Politics
There are 1,050 posts filed in Politics (this is page 49 of 105).
Tony Tata
That’s no way to run a school system, or even an army brigade for that matter. I trust that we’ll here more of the reasoning as things progress.
Two miles or two hundred feet?
You want to know how messed up the proposed 2013-2014 Wake County school assignments are? Above is a photo of our kids’ school, Conn Elementary. Highlighted in red is the long-time home of Mrs. Williams at 300 Plainview Avenue in the Belvidere Park neighborhood.
As you can see, Mrs. Williams’s property is actually adjacent to Conn Elementary. The neighborhood crosswalk for Conn runs right in front of her property. From her back porch she could honestly throw a rock and hit the school (provided of course that Principal Richburg isn’t around).
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The Wake County School board voted this afternoon to fire Tony Tata as Wake County Superintendent. Though since Friday I thought this would happen, I’m not celebrating it. I don’t think Tata is a bad guy. I think he just made some poor decisions which ultimately cost him his job.
Again, I hope now that the board can find a superintendent who can come up with the answers that the Wake County School System needs.
Does this look nonpartisan to you?
At Monday’s meeting, a group of about 30 self-described nonpartisans gathered outside to oppose any move to remove the retired U.S. Army brigadier general.
Mitt Romney’s Facebook growth has slowed considerably, coincidentally right after Facebook began cracking down on fake “likes.”
While Romney’s done plenty in public to scare away voters, I can’t help but wonder if Facebook’s new policies may have stopped the campaign from padding its numbers.
Romney’s trouble with the social network has nothing to do with President Obama’s commanding overall lead in total number of Facebook “Likes.”
Rather, it has everything to do with the fact that in August, plenty of people were liking Mitt Romney on Facebook, yet in September that growth has suddenly — and significantly — slowed.
Some friends and I were recently discussing the Wake school bus fiasco. Some thought that through his resignation, Don Haydon, Wake’s long-time operations and facilities manager, might be accepting responsibility for the debacle. And he is. It has been his job for 12 years to get the buses where they need to go. I wondered, though: how could a seasoned administrator with over a decade of experience foul things up so badly?
Then I recalled the military bureaucracy I once served in and got an idea of what most likely happened. Haydon was almost certainly given an impossible task to move more kids with fewer buses. I can imagine that his boss wasn’t too keen to hear that a train wreck was imminent and Haydon had no choice but to step down.
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Sometimes its easy for me to forget that Sen. Richard Burr is a Republican. He isn’t flashy, his office does well with constituent services, and he has shown support for veterans, an important constituency in military-friendly North Carolina. Oh sure, there’s been an occasional bank run, but Burr hasn’t drawn my outrage like other Republicans.
Until now, that is. Burr was one of the Senate Republicans who voted against a jobs bill designed to get veterans back to work. The bill was bipartisan. It was fully funded at its modest $1 billion over five years. It would’ve put some of America’s heroes – the men and women who wear our uniform – back to work. Nonetheless, Burr and his buddies scuttled it at the last minute because Obama lauded it in his convention speech.
There is simply no excuse for not passing this bill. It’s pathetic. As blogger Jim Wright profanely points out, Congress was all too eager to send our armed forces off to war, but when it is time to welcome these troops home to America Congress gives them the finger?
Burr and his pals want people to believe this is all over a billion dollars. A billion dollars over five years! Shit, the Department of Defense spent more than a billion dollars on air conditioning in Iraq – every month! And yet Congress can’t afford to cough up a quarter-bil each year to help get jobs for the brave men and women who served their country? After all these citizens have sacrificed?
I mean, damn. If there’s one issue that really shows what’s wrong with our current Congress, this is it. I hope veterans everywhere are paying attention.
Raleigh’s Union Station, circa 1940s. Photo by John F. Gilbert.
Above is a circa 1940s photo of Raleigh’s former Union Station, which still stands at the corner of Dawson and Martin streets facing Nash Square. Raleigh’s station was an “end-station” with stub-end tracks, meaning trains stopping at Raleigh had to back either in or out of the station.
Backing up trains takes a lot of time, so when the Seaboard station and Southern station (both through-stations) opened up it spelled the doom of Union Station. Now the building houses offices. I believe the station’s tracks are still embedded beneath the surrounding roads.
Remarkable. When a campaign’s lost its money men it’s already spiraling down the drain.
DONORS PREDICT ROMNEY LOSS – “The campaign is moving fast to calm nerves, especially among donors. To get a flavor of the challenge before them, a top donor said that after Romney spoke at a fundraising breakfast at the Hilton New York on Friday, a will-Mitt-win poll was taken at one table of 10 men, each of whom had paid at least $2,500 to attend, and some of whom had raised as much as $50,000 for the campaign. Not a single man said yes.”
After my post last night, I thought of one other highlight of the evening. After the meeting adjourned later than scheduled, I looked around the room and no one was leaving! The CAC chairs were all happily chatting with each other well after the meeting was over. Ten minutes later I think only 10% of members had left (and we had over 21 there).
I marveled for a moment at the sight of these interactions. I seldom saw this kind of cooperation and collaboration when I first became chair. It tells that I was right about the value of the RCAC, that the chance to work together is what its all about.
I see the RCAC as kind of a support group for CAC chairs. It’s proving to be a good call.
