country and around the world and it is a call for rigor and intellectual honesty and excellence. Called Vision 2015, it is the foundation upon which we can build a world class school system. That, at least, was clearly labeled as an editorial by John Taylor--former editorial page editor and now--wait for it-- executive director of the Delaware Public Po...

The relevant segments from today's WNJ editorial on the Obama administration's Race to the Top [which, by the way, represents another virtual continuation of a Bush program with a few cosmetic differences]: You may recall that George W. Bush's critics absolutely despised the emphasis put on test scores by No Child Left Behind. They said it cheapened the educational process and forced teachers to spend all their time "teaching to the test." Of course, that was just for public consumption. What really worried them was that tests -- along with the process of aggregating the data according to race -- would reveal, for all to see, the lousy job that public schools are doing in educating minority students. Well, now, as some critics on the left have pointed out, the Race to the Top actually puts even more emphasis on those dreaded test scores than did No Child Left Behind. The Bush measure used test scores to evaluate schools; what Duncan has in mind is to use those s...

Unbelievable : Delaware cannot afford its government. t's as simple as that. Few people will deny it -- as long they think the voters can't hear. Certain segments will bluster about doing more for constituents. But the harsh reality is that Delaware's government has grown too large and it costs too much. And too much of it is ineffective. There are too few benchmarks for performance. So, for a good portion of the time, neither the governor's office nor the Legislature knows who is doing what and why. The current financial crisis points out more than anything how overextended the situation is. For too many years, Delaware was able to "export" its taxes, pushing the bill on others while politicians built the good life.... The 2.5 percent government employee wage cut, if it actually goes through, is only temporary. They will be back in next year's budget from day one. Leg Hall is praying for a miracle recovery. In the meantime, the political solution of choic...

I props to Angel Clark of SCCOR for managing to secure her group a front-page puff piece in today's WNJ ; as the group's public relations director she has achieved her goal. The WNJ, which has some talented reporters in Ginger Gibson and Rachel Kipp, however, got taken for a ride. Here's why: 1) The reporter didn't bother to interview anybody even vaguely critical of SCCOR; we know the WNJ staff reads the blogosphere, so how could they have missed the large numbers of folks worried about the use of language [even if I disagreed with them completely, their concerns are part of the story]. 2) The reporter is apparently blissfully ignorant of the Bill Colley Catholic Lord's Prayer controversy, and SCCOR's insistence on a particular Protestant version of that prayer at all their meetings. Instead, the article just mentions WGMD as fueling SCCOR without mentioning the controversy. 3) If the report was going to mention the group targeting certain politicians for def...

Let's see, in today's edition they published Patricia Cavender's op-ed on privatizing or outsourcing DelDot: We could probably deal with a neighboring state or a private firm for less than we're paying for a poor excuse for engineering. That, of course, quails in contention with some actual investigative reporting that reveals the Delaware State Police are using their discretionary authority to break Federal law and abuse privacy rights with so-called Superchecks on gun-onwers. That's unusual in and of itself, but what about this editorial from our usual uber-Statist friends? The report on today's front page by investigative reporter Lee Williams about the Delaware State Police's use of so-called "superchecks" on gun possession is at least disturbing and possibly a violation of federal law. This is not the kind of information Delawareans want to read about their nationally recognized state law enforcement agency. Simply because the state police...

From the News Journal : CAMP Rehoboth is sponsoring the Third Annual World AIDS Day Student Art Contest. The contest is open to Sussex County residents attending middle or high school. CAMP Rehoboth chose to sponsor the Student Art Contest out of deep concern with the latest statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control. The data establishes that 50% of all new HIV infections occur in young people under the age of 25. In addition, national case surveillance data for people ages 13 to 24 revealed that the burden of HIV/AIDS falls most heavily and disproportionately on black and Hispanic youth. CAMP Rehoboth believes that accurate, age-appropriate information is our best hope for reducing these trends for our young citizens. By working with Sussex County school districts, CAMP Rehoboth hopes to ameliorate this situation. Student submissions will interpret the theme – Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise and be judged on impact, relevance to HIV/AIDS awareness, clarity of message, visual ...

... comes from me, which means it probably isn't worth a damn to any of them, but that doesn't change my obligation as a Delaware citizen. Walter, Bauer, and Jenkins (who range in age from 50-77) were the three men whose names the Snooze Journal felt obligated to print when they were arrested for loitering for engaging in or soliciting sexual activvity [the 77-year-old also got charged with offensive touching ] in the Newark PD sting this past weekend in Folk Park. Here's a large chunk of the article, because, strangely enough (possibly due to my own ineptitude) I cannot find it online : Illegal Sexual Activity Moves from Iron Hill to Folk Park by Angie Basiouny [I usually don't do writer's names, but in this case I wanted to be sure to avoid slandering any of the competent reports on the WNJ staff , and there are several.] [Nor could I resist editorializing just the slightest bit.] Newark police officers are dealing with an old problem in a new place. For the past...

Let's see: we have a revenue shortfall. Let's ask the editorial board at the Snooze Journal. Not in more than three decades has the General Assembly taken money from the fairest and most equitable source: everyone. Delaware's income tax went from one of the highest rates in the country at 20 percent for the wealthiest, to among the lowest at 5.9 percent for those earning over $60,000. There's been no measurable change in the personal income tax formula for more than a decade. Instead, surtaxes have been levied on special groups whenever revenue was needed. But during that same period of flat income tax , which began in the middle of Gov. Tom Carper's administration, the number of employees on the state payroll has doubled. The state population has increased about 18 percent.... A minimal quarter-percent increase in the personal income tax for 12 months would make up that difference. For most families, that would mean only a few dollars out of their paychecks. Yeah,...

Tuesday March 4, 2008 Brian On Critical Assignment in Poorastan , near someplace no one really knows or cares about While increasing pressure mounts on the Bush Administration to admit that while it took four years to win world war II, and has taken over six to win the global war on terror, a lone man with a camera has done the unthinkable and actually found out what may have happened to Osama Bin Laden. For details, watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjxXX70_R0A Following this Bush Administration officials told this reporter, "no comment." While former presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, known affectionately as "Rudy" to supporters, said, "since the events of 9/11 the country has been in an ideological struggle with radical islamo -fascism." When asked about the reasons why Osama is basically gone, he responded, "no comment." One can only assume that the 9/11 phallus has repeatedly penetrated the American public's consciousne...

Today's Snooze J carries a front-page article on the Provost search at DSU , and the devastating report issued by the university's search firm about reactions of candidates asked to apply. The news isn't good. Yes, the "Steve Newton" quoted in the interview as President of the DSU Chapter of the AAUP is me. I don't normally do interviews about DSU, and you'll notice that I've never posted about it here. But the News Journal called me, at the behest of someone very senior in the university hierarchy whom I cannot name. I felt obligated to answer questions honestly. Let me be clear: DSU is a great institution with a great potential future. We are currently undergoing a period of uncertainty and transition. We'll come through it as we as a university community work through it. I'll continue to try to be a positive part of that process, but don't expect to see me in the newspaper like this again, and don't expect me to post on it here. ...

Over at First State Politics , Dave Burris has been taking a beating from the usual suspects about his stand against the Prevailing Wage law in Delaware . It's therefore intriguing to see that in the Sunday Snooze Journal Dave gets some back-up from Dr. Eleanor Craig , a well-regarded economist who formerly chaired the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council. Dr. Craig explains why, among other things, Delaware's lack of a right to work law and its prevailing wage law provides a huge disincentive for manufacturing jobs to come to the First State: Delaware's prevailing wage law mandates union wages on all government contracts, increasing labor costs by 20 percent. Since half of the construction costs of buildings such as schools is labor, this adds 10 percent to all government contracts, increasing the cost of the same government services in Delaware, when compared with other states without prevailing wages. Other state law differences are significant. Delaware'...

I'm serious about the idea that the phrase "Gannett Newspaper" should join the list of great oxymorons in the tradition of "military justice" and "jumbo shrimp." Today the Snooze Journal finally got around to running a political cartoon about Hillary Clinton's tearful moment in New Hampshire that most media outlets actually printed during the same week as the New Hampshire primary. As usual, I can't do any better with this one that Cara does at The Curvature , especially with her post title: Feminists Aren't Humorless Just Because Your Jokes Suck

While everybody around was signing Jason's semi-glorious half-naked body and chanting, "OOGA!" for open government, the Snooze J as usual missed a large part of the point. Nowhere in this morning's coverage of the event was there any acknowledgement of the Delaware blogosphere's role in organizing the event. Without the constant support for open government by Delawareliberal , Delaware Watch , and Down with Absolutes , Senator Thurman Adams would have enjoyed a much quieter morning. I guess Gannett doesn't know about the New Media. A hearty cybertoast to all who participated, and a notice to those in power: we may have no television station and one sorry excuse for a major newspaper, but we have the blogs. Open government is coming.

Here's the opening line of John Sweeney's "Iowa became important for the wrong reasons" in today's Snooze J (sorry, haven't looked up the URL yet): The United States is the world's oldest democracy. Shouldn't we know how to pick a president by now?" Wouldn't our status as "the world's oldest democracy"come as quite a shock to Great Britain? And why, after that initial stupidity, would anyone want to continue reading the editorial?

As we go into an election year spin-cycle, with the statists on both wings of the Demopublican Party competing to hand out bread and circuses with our tax dollars, THIS is just too much. As the Snooze J reports, "Coupons offered to convert old TVs to digital" . Seems like the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (who knew we had one of those?) has been taking heat from Congress regarding its failure to properly prepare Americans with older TVs for the 2009 switchover to all HD broadcasting. So now it has set aside $1.5 Billion--let's see, thats $1,500,000,000 of OUR money--to send out $40 vouchers to defray the costs of converting an old TV into one that can receive Hi-Def. Converters sold on the free market will retail for $50-70, and the NTIA expects to pass out between 10-26 million of the vouchers (two per household, please). What this amounts to is the US government essentially taking $5 from all 300 million American citizens and redistributin...

Today's Snooze J has one of those human interest stories on the front page that they run in the alternate weeks when nobody related to a state legislator is stealing the state blind. You can be jaded on these "feel good" pieces, but I'd really like you to give this one a chance. Family rearranges star's priorities is about DSU basketball player Roy Bright. Roy happens to be my academic advisee, and I have known him for two years. If anything, the article understates the admirable qualities of this young man, and the challenges he continues to face. Entirely too much of the news about DSU often focuses on the Loyer Bradens of the world, so it is refreshing to see a positive story occasionally.

The Sunday News Journal is filled with unusually--even for them--inane and overtly bizarre articles today, so when you pick up a copy, (after you read about UD going back to the national championship if you really must) turn to the editorial page and start with Shirley Vandever's "Can you prove who you are if necessary?" It's pretty much the only sane piece in the whole rag. Thanks, Shirley. (Unfortunately for me, proving who I am would require KNOWING who I am, which is a concept that readers of this blog know I continue to struggle.) Then, for the masochistic among you, go across the page to the far left column (wonder if they put "Our View" on that side on purpose?) to read "Private contractors belong under military codes of discipline." Apparently, the Blackwater incident in Iraq was the first indication that the News Journal (or most political innocents) had that the US regularly uses PMCs ("private military companies," which is th...